Almost everybody knows the story of how the frisbee came to be. Back in the 1930s, some New England college goofballs started tossing around upside down pie tins. One kind of these tins was manufactured by the Mrs. Frisbie's Pies company. Obviously, the name stuck. Eventually, big money realized that there was profit in selling such projectiles, notably a corporation called the Wham-O Company, which immediately slapped a trademark on its newly-popular product. Technically, the trademark remains to today, so the word Frisbee shouldn't be ubiquitous and should always be capitalized. Going backwards now, Frisbee is clearly a proper noun, one which has been present throughout basically all of English as we know it. The word can be followed back to an alteration of Frisby, a word to describe the Frisians, an ethnic group of people. This means the word is definitely Germanic (as the people are), and even more definitely Indo-European. What a bucket of giggles!
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AUTHORHello! I'm Adam Aleksic. This year, I graduated from Harvard University with a degree in Government and Linguistics. There, I co-founded the Harvard Undergraduate Linguistics Society and wrote a thesis on Serbo-Croatian language policy, magna cum laude. In addition to etymology, I also really enjoy trivia, politics, vexillology, geography, board games, conlanging, art history, and law.
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