We spend a great deal of our lives sitting down, whether driving, eating or reading because it’s very hard to do these things standing up.
Fortunately, there are many different types of seats to sit on. In the kitchen, there’s a kitchen chair or backless stool. In the dining room, there’s the dining chair, or the high chair for the baby. In the lounge, you can sit on the sofa, an armchair, or a rocking chair. You can stretch out on a chaise longue, lie back on a reclining chair or have a relaxing sit in a massage chair, and in the study you can sit on a swivelling computer chair.
If you’re not very mobile you can get around in a wheelchair, but if you’re fairly agile you can relax in a beanbag chair. Outdoors, you can admire the garden in your deckchair, garden chair, garden bench or director’s chair.
‘Chair’ comes from the Latin cathedra, the same source as ‘cathedral’ while ‘seat’ comes from the Germanic saet ‘the sitting part of the body’. Both terms imply a position of power, ‘the seat of government’, the chair or position of a bishop or a professor, hence chairman – the person in charge of a meeting. Important jobs are done sitting down. Especially solving crosswords.
Happy Puzzling!
