Boomerang
2 of the 6 encyclopedias on this shelf carry an entry for Boomerang. Both are reproduced below, so you can see where they agree and where they differ.
Aiton's Encyclopedia (1910)
a wooden missile now peculiar to the natives of Australia. It is made of some hard wood, and is usually about thirty inches in length and three inches in width. One surface is flat and the other is rounded. In shape it is curved like a crescent or scimiter. The native seizes his boomerang by one end and hurls it with great force and skill. There are several sorts of these instruments. Some are heavy and are used in war. Others are used in the chase of the kangaroo and in hunting birds, taking the place of the Indian bow and arrow . Other boomerangs again are used for amusement. The Australian native is skillful in throwing the boomerang, being able to kill game at a distance of two hundred paces. The curves executed by a baseball twirled from the hand of an expert pitcher are sufficiently surprising, but are far excelled by the right, left, up, and down curves of the boomerang. One sort may be thrown in such a way that it will execute curves in the air at a distance and return to the thrower. It may be made to circle a tree or house. One of the Australians at the Omaha Exposition threw his boomerang to a distance of ninety yards before it began its return flight, during which it rose to a height of forty-seven yards and described five complete circles, coming back and falling within two feet of the thrower. On the theory that a careless thrower flinging his boomerang out in front of him is likely to be struck by the return of his own weapon, the term has passed into the newspaper reporter's vocabulary as synonymous for an ill advised argument or political charge which may be turned against the speaker or his party. An ancient inscription represents an Egyptian noble standing in a boat and hurling a boomerang or "throw stick" at water fowl just rising from a clump of papyrus in the Nile. An Egyptian boomerang is preserved in the British Museum . The Moqui Indians of Arizona and New Mexico used a similar instrument in hunting rabbits. Of late a toy boomerang has been sold for lawn amusement.
Collier's New Encyclopedia (1921)
a missile weapon invented and used by the native Australians, who are generally deemed the lowest in intelligence of any tribe or race of mankind. It is a curved stick, round on one side and flat on the other, about three feet long, two inches wide, _and three-quarters of an inch thick. It is grasped at one end and thrown sicklewise, either upward into the air, or downward so as to strike the ground at some distance from the thrower. In the first case it flies with a rotary motion, as its shape would indicate, and after ascending to a great height in the air, it suddenly returns in an elliptical orbit to a spot near its starting point. On throwing it downward to the ground, it rebounds in a straight line, pursuing a ricochet motion until it strikes the object at which it is thrown. The most singular curve described by it is when it is projected upward at an angle about 45°, when its flight is always backward, and the native who throws it stands with his back to the object he intends to hit.
What Has Changed in the Last Century
The physics is now routine — a boomerang is an airfoil whose spin produces uneven lift, and model aircraft engineers and sport throwers have long since made returning designs a hobby, with world championships held since the 1980s. Two claims in these accounts have not survived: the boomerang is not "peculiar to the natives of Australia" (the oldest known example is carved from mammoth ivory and was found in a cave in southern Poland, tens of thousands of years old, and Aiton's own mention of Egyptian throw-sticks and Hopi rabbit sticks hints at the wider picture), and most Aboriginal boomerangs never returned at all — the heavy hunting and fighting kinds fly straight and hard, the returning type being used chiefly for play and for startling flocks of birds. Collier's judgement in 1921 that Australians were "the lowest in intelligence of any tribe or race of mankind" is exactly the racial hierarchy that twentieth-century anthropology dismantled; Aboriginal Australians are today recognised as the custodians of the world's oldest continuous cultures. Aiton's aside about newspapermen has meanwhile won out: "boomerang" is now an ordinary English verb.
Written for this edition, 2026.