Thanks to Professor John Coleman, Director at Oxford University Phonetics Laboratory, he pointed me in the direction of a very interesting read on the origin of the word ‘Quiz’. And it was this that began to spark some thoughts in to how words that must have been used years ago meant something completely different to what they do today and if there is something here that I could incorporate in to my work and words!
With the word Quiz it came down to a Dublin theatre proprietor Richard Daley who decided to take what was thought to be a nonsensical and allow the public creates its meaning in 1875. “After a performance one evening, he gave his staff cards with the word ‘quiz’ written on them, and told them to write the word on walls around the city.” Following this it soon became the talk of the town and soon became everyday language. Little did he realise that this word had already been in existence, “The word, however, was already in use by then, meaning ‘an odd or eccentric person’, and had been used in this sense by Fanny Burney in her diary entry for 24 June 1782.” But it had also been used very shortly after this recording in 1790 and was known differently “…as a name for a kind of toy, something like a yo-yo.”
Despite all this the recording was hazy and therefore its later meaning ‘to question or interrogate’ came to be. Which shows its development in to becoming a type of test or questioning a persons intelligence and knowledge.
This brought rise to the word ‘wireless’ which I discuss later within Lexical Change.
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What is the origin of the word ‘Quiz’? http://www.oxforddictionaries.com/words/what-is-the-origin-of-the-word-quiz
