Today I found out the difference between discrete and discreet. Simply put, “discreet” describes showing “reserve, prudence, or cautiousness” in one’s behavior or speech. “Discrete”, on the other hand, means “distinct, separate, or unrelated”. A quick and easy mnemonic to remember the difference is to see that in “discrete”, unlike “discreet”, the “e’s” are separated and the definition itself is […]
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Today I found out where the tradition of yelling “Geronimo” when jumping out of a plane came from. In the 1940s, the U.S. Army was testing out the feasibility of having platoons of soldiers parachute from air planes. One of the first units to attempt to group jump out of a plane was located in Fort Benning, Georgia. On the […]
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Today I found out the color orange was named after the fruit, not the other way around. Before then, the English speaking world referred to the orange color as geoluhread, which literally translates to “yellow-red”. The word orange itself was introduced to English through the Spanish word “naranja”, which came from the Sanskrit word nāraṅga, which literally means “orange tree”. […]
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“That’s what she said” is thought to have been around since the 1970s with the earliest known documented case of the phrase showing up on Saturday Night Live, spoken by Chevy Chase in a weekend update skit in 1975, which also happened to be the first season of SNL. “That’s what she said” was later hugely popularized thanks to Wayne’s […]
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Today I found out the origins of the word “Algebra”. It all started back around 825 AD when a man named Abū ʿAbdallāh Muḥammad ibn Mūsā al-Khwārizmī, the “father” of Algebra, wrote a book called “Kitab al-jabr wa al-muqabalah”. This roughly translates to “Rules of Reintegration and Reduction”. This work was specifically covering the branch of mathematics we now know […]
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Today I found out what SOS stands for. It is commonly held that “SOS” is an acronym for “Save Our Ship” and thus often written “S.O.S.” In truth, SOS is not an acronym for anything, which is why it is incorrect to put full stops between each letter. So why was SOS chosen to signify a distress signal? The thought […]
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If you’ve ever wondered why we kiss under the mistletoe and how the plant got that strange name, well, wonder no more. The name for mistletoe derives the fact that mistletoe tends to spring from bird droppings that have fallen on trees, with the seeds having passed through the digestive tract of the birds. Thus, the plant was given the […]
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Karen asks: Why is pencil lead called lead when it doesn’t contain any? In the 16th century, a large deposit of pure, solid graphite was discovered in Borrowdale, England. This was the first time in recorded history that high quality, solid graphite had been found. When metallurgists first encountered this substance, they thought it was some sort of black lead, […]
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Today I found out where the word “amen” came from. Specifically, “amen” comes from the Hebrew word… *wait for it*… “āmēn” (אָמֵן). More interestingly, amen is one of the rare examples where a word has survived thousands of years and been adopted into a few different languages without any real modification to its meaning across time and those languages, dating […]
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For more Halloween related information, be sure and check out: 15 Facts About Halloween [Infographic]. Today I found out where the word “witch” came from. The word “witch” derives from the Old English words “wicca” and “wicce” (masculine and feminine forms, respectively). This later became “wicche”, in Middle English, which meant the same thing as “wicca” and “wicce”, but didn’t […]
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Today I found out what the dot over the lower case letter “i” is called, namely a “tittle”. While this isn’t a commonly used word any longer, the expression “jot or tittle” still endures in some places, meaning something to the effect of “a very small amount” or “iota”. A classic example of this expression can be seen in the […]
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Today I found out where the word “wiki” comes from. Howard G. Cunningham, the developer of the first wiki which was launched in 1995 called WikiWikiWeb, upon his first visit to Hawaii was informed by an airport employee that he needed to take the wiki wiki bus between the air port’s terminals. Not understanding what the person was telling him, […]
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Today I found out why the hottest part of the summer is called the “Dog Days”. The earliest reference to some aspect of this expression goes all the way back to the Ancient Egyptians. They noted that the heliacal rising of the star Sirius heralded the hottest part of the summer. However, it isn’t exactly known why the ancient Egyptians […]
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Today I found out where the word “lego” comes from. In 1934, Danish carpenter Ol Kirk Kristiansen, the founder of what we now know of as Lego®, asked his staff to come up with a good name for his growing toy company. The two names that ended up being finalists were “Legio” and “Lego”. The first was a reference to […]
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Today I found out where the term “rock and roll” came from. The word “roll” has been used since the Middle Ages to refer to, among other things, having sex: “Let’s go for a roll in the hay”; “Rolling under the sheets”; etc. The word “rock”, again among other things, has been used since at least the 17th century as […]
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Today I found out where the words “geek” and “nerd” came from. The first documented case of “geek” dates all the way back to 1916. At the time, the term was used to describe sideshow freaks in circuses. Specifically, it was typically attributed to those circus performers who were known for doing crazy things like biting the heads of various […]
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Note: This is a guest article contributed by plastics engineer and owner of Polymeric Life, Noah. Today I found out where the word plastic came from. The word plastic existed long before the first plastic, Parkesine. As early as the 1600’s, plastic was used as a term to relate to something that could be easily molded or shaped. Plastic is […]
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Today I found out how the word “spam” came to mean “junk message” or “junk mail”. While some have suggested that this was because SPAM (as in the Hormel meat product) is sometimes satirized as “fake meat”, thus spam messages are “fake messages”, this potential origin, while plausible enough on the surface, turns out to be not correct at all. […]
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