galvanise

This word starts with a dead frog and a live shock. In the 1790s, Luigi Galvani in Bologna was poking at frog legs and noticing that a jolt made them twitch, which was exactly the kind of weird laboratory drama that sends a term into the language. French scientists turned his name into galvanisme, and English grabbed it in 1801 for the new science of electric stimulation. Then the meaning spread like a spark in dry grass: by 1853 you could galvanise a crowd, a committee, or a sleepy reform movement. The metal-coating sense came in 1839, when the electricity story met practical ironwork and rust-proof zinc. So one man’s surname became a verb for either revving people up or plating railings—language, as usual, is just chemistry with better gossip.