Welcome to Interesting If True, the podcast of dubious facts.

I'm your host this week, Shea, and with me is Aaron

I'm Aaron, and this week I learned that Chewbacca is science-fiction’s most famous nudist.

Seriously, the only thing stopping you from seeing his little Ewok is that he’s basically a space alpaca.

Origins of some words I can’t spell

So the other day I was reading a comic book, as I do, and I saw for the first time the word milquetoast spelled out, M I L Q U E toast for the uninitiated. I immediately looked it up and was surprised to find out the origin. This was my inspiration for tonight's story, the origins of words I can’t spell!

Etymology – the study of word origins – is a fantastically interesting discipline that yields some incredible facts about where the hugely diverse array of words that make up the English language come from. The language is a quirky and nuanced one. It offers an enormous vocabulary and boasts status as a lingua franca, a language that is adopted as a common language between speakers whose native languages are different. Our language is a melting pot, because of this we get some really interesting word origins.

I’ll start with Milquetoast since I don’t want to leave you in suspense for much longer. The term meaning lacking character and often is used to describe a weak or feeble person is a newer word first appearing in the New York World newspaper in 1924 in a comic strip called “The Timid Soul.” The comic featured the character Casper Milquetoast described by the author, H. T. Webster, as "the man who speaks softly and gets hit with a big stick". The character's name is a deliberate misspelling of the name of a bland and fairly inoffensive food, milk toast. Milk toast, light and easy to digest, is an appropriate food for someone with a weak or "nervous" stomach. Because of the popularity of Webster's character, the term milquetoast came into general usage in American English to mean "weak and ineffectual" or "plain and unadventurous". When the term is used to describe a person, it typically indicates someone of an unusually meek, bland, soft or submissive nature, who is easily overlooked, written off, and who may also appear overly sensitive, timid, indecisive or cowardly. Milquetoast appears in most American English dictionaries, but is not in many other English dictionaries.

https://hairygreeneyeball.blogspot.com/2008/12/timid-soul.html

This word I have been spelling wrong for the entirety of 2020, “quarantine” has its origins in the devastating plague, the Black Death, which swept across Europe in the 14th century, wiping out around 30% of Europe’s population. It comes from the Venetian dialect form of the Italian words “quaranta giorni”, or “forty days”, in reference to the fact that, in an effort to halt the spread of the plague, ships were put into isolation on nearby islands for a forty-day period before those on board were allowed ashore. Originally – attested by a document from 1377 – this period was thirty days and was known as a “trentine”, but this was extended to forty days to allow more time for symptoms to develop. This practice was first implemented by the Venetians controlling the movement of ships into the city of Dubrovnik, which is now part of Croatia but was then under Venetian sovereignty. We now use the word “quarantine” to refer to the practice of restricting the movements, for a period of time, of people or animals who seem healthy, but who might have been exposed to a harmful disease that could spread to others.

When someone “goes berserk”, they go into a frenzy, run amok, perhaps even destroying things. Picture someone going berserk and it’s not difficult to imagine the ancien...