Interesting Facts

There is a language taking over the world, and it isn't English; it's Emoji. (In a survey conducted by TalkTalk Mobile, 8 in 10 people use emoji symbols in emails and text messages, and 72% of British 18 to 25-year-olds said they found it easier to put their feelings across in emoji icons than in text. The 10 most popular emojis are as follows:- 1- Smiley Face 2- Crying with laughter 3- Love heart 4- Blushing 5- Thumbs up 6- Cheeky face 7- Blowing a kiss 8- Winking face 9- Confused 10- See no evil monkey However, different language speakers have their own preferences:- Canadians seemingly enjoy using the smiling poop emoji. The French use four times as many heart emojis than other languages. Flower and plant emojis, particularly the rose, are used at more than 4 times the average rate by Arabic speakers. Russian speakers use 3 times as many romantic emojis. Australians like emojis with a...

Aubergines were originally called "vatinganah" in Sanskrit, which means literally ‘fart, go away.’ Original Photo by Irene Kightley   CC by SA 2.0 (From Sanskrit, the word and the fruit travelled, morphed into Persian as badingan, then into Arabic as al-badhinjan.  The Spanish borrowed the term thinking that the Arabic definite article "al" was part of the word, so it went into the Catalan language as alberginia, where the French later picked it up as aubergine, and the English borrowed the word in the late 1700s. 1794, from Fr. aubergine, "fruit of the eggplant" (Solanum esculentum), dim. of auberge "a kind of peach," variant of alberge, from Sp. alberchigo "apricot" [OED]. Klein derives the French word from Catalan alberginera, from Arabic al-badinjan"the eggplant," from Pers. badin-gan, from Skt. vatin-ganah. So aubergine really means "fart go away". Americans know it as an eggplant, which IMHO isn...