Interesting Facts

Tesco supermarkets have decided to only sell straight croissants. (Why? Well because UK customers have complained they cannot spread jam properly on a traditionally curved croissant. Now you probably know that the croissant is a French pastry, but what you might not know is that the word is French for crescent, and if you look crescent up in the dictionary you will see that it describes the curved sickle shape of the waxing or waning moon.  Oh dear, this is becoming an interesting word post. Anyway, although I am suspicious of their reasons (it's far more likely that it's simply cheaper to produce straight pastries), Tescos should be able to sell their boringly straight pastries, but they shouldn't call them croissants, they should call them tout droit instead.) PS - I am aware that no self-respecting French person would put jam on their croissant.

The word 'diet' first made an appearance in the 13th century. (It comes from the Greek word, diaita, meaning "way of life". The funny thing is it's a four-letter-word and the first 3 letters are "die".)

Once a word gets into the Scrabble Dictionary, it never drops out. Source - Wikipedia   (The only exception is for words mistakenly included. For example "pH", which in the 1990s was taken out when someone realised it was an abbreviation. According to the publisher, Collins "Scrabble players don't like to unlearn words."   I'm not sure if you can "unlearn" something. BTW - I'm sure one of the words in this picture should be "bitten".)

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...

In the USA money laundering is called smurfing. (In the original series of the Smurfs, the little blue characters tended to replace a verb with some form of the word "smurf"; e.g. "I feel like smurfing some bread," instead of, "I feel like eating some bread". In the USA the DEA started using the word as a code for Structuring, the act of making money transfers repeatedly in small amounts to avoid suspicion.)

In Anglo Saxon times, the second month of the year, corresponding roughly with the Roman (and modern) month of February, was called Solmonath. (‘Monath’ is the Old English word for a month, and the direct ancestor of our modern English word ‘month’. ‘Sol’ is the Old English word for ‘mud’, so Solmonath meant ‘Mud Month’, which is very appropriate given the British weather at this time of year.  According to Dictionary.com a lesser-used term was Kale-monath, which meant “cabbage month.”  I guess that reflected the wonderful English cuisine of the time.)

Sexting is a mix of two terms - Sex and Texting. (Seemingly sexting (a word I only just learnt because of the previous post) is the act of sending sexually explicit messages or photographs, primarily between mobile phones. The participants are usually teenagers or 'tweens', who seem to enjoy creating and exchanging provocative messages and nude, sexual images of themselves using their cell phone’s built-in digital camera and text messaging capabilities. The term was first popularized around 2005, but I only just found out about it because of the previous post)! My advice to anyone who thinks this sounds cool is, if you wouldn't want your granny to see it, don't send it.)

A mondegreen is the mishearing or misinterpretation of a phrase, typically a standardized phrase such as a line in a poem or a lyric in a song. (The word was first used in an essay by American writer Sylvia Wright , "The Death of Lady Mondegreen," published in Harper's Magazine in November 1954.[ In the essay, Wright described how, as a young girl, she misheard the last line of the first stanza from the 17th-century ballad "The Bonny Earl O'Moray". She wrote: "When I was a child, my mother used to read aloud to me from Percy's Reliques, and one of my favorite poems began, as I remember: Ye Highlands and ye Lowlands, Oh, where hae ye been? They hae slain the Earl O' Moray, And Lady Mondegreen. The actual fourth line is "And laid him on the green". Wright explained the need for a new term: "The point about what I shall hereafter call mondegreens, since no one else has thought up a word fo...

According to the English Oxford Dictionary the longest English word is 'pneumonoultramicroscopicsilicovolcanoconiosis'. It is 45 letters long. (I can't even pronounce it let alone spell it!!) xx Source - Wikipedia

A malapropism is the "inappropriate" use of a word. It is derived from the French phrase mal à propos (literally "ill-suited"). (It's also called a Dogberryism or acyrologia. Basically if you substitute an incorrect word for a word with a similar sound, you've made a malapropism, for example: "I resemble that remark", instead of "I resent that remark". If you want to see it in action, just read Sheridan's 1775 play 'The Rivals', and in particular the character Mrs. Malaprop.)

Quantitative easing is the act of printing more money to increase the supply. (It effectively means that the central bank prints new money, in order to increase the supply of money. 'Quantitative' refers to the money supply; 'easing' essentially means increasing. I tried it once, but I was arrested.)

The word 'euthanasia' means good death. (It comes from Ancient Greek eu- "good" + thanatos "death." Now it refers to the practice of killing anyone who is suffering from an incurable illness or condition.)

"Charlie's dead" means that someone's slip is showing. (Slip means petticoat and of course this is from a time gone by, when ladies wore petticoats. "Charlie's dead" was said when a ladies' petticoat was showing below her dress or skirt, along with the equally bizarre "It's snowing down south", which probably started because ladies' petticoats were usually white. There are a couple of different explanations for Charlie's dead though. The first explanation is that the Jacobites wore white ribbons to identify themselves to each other as supporters of "Bonnie Prince Charlie. And after he died you could point to someone who had a piece of white in their clothing and say "Charlie's dead". The other explanation that I found is that it may stem from Charles I, where apparently at his execution the women in the front row dipped their petticoats in his blood. Of course, like most idioms, nobody really knows for s...

Why one earth would this word be interesting? Well independent Councillor Ron Davies has told on his staff at Caerphilly council to stop using it, because it upsets people from Scotland, Wales, Ireland, Asia and China. (Quote: “the idea of British implies a false sense of unity”. I wonder what he thinks of being called a stupid prat.)

Hacktivist refers to politically motivated computer hackers. (It's a play on words, mixing activist and hacker. I'm not sure if it's in the dictionaries yet, but I'm sure it will be soon.)

The phrase "dead cat bounce" means a brief rally in the price of falling stock. (It is derived from the notion that "even a dead cat will bounce if it falls from a great height". Spooky is not impressed.)

Oenology (BrE) or enology (AmE), pronounced iːˈnɒlədʒi , is the science and study of all aspects of wine and winemaking from the grape harvest to bottle. An expert in the field of oenology is known as an oenologist. ( I knew I'd chosen the wrong course at Uni!)

The name "Google" originated from a misspelling of "googol," which refers to the number represented by a 1 followed by one-hundred zeros. (Having found its way increasingly into everyday language, usually through "I Googled it", the verb, "to google," was added to the Merriam Webster Collegiate Dictionary and the Oxford English Dictionary in 2006, meaning, "to use the Google search engine to obtain information on the Internet." They formally incorporated their company, Google Inc., on September 7, 1998 at a friend's garage in Menlo Park, California.)

Pica is an eating disorder, which involves an abnormal compulsion to eat non-nutritive substances (such as paint, string, hair, animal droppings, insects, soil etc) for over a month. (Yes, you will only be diagnosed as suffering from this if the compulsion persists for more than one month, and you have to be deemed developmentally able to determine whether an item is appropriate for consumption. So your average worm-eating 3-year-old does not suffer from this disorder. I wonder if eating non-nutritive substances includes hot dogs?)

Pseudocide is the act of faking your own death. (Believe it or not there are lots of websites that offer tips and hints on how best to vanish successfully - providing advice on how to cut family ties, sell possessions and start up a new business under a new identity. My own recommendation is to hang around and face the music.)