The etymology of conundrum is quite the conundrum! Nobody really quite knows its origins, but there are some theories. The word was first attested in 1596 to denote "a pedantic person", but then that meaning died out. A few more definitions emerged throughout the seventeenth century, including "pun" and "whim". It's uncertain if any of those usages are even related to the modern meaning, which emerged as Oxford University slang in 1645. Apparently, they might have coined it as a joke: it was considered humorous at the time to create words that looked Latin but actually weren't. After that, conundrum (which was also spelled quonundrum for a while) seeped into the popular culture, and the rest is history. Other etymological theories include having conundrum actually come from Latin or being named after an order of Jesuits.

In his seminal satirical masterpiece Gulliver's Travels, Jonathan Swift wrote about a fictional land inhabited by giants that protagonist Lemuel Gulliver visits after his second shipwreck. This land was named Brobdingnag, but in the preface to that section of the novel, Gulliver complains that the correct spelling is actually Brobdingrag and that the publisher messed up in editing the word. This adds a bit of verisimilitude to the narration and makes it seem more like an actual account. The word seems to have been randomly chosen to just sound sort of big. The book was published in 1726, and, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, the word Brobdingnagian developed as an adjective meaning by 1731 (noticeably without the "correct" r). It peaked in usage in the 1930s and has generally levelled off since.

The word confess was borrowed from Old French in the late 1300s as the Middle English word confessen. Across the English Channel, it took the form of confesser, with the same definition. That comes from the Latin word confessare, which is composed of the prefix con-, meaning "with", and fessare, or "to admit". So a confession is a discussion "with admission" of guilt. Con-, through Proto-Italic kom, derives from Proto-Indo-European kom, which could mean many things, including "next to", "at", and "with". Fessare, meanwhile, also came from Proto-Italic and PIE, going back to the reconstruction beh​, meaning "speak". Usage of the word confess in literature over time peaked in the late seventeenth century and has been decreasing since then, perhaps parallelism society's increasing secularism.

Parentheses have been used since right before the fifteenth century as a method to insert more information in a text, but the word for those brackets wasn't first attested until the 1540s, when it was taken from Latin parenthesis. This actually referred to the addition of only one letter to a syllable at the time of the Romans, but was repurposed for the new linguistic invention. The Latin word comes from Greek, where para meant "beside", en meant "in", and thesis was related to a verb meaning "to put". Together, a parenthesis "put something in beside" some writing. Para is from Proto-Indo-European per ("before"), en has always kind of looked like that, and thesis derives from the reconstuction deh, which could also mean "to place" (I'm just going to put this parenthetical in beside this blog post). 

Boston has had subways since 1901, making it the sixth oldest subway system in the world. The network is nicknamed the "T" because the Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority uses an encircled T for Transportation as its logo. What's really interesting about the T, though, is its color-coding system. The four main subway branches were assigned hues in 1965, and each color had significance. The northwest-to-southeast route became the Red Line because it runs through Harvard and their school color is crimson. The west-to-north route became the Green Line due to the Emerald Necklace parks it passes through. The southwest-to-north was called the Orange Line because it goes under a road formally named Orange Street. Last but not least, the northeasterly Blue Line is called that because it travels under Boston Harbor. This is really fascinating to me for some reason; I suppose it's because I didn't expect subway line colors to have etymologies.