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…
The phrase “to 86” generally means “put an end to”. It is said to have been part of a number code used in diners and soda fountains. In those early days, 86 meant “we’re out of that dish,” “don’t serve that customer,” or “don’t serve another drink to that customer because he’s already had too…
Angry, hungry, and gry, which is a now obsolete unit of measure that is equal to 0.008 inch.
It was coined by New York’s Finest along Twenty-third Street in the years before World War I. At the corner of Twenty-third Street and Broadway, traditionally the windiest corner of the city, men used to stand outside the famous Flatiron Building for free looks at ladies’ well-turned ankles. The police dutifully moved the audience along,…
In the process of deduction, you derive conclusions from assumed statements by using the rules of logic, moving from the general to the specific. In induction, you make inferences from experiments or observations to build a general law, moving from the specific to the general.
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…