BY ANY OTHER NAME?

Yahoo

In Gulliver's Travels, the Yahoos are a tribe of brutes having the form of men and embodying all the vices of mankind. So yahoo is an uncomplimentary term designating a lout, a ruffian, a brute, a degraded specimen of mankind.

Robot

In 1923 Karel Capek, a Czech playwrite, wrote a celebrated and terrifying play. Its title, R.U.R., stands for Rossum's Universal Robots, the robots being a symbol of the machine age, mechanical monsters in human form who turn upon their masters. Derived from the Slavic word robota, meaning work, the word robot has become very useful in describing an automaton or a human being who has become so mechanized that he has lost his soul.

Utopian

In 1516 Sir Thomas More wrote a book about an ideal state. Book and place bore the title Utopia, which means No Place (U is from ou, a Greek negative, and top is from topos, place). When, 250 years later, Samuel Butler wrote his novel of another utopia, he sought another disguise. He just spelled the word "nowhere" backwards and called his book Erewhon. Utopian is a synonym for quixotic; it carries the idea of impratical, unfeasible, impossible, visionary, chimerical, ideal but unattainable.