Words in use today

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On the way to work today I saw a truck delivering Sunkist sodas. What exactly is a "kist"? According to most dictionaries it means "a coffin".

A mortgage is a composite French word from "mort", meaning death, and "gage" which means "in debt". Mortgage literally means "in debt to death". I guess French people back when this word was invented didn't have long life spans.

Do you know of any other similar words?

Sunkist is a play on "Sun Kissed" - as in sun ripened fruit.

people today [a few of us, anyways] still say "nifty" even thought it was a civil-war-era corruption of the word "magnificent."

I heard that "gage" meant "hand".
So the word means a "dead hand".

Not a bad visual metaphor: a mortgage is kind of like being griped by a dead hand.

One word that seems to have gone out of usage since my childhood in the sixties is the word "cavort"as in "you kids stop cavorting around".

I got too big to cavort ( jump on beds and have pillow fights etc), so I stopped hearing the big people use the word at a certain point. But apparently parents dont use it now.

At work we all heard some strange noises from the ceiling that sounded like an aerobics class thumping in unison. I commented about hearing people "cavorting around". Two of my coworkers doubled over laughing because they had never heard the word before.
They both happened to be african american, but I think the linguistic gap had more to do with generation than with race because even I hadnt heard the word for decades. It became a running joke for awhile. In the middle of a stressful workday one of us would call out to othe by name and then sternly ask 'are you cavortin'" and then we all would double over laughing.

Its a fun playful word. Hope it makes a comeback.