Secrets of My Legacy

Why is a formal suit for men called a “tuxedo”?

In the nineteenth century, the accepted formal dress for men was a suit with long swallowtails. But one evening in 1886, young Griswald Lorillard, the heir to a tobacco fortune, shocked his country club by arriving in a dinner jacket without tails. This fashion statement caught on, and the suit took on the name the place Lorillard introduced it: Tuxedo Park, New Jersey.

Where did the coffee habit come from?

Muslims were the first to develop coffee. As early as 1524 they were using it as a replacement for the wine they were forbidden to drink. According to legend, an astute Arab herder noticed that his goats became skittish after chewing on the berries of a certain bush, so he sampled a few himself and found them to be invigorating. The region of Abyssinia where this took place is named Kaffa, which gave us the name for the drink we call coffee.

Why do we define the rat race as “keeping up with the Joneses”?

Keeping up with the Joneses has come to mean trying to keep up with your neighbours, in terms of material possessions, at any cost. The expression comes from the title of a comic strip that ran in newspapers between 1913 and 1931 and chronicled the experiences of a newly married man in Cedarhurst, New York. Originally titled “Keeping Up With the Smiths,” the cartoon was changed to the “Keeping Up With the Joneses” because it sounded better.

Why do we say “Hello” when we answer the telephone?

The first word used to answer the phone was the nautical greeting “ahoy” because the first regular phone system was in the maritime state of Connecticut. Alexander Graham Bell, the inventor, answered with the Gaelic “hoy,” but it was Thomas Edison’s greeting of “hello,” an exclamation of surprise dating back to the Middle Ages, that caught on, and so we answer today with, “Hello?”

How did the drink Gatorade get its name?

In 1963, Dr. Robert Cade was studying the effects of heat exhaustion on football players at the University of Florida. After analyzing the body liquids lost during sweating, Cade quickly came up with a formula for a drink to replace them. Within two years, Gatorade was a $50- million business. The doctor named his new health drink after the football team he used in his study, the Florida Gators.

Why do we call a bad actor a “ham” and silly comedy “slapstick”?

In the late nineteenth century, second-rate actors couldn’t afford cold cream to remove their stage makeup, so they used ham fat and were called hamfatters until early in the twentieth century when these bad actors were simply called “hams.” Physical comedy became known as “slapstick” because of its regular use of crude sound effects: two sticks were slapped together off-stage to accentuate a comic’s onstage pratfall (prat being an Old English term for buttocks).

Why are vain people said to be “looking for the limelight”?

In the early days of theatre, the players were lit by gas lamps hidden across the front of the stage. Early in the twentieth century, it was discovered that if a stick of lime was added to the gas, the light became more intense, and so they began to use the “limelight” to illuminate the spot on stage where the most important part of the play took place. Later
called the “spotlight,” the “limelight” was where all actors fought to be.

How did teenagers become a separate culture?

The word teenager first appeared in 1941, but the emancipation of that age group began forty years earlier when new laws freed children from hard labour and kept them in school. Until then, there was only childhood and adulthood. At the age of thirteen, a girl became a woman and could marry or enter the workforce and a boy became a man. Today,teenagers are treated as children with suppressed adult urges.

Where did the bearded figure Uncle Sam come from?

Sam Wilson was a meat packer who supplied preserved beef to the U.S. Army in the nineteenth century. The barrels of meat were stamped “U.S.” to indicate they were property of the United States, but the soldiers joked that the initials were actually those of the supplier, “Uncle Sam” Wilson. The bearded figure of “Uncle Sam” was drawn and introduced by Thomas Nast, the same cartoonist who created the Republicans’ elephant and the Democrats’ donkey.

How did the Mercedes automobile get its name?

In 1900, the Daimler Corporation was commissioned to design and build a special racing car to add to the fleet of a wealthy Austrian named Emil Jellinek. Mr. Jellinek gave the special car the nickname “Mercedes,” which was his daughter’s name. Jellinek was so impressed with the car that he bought into Daimler, and when the company merged with Benz in 1926, company officials decided to keep the name and market a commercial car as the Mercedes Benz.

Why were dancers in the thirties and forties called “jitterbugs”?

Band leader Cab Calloway coined the word jitterbug as a description of both the music and the dancers during the big band era. It came from a time when drinking alcohol was prohibited by law, giving rise to the popularity of illegal booze. Because of its hangover effect, moonshine had long been called “jitter sauce,” and Calloway, while watching the
intoxicated dancers, labelled them “jitterbugs.”

How did the soft drink Dr. Pepper get its name?

In Virginia in the 1880s, Wade Morrison, a pharmacist’s assistant, wanted to marry his boss’s daughter. But her father considered Morrison too old for her and asked him to move on. After Morrison had settled down and opened his own drugstore in Waco, Texas, one of his employees came up with a new soft drink idea, which Morrison developed and named after the man who gave him his start in the drug business: his old girlfriend’s father, Dr. Kenneth Pepper.

What’s unusual about the music to the American national anthem?

In 1814, after a night in a pub, Francis Scott Key was taken prisoner during the war between Canada and the United States. When he saw the American flag still flying over Fort McHenry he was inspired to write his famous lyrics with one particular barroom song, “To Anacreon In Heaven,” still in his mind. And so “The Star Spangled Banner” was written to the tune of a traditional old English drinking song.

Who was Matilda in the song “Waltzing Matilda”?

In the Australian song “Waltzing Matilda,” a billabong is a pool of stagnant water. A swagman was someone who carried around everything he owned in a knapsack. Waltzing meant hiking, and Matilda wasn’t a woman but rather an Australian word for a knapsack. So Waltzing Matilda means: walking with my knapsack.

How did the poem “Mary Had a Little Lamb” become so famous?

“Mary Had a Little Lamb” was written in 1830 by Sarah Hale, the editor of Godey’s Ladies Magazine. She was inspired after watching young Mary Tyler’s pet lamb follow the girl to school, which, of course, was against the rules. The poem became immortal more than fifty years later when Thomas Edison used it as the first words ever spoken and then recorded on his new invention, the phonograph.

Who was Little Jack Horner in the nursery rhyme?

At a time when Henry VIII was confiscating church property, one monk appeased the king with the gift of a special Christmas pie. Inside the crust were deeds to twelve manor houses secretly offered in exchange for his monastery. The steward who carried the pie to London was Jack Horner, who along the way extracted a plum deed for himself. It was for Mells Manor, where Horner’s descendants still live to this day.

Why do we call Academy Awards “Oscars”?

Since 1928, the Academy Awards have been issued by the American Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences for excellence in filmmaking. The statuettes were nicknamed “Oscar” in 1931 by Margaret Herrick, a secretary at the academy who, upon seeing one
for the first time, exclaimed, “Why it looks just like my uncle Oscar.” Her uncle was Oscar Pierce, a wheat farmer.

Who was Mona Lisa in da Vinci’s famous masterpiece?

Although it’s known as the Mona Lisa, Leonardo da Vinci’s famous painting was originally titled La Giaconda. Painted on wood, it’s a portrait of Lisa Gherardini, the wife of a Florentine merchant. X-rays reveal that Leonardo sketched three different poses before settling on the final design. The painting of Lisa has no eyebrows because it was the fashion of the time for women to shave them off.

What is the most popular rock and roll song in history?

Because the lyrics in the Kingsmen’s 1963 recording of the song “Louie, Louie” were unintelligible, people thought they were dirty, and although they weren’t, a U.S. congressional investigation assured the song’s enduring success. Since being sold by its author, Richard Berry, for $750 in 1957, “Louie, Louie” has been recorded by nearly one thousand different performers and sold an estimated quarter-billion copies.

Who owns the song “Happy Birthday”?

“Happy Birthday” began as “Good Morning Dear Children” and was written by educators Mildred and Patty Hill in 1893. In 1924, a publisher changed the opening line to “Happy Birthday to You” and it became a ritual to sing the song to anyone celebrating his or her
birthday. In 1934, after hearing the song in a Broadway musical, a third Hill sister, Jessica, sued the show and won. The Hill family was thereafter entitled to royalties whenever the melody was performed commercially.

How did the name Wendy originate?

The name Wendy was invented by J.M. Barrie for a character in his 1904 play Peter Pan. The poet W.E. Henley, a close friend of Barrie’s, had a four-year-old daughter, Margaret, and because her father always referred to Barrie as “friend,” she would try to imitate him by saying “fwend” or “fwendy-wendy.” Sadly, Margaret died at the age of six, but her expression lives on in Peter Pan and all the Wendys that have followed.

Have you ever wondered how Cinderella could have walked in a glass slipper?

The story of Cinderella was passed along orally for centuries before it was written down by Charles Perrault in 1697. While doing so he mistook the word vair, meaning ermine, for the word verre, meaning glass. By the time he realized his mistake, the story had become too popular to change, and so instead of an ermine slipper, Cinderella wore glass.

Why is a beautiful blonde called a “blonde bombshell”?

The expression “blonde bombshell,” often used to describe a dynamic and sexy woman with blonde hair, came from a 1933 movie starring Jean Harlow. Hollywood first titled the film Bombshell, but because it sounded like a war film, the British changed the title to Blonde Bombshell. It originally referred only to the platinum-haired Miss Harlow, but has come to mean any gorgeous woman of the blonde persuasion.

How many movies are made annually in Hollywood?

There hasn’t been a movie made in Hollywood since 1911, when, fed up with ramshackle sets and the chaotic influence of hordes of actors and crews, the town tossed out the Nestor Film Company and wrote an ordinance forbidding the building of any future studios. Even so, the magic of the name was already established, and so the industry we call Hollywood grew up around that little town in such places as Burbank, Santa Monica, and Culver City — but not in Hollywood.