Online Etymology Dictionary

Davy Jones: "the spirit of the sea," 1751, first mentioned in Smollett's "The Adventures of Peregrin Pickle" (chapter 15) as an ominous and terrifying fiend who "presides over all the evil spirits of the deep, and is often seen in various shapes, perching among the rigging on the eve of hurricanes, shipwrecks and other disasters." Davy Jones's Locker "bottom of the sea," is 1803, from nautical slang, of unknown origin; second element may be from biblical Jonah, regarded as unlucky by sailors.
Dow Jones: short for Dow Jones Industrial Average, first published 1884 by Charles Henry Dow (d.1902) and Edward D. Jones (d.1920), later publishers of "The Wall Street Journal."
Jones: for the surname, see John. Phrase keep up with the Joneses (1913, Amer.Eng.) is from the title of a comic strip by Arthur R. Momand. The slang sense "intense desire, addiction" (1968) probably arose from earlier use of Jones as a synonym for "heroin," presumably from the proper name, but the connection, if any, is obscure.
potassium: 1807, coined by Eng. chemist Sir Humphrey Davy (1778-1829) from Mod.L. potassa, Latinized form of potash (q.v.). Davy first isolated it from potash. Symbol K is from L. kalium "potash."
aluminum: 1812, coined by English chemist Sir Humphry Davy (1778-1829), from L. alumen "alum" (see alum). Davy originally called it alumium (1808), then amended this to aluminum, which remains the U.S. word, but British editors in 1812 further amended it to aluminium, the modern preferred British form, to better harmonize with other element names (sodium, potassium, etc.).
"Aluminium, for so we shall take the liberty of writing the word, in preference to aluminum, which has a less classical sound." ["Quarterly Review," 1812]
magnesium: 1808 (Humphry Davy), from magnesia.
strontium: light metallic element, 1808, coined in Mod.L. by Eng. chemist Sir Humphry Davy (1778-1829) from Strontian, name of a parish in Argyllshire, Scotland, the site of lead mines where strontium was first found.
chloride: "chlorine compound," 1812, coined by Sir Humphrey Davy (1778-1829) from chlorine + -ide.
chlorine: coined 1810 by Sir Humphry Davy (1778-1829) from Gk. khloros "pale green" (see Chloe). Named for its color. Discovered 1774, but known at first as oxymuriatic acid gas.
calcium: coined 1808 by Sir Humphry Davy from L. calx (gen. calcis) "limestone" (see chalk).
piazza: 1583, "public square in an It. town," from It. piazza, from L. platea "courtyard, broad street," from Gk. plateia (hodos) "broad (street)." Mistakenly applied in Eng. c.1642 to the colonnade of Covent Garden, designed by Inigo Jones, rather than to the marketplace itself; hence "the verandah of a house" (1724, chiefly Amer.Eng.).
she-male: early 19c. U.S. colloquial, "a female," from she + male.
"Davy Crockett's hand would be sure to shake if his iron was pointed within a hundred miles of a shemale." ["Treasury of American Folklore"]
By 1972 it had come to be used (disparagingly) for "masculine lesbian." The sense of "transsexual male" seems to date from c.1984.
sodium: metallic alkaline element, 1807, coined by Eng. chemist Humphry Davy from soda; so called because the element was isolated from caustic soda (sodium hydroxide). The chemical symbol Na is from Natrium.
boron: 1812, from borax + ending abstracted unetymologically from carbon (it resembles carbon). Originally called boracium by Sir Humphrey Davy because it was drawn from boracic acid. Related: Boric.
barium: 1808, Mod.L., from Gk. barys "heavy;" so called by its discoverer, Eng. chemist Sir Humphrey Davy (1778-1829) because it was present in the mineral barytes "heavy spar," from Gk. barys "heavy" (see grave (adj.)).
fluorine: 1813, non-metallic element, coined by Eng. chemist Sir Humphry Davy (1778-1829) from fluorspar ("calcium fluoride," modern fluorite), the name of the mineral where it was first found, from L. fluor, originally meaning "a flowing, flow" (see fluent). The mineral name was given by Georg Agricola in 1546, translating Ger. name flusse, so called because it melts easily.
iodine: 1814, formed by British chemist Sir Humphry Davy from Fr. iode "iodine," coined 1812 by Fr. chemist Joseph Louis Gay-Lussac from Gk. ioeides "violet-colored," from ion "violet" + eidos "appearance" (see -oid). So called from the color of the vapor given off when the crystals are heated.
row (1): "line of people or things," O.E. ræw "a row, line," from P.Gmc. *rai(h)waz (cf. M.Du. rie, Du. rij "row;" O.H.G. rihan "to thread," riga "line;" Ger. Reihe "row, line, series;" O.N. rega "string"), possibly from PIE base *rei- "to scratch, tear, cut" (cf. Skt. rikhati "scratches," rekha "line"). Meaning "a number of houses in a line" is attested from mid-15c., originally chiefly Scottish and northern English. Row-house is first recorded 1936, Amer.Eng. Phrase a hard row to hoe first attested 1835, in writing of Davy Crockett.
Irish: c.1200, Irisce, from stem of O.E. Iras "inhabitant of Ireland," from O.N. irar, ult. from O.Ir. Eriu (acc. Eirinn, Erinn) "Erin," which is from O.Celt. *Iveriu (acc. *Iverionem, abl. *Iverione), perhaps meaning "good land." Meaning "temper, passion" is 1834, Amer.Eng. (first attested in writings of Davy Crockett), from the legendary pugnacity of Irish people. Irish-American is from 1832; Irish coffee is from 1950. Wild Irish (1399) originally were those not under English rule; Black Irish in ref. to those of Mediterranean appearance is from 1888.
creationism: 1847, originally a Christian theological position that God immediately created a soul for each person born; from creation + -ism. As a name for the religious reaction to Darwin, opposed to evolution, it is attested from 1880.
"James Ussher (1581-1656), Archbishop of Armagh, Primate of All Ireland, and Vice-Chancellor of Trinity College in Dublin was highly regarded in his day as a churchman and as a scholar. Of his many works, his treatise on chronology has proved the most durable. Based on an intricate correlation of Middle Eastern and Mediterranean histories and Holy writ, it was incorporated into an authorized version of the Bible printed in 1701, and thus came to be regarded with almost as much unquestioning reverence as the Bible itself. Having established the first day of creation as Sunday 23 October 4004 B.C. ... Ussher calculated the dates of other biblical events, concluding, for example, that Adam and Eve were driven from Paradise on Monday 10 November 4004 BC, and that the ark touched down on Mt Ararat on 5 May 1491 BC `on a Wednesday'." [Craig, G.Y., and E.J. Jones, "A Geological Miscellany," Princeton University Press, 1982.]
John: masc. proper name, c.1160, from M.L. Johannes, from L.L. Joannes, from Gk. Ioannes, from Heb. Yohanan (in full y'hohanan) lit. "Jehovah has favored," from hanan "he was gracious." As the name of John the Baptist and John the Evangelist, it was one of the most common Christian given names, and in England by early 14c. it rivaled William in popularity. O.Fr. form was Jean, but in England its variants Johan, Jehan yielded Jan, Jen (cf. surname Jensen). Welsh form was Ieuan, (see Evan), but Ioan was adopted for the Welsh Authorized Version of the Bible, hence frequency of Jones as a Welsh surname. Feminine form was Joan, Latinized as Johanna. Colloquial John Hancock "signature" (1903, sometimes, through some unexplainable error, John Henry) is from the signer of the Declaration of Independence, either from his signing first or most prominently. The family name is attested from 1276 in Yorkshire, a dim. (see cock) of Hann, a very common given name in 13c. Yorkshire as a pet name for Henry or John. Johnny-come-lately first attested 1839.
yellow ribbon: The American folk custom of wearing or displaying a yellow ribbon to signify solidarity with loved ones or fellow citizens at war originated during the U.S. embassy hostage crisis in Iran in 1979. It does not have a connection to the American Civil War, beyond the use of the old British folk song "Round Her Neck She Wore A Yellow Ribbon" in the John Wayne movie of the same name, with a Civil War setting, released in 1949. The story of a ribbon tied to a tree as a signal to a convict returning home that his loved ones have forgiven him is attested from 1959, but the ribbon in that case was white. The ribbon color seems to have changed to yellow first in a version retold by newspaper columnist Pete Hamill in 1971. The story was dramatized in June 1972 on ABC-TV (James Earl Jones played the ex-con). Later that year, Irwin Levine and L. Russell Brown copyrighted the song "Tie a Yellow Ribbon Round the Ole Oak Tree," which became a pop hit in early 1973 and sparked a lawsuit by Hamill, later dropped. In 1975, the wife of a Watergate conspirator put out yellow ribbons when her husband was released from jail, and news coverage of that was noted and remembered by Penne Laingen, whose husband was U.S. ambassador to Iran in 1979 and one of the Iran hostages taken in the embassy on Nov. 4. Her yellow ribbon in his honor was written up in the Dec. 10, 1979, "Washington Post." When the hostage families organized as the Family Liaison Action Group (FLAG), they took the yellow ribbon as their symbol. The ribbons revived in the 1991 Gulf War and again during the 2003 wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.
fuck: a difficult word to trace, in part because it was taboo to the editors of the original OED when the "F" volume was compiled, 1893-97. Written form only attested from early 16c. OED 2nd edition cites 1503, in the form fukkit; earliest appearance of current spelling is 1535 -- "Bischops ... may fuck thair fill and be vnmaryit" [Sir David Lyndesay, "Ane Satyre of the Thrie Estaits"], but presumably it is a much more ancient word than that, simply one that wasn't likely to be written in the kind of texts that have survived from O.E. and M.E. Buck cites proper name John le Fucker from 1278. The word apparently is hinted at in a scurrilous 15c. poem, titled "Flen flyys," written in bastard L. and M.E. The relevant line reads:
Non sunt in celi
quia fuccant uuiuys of heli
"They [the monks] are not in heaven because they fuck the wives of Ely." Fuccant is pseudo-Latin, and in the original it is written in cipher. The earliest examples of the word otherwise are from Scottish, which suggests a Scandinavian origin, perhaps from a word akin to Norw. dial. fukka "copulate," or Swedish dial. focka "copulate, strike, push," and fock "penis." Another theory traces it to M.E. fkye, fike "move restlessly, fidget," which also meant "dally, flirt," and probably is from a general North Sea Gmc. word, cf. M.Du. fokken, Ger. ficken "fuck," earlier "make quick movements to and fro, flick," still earlier "itch, scratch;" the vulgar sense attested from 16c. This would parallel in sense the usual M.E. slang term for "have sexual intercourse," swive, from O.E. swifan "to move lightly over, sweep" (see swivel). Chronology and phonology rule out Shipley's attempt to derive it from M.E. firk "to press hard, beat." As a noun, it dates from 1680. French foutre and Italian fottere look like the English word but are unrelated, derived rather from L. futuere, which is perhaps from PIE base *bhau(t)- "knock, strike off," extended via a figurative use "from the sexual application of violent action" [Shipley; cf. the sexual slang use of bang, etc.]. Popular and Internet derivations from acronyms (and the "pluck yew" fable) are merely ingenious trifling. The O.E. word was hæman, from ham "dwelling, home," with a sense of "take home, co-habit." Fuck was outlawed in print in England (by the Obscene Publications Act, 1857) and the U.S. (by the Comstock Act, 1873). The word may have been shunned in print, but it continued in conversation, especially among soldiers during WWI.
"It became so common that an effective way for the soldier to express this emotion was to omit this word. Thus if a sergeant said, 'Get your ----ing rifles!' it was understood as a matter of routine. But if he said 'Get your rifles!' there was an immediate implication of urgency and danger." [John Brophy, "Songs and Slang of the British Soldier: 1914-1918," pub. 1930]
The legal barriers broke down in the 20th century, with the "Ulysses" decision (U.S., 1933) and "Lady Chatterley's Lover" (U.S., 1959; U.K., 1960). Johnson excluded the word, and fuck wasn't in a single English language dictionary from 1795 to 1965. "The Penguin Dictionary" broke the taboo in the latter year. Houghton Mifflin followed, in 1969, with "The American Heritage Dictionary," but it also published a "Clean Green" edition without the word, to assure itself access to the lucrative public high school market. The abbreviation F (or eff) probably began as euphemistic, but by 1943 it was being used as a cuss word, too. In 1948, the publishers of "The Naked and the Dead" persuaded Norman Mailer to use the euphemism fug instead. When Mailer later was introduced to Dorothy Parker, she greeted him with, "So you're the man who can't spell 'fuck' " [The quip sometimes is attributed to Tallulah Bankhead]. Hemingway used muck in "For whom the Bell Tolls" (1940). The major breakthrough in publication was James Jones' "From Here to Eternity" (1950), with 50 fucks (down from 258 in the original manuscript). Egyptian legal agreements from the 23rd Dynasty (749-21 B.C.E.) frequently include the phrase, "If you do not obey this decree, may a donkey copulate with you!" [Reinhold Aman, "Maledicta," Summer 1977]. Fuck-all "nothing" first recorded 1960. Verbal phrase fuck up "to ruin, spoil, destroy" first attested c.1916. A widespread group of Slavic words (cf. Pol. pierdolić) can mean both "fornicate" and "make a mistake." Fuck off attested from 1929; as a command to depart, by 1944. Flying fuck originally meant "have sex on horseback" and is first attested c.1800 in broadside ballad "New Feats of Horsemanship." For the unkillable urban legend that this word is an acronym of some sort (a fiction traceable on the Internet to 1995 but probably predating that) see here, and also here. Related: Fucked; fucking. Agent noun fucker attested from 1590s in literal sense; by 1893 as a term of abuse (or admiration).