Ive often said that the new words created in any era give us a snapshot of that time. Our present preoccupation with green issues is perfectly reflected in the latest additions to most dictionaries.
Collins Dictionary is obviously environmentally aware, with new phrases such as carbon footprint: a measure of the amount of carbon dioxide [more…]
Extract from Crossed Wires BIG 188
With all the coughing and sneezing going on in the office, I looked into the origins of these words, and found that cough comes from German keuchen ‘to pant’ and wheeze from Old Norse hvaesa ‘to hiss’.
Hiccup, once called hicket or hyckock, is named after the sound of the [more…]
You cant cure a cold or flu but everyone has their own method for relieving the symptoms. In fact, ask fifty people and youll get fifty different answers.
When our family came down with colds recently, we were given all sorts of advice regarding home remedies, but we find the old family favourite always works [more…]
Interested in becoming a crossword compiler?
You’re in luck! Hidden beneath the dust bunnies during a recent spring-clean we discovered a typewritten aid for compiling crosswords written by none other than Crossword Queen, Christine Lovatt. And much to our surprise and delight the advice contained therein still holds true.
So, if you want to try [more…]
With the Olympic Games upon us, its quite interesting to see the origins of the names of some Olympic sports.
The name Olympics comes from where it all started, in Olympia, a district in ancient Greece where athletic contests were held every four years.
Badminton is played with a battledore and shuttlecock. Battledore comes from the [more…]
The English language has the largest vocabulary of any language which is not surprising when you think that it is made up of Celtic, Germanic, Latin, Viking and French languages, not to mention all the words borrowed from Africa and Asia.
English is now the everyday speech of more than four hundred million people around [more…]
UNIQUE BLOCKS are essential tools for solving Kakuro and Killer Sudoku/Addoku puzzles. For example a total of 4 in 2 squares is a UNIQUE BLOCK. It can’t be 2 + 2 because each line of numbers can contain only one of each numeral. So the two squares can have only 1 or 3, though [more…]
The word exotic comes from the Greek exotikos, literally from the outside. So if we had visited Ancient Greece, they may have described us as exotic, because they used it to mean foreign.
Exotic plants and birds come from another land, but exotic also means attractively strange, or maybe that should be strangely attractive. (Im [more…]
Easter will be here on 23rd March this year. In the Christian church, its a time of celebration, the end of the Lenten fasting period. To many people Easter is a time when people dressed as rabbits wander about the local shopping centre scaring children. It also means eating lots of chocolate eggs and [more…]
