 Welcome to the Endnotes, where I put all the fun facts I can't fit into the main videos. Today, some extra bits of information from my video about the word widow, and if you haven't seen that yet, click on the card. Looking again at the expression grass widow, which as we saw in the main video went from meaning a discarded mistress to a married woman whose husband is away, we saw there was speculation that the shift in meaning happened in Anglo-India. The one problem is that the earliest citations the Oxford English Dictionary has in the newer sense are not from India, but from American and Australian English, first in a story published in 1845 by American humorist Johnson J. Hooper. Then, in 1853, Ellen Clacy writes in, a lady's visit to the gold diggings of Australia, the absence of so many of the Lords of Creation in pursuit of what they value more than all the women in the world, nuggets. The wives thus left in town to deplore their husband's infatuation are termed grass widows, a mining expression. So, Clacy takes it as a mining term. It's not until 1859 that we have an Anglo-Indian example from John Lang's Wanderings in India in which he writes, grass widows in the hills are always writing to their husbands when you drop in upon them. All these citations are from around the same time, and perhaps someone will anti-date the term, finding an even earlier example in India. Another important widow expression is the phrase widows and orphans, originally referring to the vulnerable members of society most in need of charitable help, but also with a couple of important figurative senses. There's the financial sense, designating a safe, low-risk investment deemed suitable for those considered as vulnerable or having limited knowledge of investing, such as, originally, widows and orphans. So widow and orphan investments, or widow and orphan stocks. Then there's the typesetting term widows and orphans, referring to a paragraph-ending line that falls at the beginning of a page, a widow, or a paragraph-opening line that appears at the bottom of a page, an orphan. Typesetters usually try to avoid widows and orphans as they look messy and break up the flow of the text. The etymology of orphan, by the way, is quite an interesting one. It comes through Greek orfanos, and Latin orfanos, from a Proto-Indo-European root that means to turn, with derivatives in a number of languages referring to change of allegiance or the passage from one status to another. So etymologically speaking, an orphan has turned from the status of having parents to not having them, in other words turning from one sphere of belonging to another, and this would explain the various derivatives from the same root that have to do with inheritance and slavery, such as the word robot, which originally meant slave, before it was borrowed into English from Czech, referring to a more mechanical servant. Another word that descends from this root in its base sense of turn is orbit, coming from Latin orbita, meaning wheel track, with the original English sense of eye socket, before being applied to other round or spherical things, such as the astronomical sense, which was first used in English in the 1690s. And so, to bring all of this back to golf, another of the topics of the main video, in 2006, as a publicity stunt, Russian cosmonaut Mikhail Purin hit a golf ball into orbit off the International Space Station. There were differing estimates of how long it probably stayed in orbit before burning up in the atmosphere, ranging from three days to three and a half years. And speaking of golf, or rather its distant relative, Polo, and the Polo-obsessed Lord Mountbatten, his name is an anglicization of the original German surname Battenberg, Berg meaning mountain or hill. The family adopted the English translation of their name around World War I due to anti-German sentiment in Britain at the time. At first glance, the Batten element of the name might seem to be a possible instance of that root in bastard from Greek bastadzein, meaning to carry, as indeed the word batten as in batten down the hatches as a kind of stick or staff is related to baton, which comes ultimately from Greek bastun meaning support from bastadzein. But in the name, it is more likely to have come from a Germanic root, meaning to improve, related to the word better. As always, you can hear even more etymology and history, as well as interviews with a wide range of fascinating people on the Endless Knot podcast, available on all the major podcasting platforms, as well as our other YouTube channel.