1583: heresy Apr 15, 2019

Free thought is usually prized in a modern democratic society, but from a time in history when this was not the case, there is still some effect on the lexicon. The word 'heresy' comes from the Greek 'haireomai' meaning 'choose'. Originally, this word and its various forms referred to a person taking a school of thought or sect of usually—but not necessarily—Christianity, but over time the word morphed to denote an idea that was not in line with a particular orthodoxy. Usually this word has religious contexts nowadays, but it is in some ways just as traditional when it is used to describe politics, for example.

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1582: addict Apr 14, 2019

It has been discussed here before how ‘addict’ backformed from ‘addicted’, and has its first recorded use in only 1909, but this is only scratching the surface of the history of this word. ‘Addicted’ comes from a Latin verb ‘addicere’ meaning ‘say to’ i.e. ‘dictate’, but would often mean something more like ‘assigned’, as in slavery. Indeed, eventually it came to refer to someone who was seen to be a slave not to a person so much but to a substance usually.

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1581: Crocodile Tears is in over 40 Languages Apr 13, 2019

Although we think of idioms as being fairly culturally specific, a calque for 'crocodile tears' exists in over 40 European languages, and even some outside Europe including in Swahili and apparently Mongolian. Part of the reason for this that there was a myth that crocodiles shed a tear when they ate their prey, but since this phrase had existed in Latin too, it disseminated the idea into other, modern languages. Crocodiles do actually have tears that are only for moisture and not emotion, so there is some truth behind it as well.

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1580: muscle Apr 12, 2019

The vast majority of medical or scientific terms come from either Latin or Greek in some form, and while these may be considered serious or official in English, this isn’t always the case for where the terms derive. The word ‘muscle’ comes from the word ‘mus’, the Latin word for ‘mouse’, with the rest of ‘musculus’ being a Latin diminutive suffix. Muscles were seen to look like little mice.

1579: malaria Apr 11, 2019

Throughout history, very little was known about medicine in the scientific way it is now, and this has made subtle lasting impressions on language. For instance, the word ‘malaria’ is a type of parasite transferred by mosquitos, and while in the past it was understood to come after being in swampy areas, it was thought to come from bad air quality. The word ‘malaria’ comes from a contraction of the Italian ‘mala aria’ (bad air). However, this wasn’t only just for bad medicine, as for a while around the 18th century, ‘malaria’ was simply used to describe any kind of swampy environment.

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1578: tragedy and tragic: a goat song Apr 10, 2019

There are many words for which the origin is unknown or too disputed for confidence, but less common is when the etymology is known but no one knows why. For instance, the word ‘tragedy’ comes from Greek—not surprising with the rich history of the Greek tragedy in drama—but when broken down the word translates directly as ‘goat song’, ‘tragōidia’ being from ‘tragos’ meaning ‘goat’ and ‘ōidē’, which also gave English ‘ode’. Indeed, ‘tragic’ was only associated to ‘tragedy’ in English much later, but in French and Greek again comes from this ‘tragos’, so even divorced from the ‘ode’, there is again the connection between goats and sorrow from Greek. 

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1577: loophole Apr 9, 2019

Today, a 'loophole' means a lapse or inadequacy in something that can be used taken advantage of, and while it meant much the same thing in the 16th century, the initial subject matter was not rules, but walls. In the historical sense, a loophole was a hole through a wall from which someone could fire an arrow. In the late 16th century, the word 'loop' also denoted a an embrasure, so while those may have fallen out of style architecturally, the phraseology has persisted.
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1576: daemon vs. demon Apr 8, 2019

'Daemon' today may just look like an older way of writing 'demon', and while there is some truth to that, it is much deeper. As with many English words with 'ae' or 'oe' representing only one sound, this word is from Greek. At that time, it could mean anything supernatural from 'deity' to 'lesser spirit', and this reflected somewhat in 'daemon', which still means 'divinity' or 'inner spirit'. The purely negative connotations came later, and are now denoted exclusively in 'demon', despite identical pronunciation. Indeed, 'demon' only became the popular way to write the word in the 19th century.

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1575: Zero-Marking Word Order Apr 7, 2019

It is true that languages that make less use of affixes and other morphological features tend to rely on the order of words to convey meaning more than others, the dependency on word order is sometimes more acute than this even. Languages without specific marking for possession, such as English's possessive S, tend to be arranged subject-verb-object. The theory behind this is that the way this tends to be solved in languages that do this such as Arabic is that the nouns are simply put next to each other in the sentence to show possession, and since at other times any two nouns would be separated by the verb, it makes it clear that there is a difference.

1574: cabal and kabbalah Apr 6, 2019

The word 'cabal', connoting secret societies, comes from 'kabbalah' (קַבָּלָה), i.e. Jewish mysticism, but this doesn't have to do with beliefs of Jewish conspiracies, at least not directly. Instead, it comes from the Old French 'cabale' which actually held both meanings together, but denoted more mildly 'private groups', and any mystical reading of the Old Testament. Both of those meanings evolved in English until they were were well and truly distinct, but in fairness and from a historical perspective, Kabbalah's influence in general peaked in the European Middle Ages, so there would have been some precedent for it. 
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1573: Losing and Regaining Z Apr 5, 2019

The letter Z comes from the Greek letter zeta (Ζζ), but for a while it was removed from the Latin script. In around 300 BC, the Censor Appius Claudius Caecus removed it from the Latin writing system; even when it was reintroduced 200 or so years later it was done so only for Greek loan words. There are many cases in which something is written with an S but the sound is voiced like [z], such as in 'wisdom', and often—though not always—this history is why. Germanic languages adopted the Z and use it a great deal, but Latin languages does not use the letter. 
Watch more about letter here: https://youtu.be/dntJLHmkfhw

1572: German Contractions Apr 4, 2019

There are plenty of contractions in English, but with a few exceptions these are centered around verbs. This is not so in German. In that case, while there are some contractions that involve verbs, some of the most common ones relate to articles—in English those are 'a' and 'the'— so that phrases like 'in das' meaning 'in the' (neuter) becomes 'ins', and 'in dem' also 'in the' (masculine) becomes 'im'. This happens to a number of other prepositions, such as 'an', 'hinter', 'um', 'vor' and so on, but not always consistently. For instance, 'zu der' becomes 'zur' in the feminine and 'zu dem' becomes 'zum' in the masculine and neuter, but 'zu den' only becomes 'den' dialectal varieties of German, such as in Berlin, but it is not considered standard. The reason for this is as much luck as anything else.

For more on dialects, watch this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4CM7-BMO3vk&t=243s

1571: march (Verb) Apr 3, 2019

While name for the month of March is known to have come from 'Mars', the Roman war deity, the origin of the verb is not totally understood. The English verb 'March' comes from Latin in which it denoted military campaigns, but after that there are competing theories. It could be from a Frankish word for borderland, and this would be supported by other related Germanic words like 'mark' related to borders and frontiers. Other, probably less likely theories posit that the word comes from a Gallo-Roman word for 'hammer' (i.e. stomp) while another is that it simply comes from the fact that Roman military campaigns were led in the Spring, and the name came from the month.

1570: March (Month) Apr 2, 2019

In Latin, it is a common occurance to see a [t] be substituted for an [s] in or vice versa in certain environments. This is how the English words 'admit' and '(ad)mission' are from the same root but look different, because the verb from which they both derive, 'mittere' ('to send') appeared as 'missus' ('sending') as a participle. Considering the month of March, this can be seen as well, as the month is named for the Roman god Mars, but the name for the month in Latin is 'Martius'.
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1569: WLAN in German Apr 1, 2019

In English 'WIFI', is a common term but it ultimately doesn't stand for anything except 'wireless', but even so the same word is used in a plethora of languages from Swedish to Korean. In German however, the equivalent term is 'WLAN', which is an acronym, but not a German one. Instead, it comes from 'wireless local area network', which is still English, but it just so happens that while German term is a loan word, it is the less common one, both within English and across languages. In German, WLAN would translate to 'kabellose Netzverbindung', but that doesn't abbreviate as well apparently.

1568: Metonymy Mar 31, 2019

While it's true that sometimes streets have been used as a sort of nickname for a larger entity, such as with Wall Street as discussed yesterday, this phenomenon has a much larger scope. This is called 'metonymy', from Greek, literally 'changing the name', and it can happen to just about anything. Some common examples include 'suit' for a businessmen, and 'The Pentagon' for the United States Department of Defense. These could be classified as synonyms, because in effect that is what is going on, but these are specifically from something that has direct connotation to the original word, but is related to something more acute, like in these cases outfit or location. If you have any others, include it in a comment.

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1567: scotland yard Mar 30, 2019

The name for the London police force headquarters as 'Scottland Yard' is so culturally significant that even when the building was moved, it was called 'New Scotland Yard'. Indeed, it was only the location of the former headquarters that the name came to be in the first place, as even though the address was officially 4 Whitehall Place, the public entrance was on on a street called 'Great Scotland Yard', and many people applied the name thereafter. This is a similar process as happened with Wall Street in New York City connoting the whole financial district.
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1566: On Contractions Mar 29, 2019

Most English contractions make sense how they came to be, even if a vowel might change a bit from something like "do" to "don't". However, with the exception of 'won't, which is a jarring contraction of will+not (even if historically it was woll+not) this only covers contractions that are also then able to be split apart again, unlike words like 'howdy' from "how do you do?", or 'goodbye' from "G-d be with you". Nevertheless, one that makes arguably less sense than "won't" but still is parsable is "dasn't" from 'dare not'. In this case, the extra S comes from "he dares not", but "dasn't" can be used alongside any pronoun, including 'I' and 'you'.
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1565: Alphabetization in Chinese Mar 28, 2019

Alphabetization is a prevalent and in some cases expected form of organization, but for some peoples this is not possible. Most languages are standardly written using an alphabet—or an alphabet-like system—but for iconographic writing systems like that of hanzi in Chinese or kanzi in Japanese, this can be trickier. In this case, the so-called 'radical and stroke' system is used, in which a certain word will be understood to have a base common to multiple words called a radical. However, these radicals are not always easy to discern, and don't necessarily bear much significance in the individual words. After that the number of pen-strokes are counted and that is how the words are organized thereafter, but there is no regard for which types of strokes necessarily, so it is not as easy to quickly scan for something.
Here's a Word Theory about this sort of topic: https://www.patreon.com/posts/why-chinese-is-21530910

1564: Black and Schwartz Mar 27, 2019

The word 'black' is strange not only because it is related to the words 'blanc' and 'blanco' meaning 'white', but also because it is not similar to that of most other Germanic languages. For instance, Dutch has 'zwart', Danish has 'sort', and German has 'schwartz', but English isn't totally left out in this regard. In some older or dialectal forms of English, 'swart' meaning dark—albeit not quite jet-black—and the more widespread though still not particularly common 'swarthy' meaning 'dark skinned'. Indeed, Old English had a word that sounded like this, so 'black' is something of a black sheep here.
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