The Amateur Etymologist

Yo-yo

The yo-yo is an all-American toy that is familiar to just about everyone. It seems with every generation, it pops up and is extremely popular for a season then fades away, only to reappear again (often with a new marketing campaign and new technology). This is called the yo-yo effect. (Kidding!)

Since my kids are now into yo-yos, I thought I'd do a little digging into the etymology of the word. Turns out the word is from the Philippines. In fact, it's from Ilocano, in northern Luzon. Were yo-yos invented by the Filipinos?

A little more digging around and I discovered that yo-yos have been around for a long, long time. The oldest surviving yo-yo dates from 550B.C. and was made of terra cotta. It's from Greece and there is a painting on a vase that shows a boy playing with a yo-yo. Naturally, it wasn't called a yo-yo then.

In the 1800s, the French referred to the toy as a bandalore while the English referred to it as a quiz. Then in 1916, Scientific American publishes an article about Filipino toys and makes mention of the yo-yo. But the watershed year for the modern yo-yo was 1923 when Pedro Flores, a Filipino living in the US, makes a yo-yo in the tradition of his forefathers. In 1928, he opens his first yo-yo factory in Santa Barbara. The yo-yo craze takes off, helped along by Flores's yo-yo contests.

Then along comes Donald Duncan who sees the potential and buys out the factory and the brand name from Flores. Duncan renames the product as a Duncan yo-yo. And with clever marketing, the yo-yo phenomenon really took off. That's the story of the yo-yo. I like the idea that such an "American toy" actually has roots going back to the Philippines and further back into ancient Greece.

Find out more about yo-yo history from the Duncan website.

Limelight

As I was in the car today, travelling through the streets of Jakarta, I saw a sign that had the word limelight on it. It's commonly understand that to be in the limelight means to be in the center of attention. But what does that have to do with the fruit?

As it turns out, not much. The reference to lime is actually calcium oxide. Limelight was a type of stage lighting used theatres and music halls in the 1860s and 1870s. An oxyhydrogen flame is directed at a cylinder of lime (calcium oxide) and through the combined effects of incandescence and candoluminescence, it produces a bright, intense light. The beam of light is then directed at a performer on stage. The original limelight has since been replaced by modern spotlights but the term still endures.