A Fascist general named Gonzalo Queipo de Llano y Sierro is said to have coined the phrase during the Spanish Civil War (1936-1939).
As four Fascist army columns closed in on Madrid, the general described his supporters inside the city as a “fifth column.”
The term came to mean any group of subversives trying to undermine a nation from within.
Not surprisingly, the name refers to a part of the lion. In England, before the sixteenth century, the weed was called lion’s tooth because of its serrated leaf’s resemblance to the lion’s incisor. Later, the French translation, dent de lion, was adopted into English and eventually became anglicized to “dandelion.”
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.
Rather than measuring the time that passes during a meeting, the word minutes refers to the Latin minutus, or “small.” This is because the occurrences of the meeting are meant to be noted shortly and quickly, not that the events themselves are unimportant.
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 use of Ain’t as a substitute for am not or are not dates back to the reign of King Charles II, about 300 years. It is unclear how or why it became unacceptable in the English Language.
Spelunking is the exploration of caves as a hobby. It is not to be confused with speleology, the scientific study and exploration of caves.