(HOO-lih-gun)

Means: A rowdy troublemaker, the kind of guy who gets the whole section thrown out of the game.

Etymology: It burst into London newspapers in the summer of 1898, in police-court reports about street gangs. The best guess is that it comes from a rowdy Irish family called Hooligan, or Houlihan, made famous in British music-hall songs of the 1890s. Within a couple of years it had crossed the ocean and stuck.

"Twenty years ago we were the hooligans in the upper deck. Now we complain when the guy behind us stands up."

In the 1950s, Swiss designers decided signs and posters should be clean and neutral: a strict grid, lots of white space, and plain sans-serif letters lined up on the left. Their poster child was a typeface designed in 1957 by Max Miedinger and Eduard Hoffmann, first called Neue Haas Grotesk and renamed Helvetica, Latin for "Swiss." Here's the bar bet: everybody thinks the New York subway signs were designed in Helvetica, but the 1970 sign manual by Massimo Vignelli and Bob Noorda specified a cousin called Standard. Helvetica didn't become the official subway typeface until 1989.

Sylvan Goldman, who owned the Humpty Dumpty grocery stores in Oklahoma City, rolled out the first shopping carts in 1937: basically folding chairs with wheels and two wire baskets. Nobody would use them. Men thought pushing one made them look weak, and women said it felt like pushing a baby carriage. So Goldman hired models, men and women, to push the carts around the store pretending to shop. It worked, and by 1940 other stores were reportedly on a seven-year waiting list to buy them.

My wife told me she wanted to go somewhere expensive for our anniversary.

So I took her to the gas station.

The same three letters fill every blank, in the same order. What are they?

• SC _ _ _
• WH _ _ _
• _ _ _ RT
• ST _ _ _

Hint: you might be holding one.

Answer in tomorrow's issue.