The male side of a family is called the Spear side.
A distaff was a stick with a cleft end, used to hold the flax or wool from which a woman spun thread.
The distaff was considered a woman’s tool, while the spear was a man’s.
Both ways of describing genealogy are now rarely used.
A fathom is Six feet deep. How far is a league? A League can vary from 2.4 to 4.6 miles. What is the area of an acre? An acre is 4,840 square yards, or 43,560 square feet.
The practice, also called anthropophagy, is derived from the Spanish word for the Caribs. The Caribs were a West Indian tribe known for cannibalism.
Spelunking is the exploration of caves as a hobby. It is not to be confused with speleology, the scientific study and exploration of caves.
The abbreviation eg., standing for the Latin exempli gratia, or “for the sake of example,” means exactly that, a series of examples: “large dogs, e.g., Saint Bernards and Great Danes.” The abbreviation i.e., standing for id est, or “that is,” explains the subject you have mentioned: “large dogs, i.e., those over 3 feet tall and…
In Old English, scot meant a payment, or one’s share of a payment. To go scot free meant escaping that charge.
It depends on whom you ask. Some editors will still change “to boldly go where no man has gone before” to “to go boldly . . .” But other pundits now consider the taboo against split infinitives all but passé. The taboo was introduced by eighteenth and nineteenth-century grammarians for unknown reasons.