Martha Barnette

And there was a guy there who did some amazing things with algebra

and blew the minds of European mathematicians with some of the things that he came up with.

And his name was Al-Khwarizmi.

And when they translated his work into Latin, it was Latinized as Algoritmi.

And that's the source of our English word algorithm, which is of course a set of step-by-step instructions for solving a problem or completing a task.

The word algorithm, you know, it's on everybody's tongue these days, but it goes all the way back to the 9th century.

Exactly.

And that's what happens a lot of times with words is they get reappropriated and given different meanings.

Oh, that's a wonderful one.

Yes, silhouette goes back to 1759 when France's newly appointed minister of finance was doing all this budget cutting.

I mean, he was very unpopular because he just

went in there and was cutting people's pensions.

He put a tax on windows, for example.

He put a tax on trouser cuffs.

I mean, he was really, really doing every bit of cost cutting that he could do.

And his name was Etienne de Silhouette.

And he was so unpopular that he got thrown out of office after just eight months.

And about the same time, there were these kinds of portraits that became very popular that were just, you know, just, well, a silhouette, a little shadow, rather than an expensive painting.

You know, you would just trace around the shadow of a person's head, and that would be their portrait.

And so those became fashionable, and this was around the time that silhouette was thrown out of office.