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often seasoned with onions or pepper. The most common explanation for the name says that they were originally made around campfires (the story often has the campers being Confederate soldiers), where they were tossed to hungry, yelping dogs with the command “Hush, puppies!” Over time that became the name of
the food. The oldest documented use of the term goes back to a 1918 publication on American English called Dialect Notes .
     
    TERM: Chestnut
    MEANING: The nut from a chestnut tree, or the tree itself
    ORIGIN: The Ancient Greek word for chestnut was kastanea . That could have meant either “nut from Castanea,” a city in Turkey, or “nut from Castana,” a city in central Greece. Both regions were (and still are) renowned for their chestnuts. Kastanea passed into Latin as castanea , which became chastaigne in Old French. That went to Middle English as chasteine , and around 1570 became chestnut .
     
    TERM: Urban legend
    MEANING: Modern folktales often thought to be factual
    ORIGIN: Why are they called “urban” when they often don’t involve cities in any way? Because they’re named after Jeffrey Jack Urban, a farmer from Yankton, South Dakota. He was a notorious teller of wild, almost-believable stories in the 1930s. Local people started calling any such tales “Urban legends” after Jeffrey Jack. (Just kidding. We made that up.)
    The truth is that in the 1940s and ’50s, folklorists started collecting modern American legends and noticed that they had different characteristics than older, rural-based legends did. They called these legends “urban belief tales” or “city tales,” the words “urban” and “city” indicating their darker, more modern themes, even though the stories weren’t necessarily based in cities. The name evolved to become “urban legend” in the 1960s. The first recorded use is usually credited to folklorist Richard Dorson in the 1968 book, Our Living Traditions. (Dorson is also credited with popularizing the term “fakelore.” For more on that, see page 435.)

    “Of course I can keep secrets. It’s the people I tell them to that can’t keep them.”
    — Anthony Haden-Guest

EVERYDAY HEROES
    Here’s something to think about: Every time you walk out your door, you could be faced with an opportunity to save someone’s life.
    Are you ready for it? These people were.

STEERED RIGHT
    Nearly every weekday for 30 years, John Beatty drove his pickup truck across San Francisco’s Golden Gate Bridge on his way to and from work. One morning in late 2007, the 50-year-old electrician suddenly came up on a slow-moving Jeep Grand Cherokee. He hit the brakes and went to pass the Jeep, only to see the driver slumped over the steering wheel. “It began to cross into the fast lane, and people were using that lane to pass her,” Beatty later said. “On the other side of the road, traffic was flying northbound. I thought, ‘I’m not letting this happen.’” He drove in front of the Jeep and let it hit his pickup. Displaying some impressive driving skills, Beatty was able to steer the SUV toward the right lane. At first, other drivers honked impatiently at the slow procession, but once they understood what was happening, they gave Beatty the space he needed to get the Jeep safely off the road. Sadly, the unconscious driver later died from her condition, but California Highway Patrol officers credit Beatty with preventing what could have been a deadly collision into oncoming highway traffic. “I lead a kind of low-key life,” admitted Beatty. “Excitement’s not my bag.”

RAIL BRAVE
    Veeramuthu Kalimuthu, known as Kali, stood on a subway platform during a busy New York City afternoon rush hour in 2008. A new train rolled in every three minutes, and Kali’s was about a minute away. That’s when he heard screams and saw that a man had fallen onto the tracks from the platform on the opposite side of the station. Kali watched and waited for someone to help, but no one did.