The oldest letter in the alphabet is o, first used by Egyptians in about 3000 B.C.
The newest letters are j and v.
The consonant j was not distinguished from the vowel i until the 1600s, and not until the Renaissance was the consonant v distinguished from the vowel u.
Probably not. In French, gaga means a silly old man, and the meaning may simply have been modified. However, some think it is short for artist Paul Gauguin (1848-1903), who, it is said, revealed mental imbalance in his work.
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…
A perimeter is the distance around the boundary of a closed plane figure, such as a rectangle or circle. A parameter is a quantity that, when varied, affects the value of another quantity. Parameters are established to aid in determining an unknown figure.
The phrase “In Like Flynn” is believed to have originated with Ed Flynn. Flynn was head of New York City’s Democratic party machine from 1922 to 1953. Flynn’s political machine was always “in” power. The phrase gained further popularity in 1942, when swashbuckling actor Errol Flynn (1909-1959) was tried and acquitted on charges of the…
Sweatshops were referred to as such not because the workers sweat a lot. In the 1840s in England, the word sweating meant the exaction of tedious work at low wages. The term sweatshop, a place where workers were “sweated”, was coined in the United States in 1867. Originally referring only to the garment industry, it…
Despite many alternative claims, the first appearance in print links the term O.K. to a political organization that supported the reelection of President Martin Van Buren. The New York New Era of March 23, 1840, carried an article on the Democratic O.K. Club. The initials stood for Old Kinderhook, a Van Buren epithet derived from…