5 Words We Got by Misunderstanding Fictional Characters

5 Brainiac

Brainiac is a villain from DC comics, an enemy who fights Superman. Some of you won’t have heard of him, as he’s never received a live-action movie, but others among you know him well, since he’s popped up in a bunch of other media. This year, for example, he was the main villain in a Suicide Squad video game, which is going down as one of the biggest flops of all time, losing Warner Bros. hundreds of millions of dollars. 

His name is Brainiac, because he’s such a brainiac. But that slang term didn’t exist back when he debuted in the comics in 1958. It only ever became a word we use to refer to real-life smart people because it began as the name of that comic-book character. 

And when we call someone a brainiac, we forget what the name originally meant. The writer behind Brainiac (Otto Binder) chose that name because of the word brain, of course, but also the word maniac. Calling someone a “brainiac” rather than just “brainy” should then accuse them of being of insane, but it rarely does. 

Obviously, words can change meanings over time, but if our descendants start referring to turkeys as “turduckens,” they’re missing the word’s original beauty. 

4 Jumbo

P.T. Barnum had a famous elephant named Jumbo, and the mother elephant in Disney’s Dumbo was named after him. Much like with Brainiac, you might look back and imagine that these elephants were named Jumbo because they were so large, but “Jumbo” didn’t mean that at the time. Only afterward did the name become an adjective to describe big stuff.

Jumbo’s keeper Matthew Scott named him, and the name might have been taken from the Swahili word for hello, hujambo. It also might have been based on the existing English slang word jumbo, which at the time (the 1860s) meant “clumsy.” Jumbo wasn’t even that large for an elephant. Sure, any elephant is going to be large if you haven’t seen one before, but his 10-foot-7 height was average for his species. 

It’s amazing how deeply the word “jumbo” is ingrained in our language, considering it came from this one entertainer. It’s not just that we point at someone who’s big and nickname them Jumbo, like the elephant, since that isn’t really something we ever do. It’s how “Jumbo size” has become such an accepted category for products, from the oxymoronic jumbo shrimp to jumbo jets and Jumbotrons. Very few of those things are especially clumsy. 

As for Jumbo the elephant, it seems he was clumsy, and this clumsiness ended up killing him. A train hit him because he didn’t hop off the tracks in time. That’s unless you believe the conspiracy theory that Barnum staged the crash for publicity. 

3 Freelance

A freelancer is under contract to no one and works wherever they like. You might have heard a convincing origin for this word: It comes from a type of medieval knight who was free to use his lance to fight for whoever paid him.

But the word really didn’t exist back in the Middle Ages. It comes from the novel Ivanhoe by Walter Scott, which takes place in the Middle Ages but was written in 1819. “I offered Richard the service of my Free Lances, and he refused them,” says Maurice de Bracy, a mercenary leader. 

If you’re wondering what freelance soldiers really were called back then, you might try the Latin word stipendiarii, as they were paid stipends. Or you could fall back on the reliable mercennarius, or mercenary. In fact, if you work freelance today, we encourage you to call yourself a mercenary, as this projects strength.

2 Paparazzi

“Paparazzi” sounds like an Italian word. We conjugate it as we do Italian words, using it as a plural while a single member of the paparazzi is a paparazzo. You should conjugate similar words accordingly, by the way. A wall may be covered with graffiti, but a single tag on a wall is a graffito. You can eat a bowl of spaghetti, but a single strand of pasta is a spaghetto.

“Paparazzo” is indeed an Italian word, which is to say it’s an Italian name, in an Italian film. The movie was 1960’s La Dolce Vita by Federico Fellini. Paparazzo is a photographer who travels with our guy Marcello to grab photos for a story. One of the writers on the film said Fellini took the name from a book called By the Ionian Sea, where Paparazzo was the name of a real hotel owner. The name is still common in that neck of Italy today. Time magazine used the word “paparazzi” in an article they wrote on photographers in 1961, and the term spread from there.

Incidentally, Paparazzo’s big target in La Dolce Vita isn’t a celebrity but a supposed sighting of the Virgin Mary outside Rome. It’s appropriate then that we call celeb photographers paparazzi, because in later years, paparazzi would seek photos of Madonna.

1 Five-Oh

When you’re out on the streets slinging illegal Kinder Eggs, and a prospective buyer raises your suspicions, you might turn to your partner and suggest that this customer might be five-oh. You’re using a codeword that means “police.” It comes from the show Hawaii Five-0, which had a 10-season reboot starting in 2010 and was originally a 12-season series that debuted in 1968.

Both shows, sure enough, were about police in Hawaii. But the phrase “five-0” didn’t mean police, exactly. It referred to Hawaii, because Hawaii was the 50th state. This was especially confusing for users back in the 1960s because the original series was titled Hawaii Five-O, not Hawaii Five-0. 

It’s a bit like if Brooklyn Nine-Nine becomes so iconic that decades later, people are using the phrase “99” to refer to police of all kinds. Those people wouldn’t be wrong, exactly. The Nine-Nine were police in that show. It would still be strange. 

Actually, to make this analogy work, the show should be called Brooklyn BK, and we’d all be calling police “BK.” We 100-percent believe some network might choose that name for a police procedural. TV can get pretty dumb. 

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