The greatest Irish writer of his generation who wrote the critically acclaimed Borstal Boy and The Quare Fellow described himself as “a drinker with a writing problem”. Raised on whiskey by his maternal grandmother because “it was good for the worms”, Brendan Behan achieved national notoriety with a series of …
Those crazy Etruscans, who inhabited Italy in the area that is now modern Tuscany, are regarded as the best dentists of the ancient world. They extracted decayed teeth, replacing them with full or partial dentures, in which individual teeth were realistically carved from ivory or bone and bridgework was crafted …
Penthouse is a fine example of a word that has come about by the workings of folk etymology. Old French had the word apentis to denote ‘an outhouse projecting from the side of a main building’.The word was a borrowing of medieval Latin appendicium, ‘appendage’, a derivative of the Latin …
Roman patricians and plebeians ate with their fingers, as did all European peoples until the dawning of a conscious fastidiousness at the beginning of the Renaissance. Still, there was a right and a wrong, a refined and an uncouth, way to go about it. From Roman times onward, a commoner …
Only within the last century were chocolate eggs exchanged as Easter gifts. But the springtime exchanging of real eggs—white, coloured, and gold-leafed—is an ancient custom, predating Easter by many centuries. From earliest times, and in most cultures, the egg signified birth and resurrection. The Egyptians buried eggs in their tombs. …
Lovers who affectionally sign “XXX”s to valentine cards and letters are usually unaware that the custom goes back to the early Christian era, when a cross mark, or “X,” conveyed the force of a sworn oath. The cross was, of course, a religious symbol. Not only did it refer to …
English novelist Arnold Bennett died trying to impress his girlfriend. When a Parisian waiter advised him against drinking the café’s toxic tap water, Bennett took a sip to show his lady companion that he wasn’t afraid of a little bacteria. “Ah, ce n’est pas sage, Monsieur, ce n’est pas sage!” …
After serving as President of Poland for five years,the splendidly mustachioed Lech Wałęsa resumed his old job as an electrician at the Gdansk shipyard, on the Baltic coast, repairing forklifts and electric vehicles for the equivalent of $1.40 an hour. When he returned to the shipyard gates on April 2, …
As we all know, fingers are the digits and are therefore used for counting. Then digits become numbers and if you store information it becomes digital. All rather dull really. But the Old English names for the fingers are far more interesting than all matters digital.. The index finger was …
According to Italian tradition, the city of Venice was founded at the stroke of noon on Friday, March 24th, 421, when a group of Paduan refugees gathered in the marshlands off the northern coast of Italy and laid the cornerstone of San Giacomo Church. Venice’s creation myth was part of …
