Why is the practice of eating human flesh called Cannibalism?

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.

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.

The old saying waiting till the cows come home is almost 400 years old. It refers to the early-morning hour when cows line up at the farm gates, ready to be milked.

There are several theories for the origin of the word hoodlum. One has to do with a gang of thugs in San Francisco led by a man named Muldoon. A fearful reporter, writing about him in 1877, spelled the name backward, Noodlum, and the compositor mistook the N for an H. A second theory claims…

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…

The phrase upside down was believed to be an early form of upsedown or up so down. The phrase came into popularity during the Elizabethan Age.