The story goes like this: Many years ago I heard that a group of (etymologist?, Sociologist?, Advertisers?) around the early 1900’s were curious about how a word enters in to mainstream usage and, further, how it’s meaning develops or evolves.
To this end, they created a word and posted it on a billboard in, IIRC, New York City. The sign had no explanation or definition, just the word in large print. I cannot remember the word but it began with a “Q” I think and is in common use today.
I began to think it might be the word “quiz” but I recently came across the use of this word in Charles Dickens’s “The Pickwick Papers”. This usage is somewhat older than I remember the experiment taking place but I could be wrong.
Does this sound familiar to you? Can anyone shed some light on this for me?
Too esoteric for me, nicodemus. Aren’t you the one who had a conversation with the jawbone of an ass? old testiment
The Inquisitor quized during the inquisition. :smack:
Try this.
I heard the story as involving a bunch of young gentlemen hanging around their London club, well before 1900. One bet he could introduce a new word within 24 hours, and went out writing it on the pavement and posting notes with the word ‘quiz’ all over the city. By the following evening, everybody was wondering what 'quiz meant.
The story is a myth, unfortunately.
The version of the story I heard was from Dublin, in the 1790s. It was a theater owner who made a bet in a pub that he could introduce a new word into the language by morning and then hired gangs of street urchins for a penny to write “quiz” all over town.
The name of the proprietor was Richard Daley and the Ask Oxford site has this:
“This picturesque tale appeared as an anecdote in 1836, but the most detailed account (in F. T. Porter’s Gleanings and Reminiscences, 1875) gives the date of the exploit as 1791. 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 on 24 June 1782. ‘Quiz’ was also used as a name for a curious toy, something like a yo-yo and also called a bandalore, which was popular around 1790. The word is nevertheless hard to account for, and so is its later meaning of ‘to question, to interrogate’, which emerged in the mid-19th century and gave rise to the most common use of the term today, for an entertainment based on questions and answers.”
It seems kind of obvious to me that it’s just a slight alteration of the Latin word for ‘what?’ — quis.
Thank you. That may well be the story I heard originally so many years back. It does sound like the same kind of origin story as was told to me.
As for the jawbone of an ass Antivenin, no. Nicodemus was New Testiment (John 3:16 to be specific) and, along with Joseph of Arimathea (sp?) took Jesus from the cross to the tomb of Joseph. Or so I’m told. Thanks for asking tho. Wasn’t it Samson who used the jawbone to slay the enemy?
Yeah! The SDMB Dopers! 
Abe Lincoln once cracked a joke recalling how Samson slew a hundred men with the jawbone of an ass, and how a certain politician, while making a speech in Congress, achieved the same feat.