It’s the Friday Know-It-All! Editor Ruby is here to talk to you about her main interest: words, and what’s up with them. Here are some fun facts she’s picked up while writing trivia over the last few months.

“Mystic River” and “Mystic Pizza” both refer to real places called Mystic, but they are not the same one. The Mystic River in “Mystic River” is in the Boston area; the Mystic in “Mystic Pizza” is a town in Connecticut. (If you are ever in Mystic, Connecticut, you must hop over the Thames River — not that one — and go to the coolest bookstore I’ve ever been to.) The word “Mystic” has nothing to do with the English word “mystic” as in supernatural: it is from one or many Algonquian languages (Wikipedia lists Massachusett and Pequot in different places) meaning “big river.” Ojibwe is also in the Algonquian family, which means the “mys-” in “Mystic” is the same root as the “miss” in “Mississippi.”

Speaking of the names of things: Willem Dafoe’s given name is William; Willem is a nickname inspired by the Dutch name. Ginnifer Goodwin’s given name is Jennifer, but she changed it to be unique and to emphasize the Southern pronunciation, so the first syllable rhymes with “pin” instead of “pen.” D’Arcy Carden’s given name is Darcy, but she changed it because she thought the Smashing Pumpkins’ D’Arcy Wretzky was cool. (As far as I can tell, D’Arcy Wretzky was given that name by her parents.) Guy Fieri’s given name is Guy Ferry, but he changed it back to the original, pre-anglicized Italian spelling. Names can be anything! Speaking of Food Network stars, Bobby Flay has the most delightful “Personal Life” section of his Wikipedia page I’ve ever encountered, most importantly revealing that he owns a racehorse named Pizza Bianca.

While we’re on etymologies, the play “Cyrano de Bergerac” introduced the word “panache” to the English language. Today, we (apparently) call CuSO4 copper(II) sulfate, but back in the day, they called it “blue vitriol,” which sounds like if you got very mad and started swearing. Trivia Mafia loves a “retronym,” which is when a word or term is newly created due to technology or time, to describe things already in existence — like when we started calling it a “landline” because of cellphones. Here’s a fun one that feels pretty snotty: when today’s tennis, or “lawn tennis” was invented, the previous, indoor game took on the name “real tennis.” Excuse ME!

Some other cool language terms:

When you spell something wrong to be cool, that’s “sensational spelling,” a la Korn, the Byrds, or D’Arcy Carden.
The prefix parts of Dutch surnames, like “van” and “de,” are properly called “tussenvoegsel,” or “that which is inserted.”
Most “specific kind of words” terms in English come from Greek or Latin, but “bahuvrihi” is a Sanskrit word for “a type of compound word that denotes a referent by specifying a certain characteristic or quality the referent possesses” — e.g., “houndstooth” is neither a hound, nor a tooth, but a fabric that invokes the quality of the shape of hounds’ teeth.