What is a papal bull?
It is not an animal, but an official edict or decree from a pope.
The term comes from the Latin bulla (a knob or seal).
It originally referred to the seal that was placed on the pope’s official documents.
It is not an animal, but an official edict or decree from a pope.
The term comes from the Latin bulla (a knob or seal).
It originally referred to the seal that was placed on the pope’s official documents.
No, the word shyster did not come from Shakespeare’s Shy-lock. It came from a Mr. Scheuster, an unscrupulous American criminal lawyer in the 1840s.
A cathartic is a medicine that stimulates movement of the bowels. Aristotle, in his Poetics, used the medical term catharsis (in Greek, literally “purgation” or “purification”) as a metaphor for the way a stage tragedy “cleans out” the emotions of a spectator by arousing terror and pity.
The word Nightmare was named after a creature but not a horse. According to ancient superstition dating back to the eighth century in England, people thought a female monster or spirit, a so-called mare, would sit upon a sleeper’s chest. This would cause a feeling of suffocation from which the sleeper would try to free…
At one time there was no difference between a Preface and a Foreword. Preface was the Latinate term, foreword the Anglo-Saxon one, for a brief opening comment about a book’s purpose. Now, many consider an author’s introductory comment to be the preface, and anyone else’s comment to be the foreword.
The U.S. Navy defines a boat as “a vessel that can be hauled aboard a ship.” In ordinary usage, however, large vessels are often called boats as well as ships.
The word is used by astronomers to describe the position of three bodies that are approximately in line. For example, when the moon is full, it is in syzygy with the earth and sun, because it is on the far side of the earth from the sun.