With the conquest of England in 1066 by William of Normandy, the Anglo-Saxon language of the British Isles underwent several alterations. As the French-speaking Normans established themselves as the ruling caste, they treated the native Saxons and their language as inferior. Many Saxon words were regarded as crude simply because …
English has become a world language spoken in countries ranging from Canada to India to Australia. An ongoing battle concerns the status of local versions of English in particular countries. Must they stay as close as possible to standard British or American, or can they assert language independence as well …
“To be As Happy As A Sandboy” means that you are in a state of joyous contentment. This phrase passed into regular usage courtesy of Charles Dickens. In 1840 Dickens published The Old Curiosity Shop which includes an inn called The Jolly Sandboys that displayed a sign outside depicting three …
Advances in technology have ensured that we are always on call, but whether that improves the quality of our lives is somewhat debatable. There now seems to be a whole new set of phrases describing our relationship with mobile phones. For example in Sweden, they call a phone yuppienalle – a yuppie …
Because of the public-relations fanfare surrounding the debut of nylon stockings, there is no ambiguity concerning their origin. Perhaps there should have been scepticism, though, of the early claim that a pair of stockings would “last forever.” The story begins on October 27, 1938, when the Du Pont chemical company …
Ring-a-ring o’ roses, A pocket full of posies A-tishoo! A-tishoo! We all fall down. The rhyme first appeared in an 1881 book, Mother Goose, though in oral tradition it is much older. And for all its apparent innocence and playfulness as a child’s game, the verse is about something deathly …
Men inquire, “Where can I wash my hands?” and women ask, “Is there a place to powder my nose?” Schoolchildren stammer, “May I be excused?” while travellers abroad beg for directions to the nearest “comfort station, the prissy Americans call it a “rest room” and the British call it a …
Despite the fact that every other shop in most cities seems to be a bloody Starbucks (or something similar), this is not a modern day occurrence. In the 17th century, London had over one thousand establishments catering to a strange new craze imported from Arabia in the early months of …
The earliest known recipe for something similar to today’s potato crisps is in William Kitchiner’s cookbook The Cook’s Oracle, first published in 1817, which was a bestseller in England and the United States. The 1822 edition’s version of recipe 104 is called “Potatoes fried in Slices or Shavings” and reads …
In a recent interview with The Sun, the increasingly strange Nicholas Cage announced to the world that he chooses which animals to eat based on their sex lives “I think fish are very dignified with sex. So are birds. But pigs, not so much. So I don’t eat pig meat …
