I’m on a bit of a jag here looking into words that have to do with winter sports, since the Olympics are coming up.

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Today I’ll start with the moguls you’d ski over and quickly move on to why a big boss at a film studio is called a movie mogul.

These two moguls are different words with different etymologies.

The moguls one finds on ski hills are large bumps whose name only appeared in English as skiing became more popular; that would be 1956.

The word is from Austrian German meaning “hillock” but may go back to Indo-European roots with a meaning of “chunk” or “lump.”

These have nothing to do with movie moguls who may or may not be chunky or lumpy.

The industry leaders in other lines of business are also sometimes called moguls. I see references to TV and real estate moguls.

The earliest reference to this kind of a mogul appeared in 1655.

The title was applied in the same way that drug czar or king of rock-and-roll might be used because the Grand Mogul was a kingly figure of northern India.

Think of the Taj Mahal, it was built by one of the Moguls who ruled what is now India.

But it seems that these rulers of the Indian subcontinent originally came from somewhere else and were called Moguls because of it.

Modern Mongolia is in northern China but Genghis Khan was the poster child for the Mongol Empire’s influence over unbelievably large swaths of Eurasia. It was descendants of the Mongols who took over much of India between the 14^th and 17^th centuries and Mogul is thought to come from Mongolian.

As a sidebar, people with Down’s syndrome are sometimes referred to as mongoloid and this is because Dr. John Langdon Haydon Langdon Down, after whom Down’s syndrome is named, himself used the term.

In so doing he forever marked himself as a racist; but then those were the opinions of his times.

Unbelievable as it may seem today, here’s what he wrote in 1866:

“I have for some time had my attention directed to the possibility of making a classification of the feeble-minded, by arranging them around various ethnic standards… The great Mongolian family has numerous representatives, and it is to this division, I wish..to call special attention. A very large number of congenital idiots are typical Mongols.”