See if your football fanatic friends can explain the meaning and history behind some common football words! Let’s start with a strangely confusing term in the game: touchdown. For most of the game the last thing a player wants is for the pigskin to make contact with the ground. Why would it be called a touchdown, if the football doesn’t need to touch down in order to …
Thinly dressed with yellow mustard and slapped between two slices of white bread, bologna is found in the lunchboxes of many American youth. But, what does the cold cut have to do with baloney, a slang word that implies nonsense? The bologna sausage is traditionally made from the “odds and ends” of chicken, turkey, beef, or pork. It is similar to the Italian mortadella, which …
After World War II, one of the largest aircraft manufacturers, Boeing, turned its attention from designing military craft to building commercial planes, along with missiles and spaceships. (Unrelated fact: when Boeing was forced to spin off its passenger flight division, the newly-formed company became United Airlines.) Why did Boeing start using numbers as names? Back to the late 1940s: Model numbers were assigned to each …
When someone casually uses a term they assume you understand but don’t, you have a few choices. You can get frustrated, or you can look it up. Financial jargon can be a code of confusing abbreviations and arithmetic. Let’s focus on one of the most common bits of shorthand: “the Dow.” What is the full name of the Dow? The full name for this measure of stock …
Pakistan means “land of the pure” in Urdu and Persian. It shares a suffix with Afghanistan, Tajikistan, and Turkmenistan. But, what does it mean? What does -stan mean? The suffix –stan is Persian and Urdu for “place of,” or “where one stands.” It is found in the names of seven countries: Afghanistan, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Pakistan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, and Uzbekistan. In most of these titles, the first part of the …
Our society’s constant obsession with relationships and especially celebrity marriages—with their ups and downs, and often very salacious details—can lead us to wonder and ask big questions about the words we use to talk about love, commitment, and desire. While this isn’t People magazine or “Dear Abby,” perhaps we can use our natural curiosity as an excuse to look at a dilemma of language that is …
It’s one thing to make a typo on your resume, but we know of a worse kind of mistake: calling your partner the name of a previous paramour. Or perhaps you’re talking to your boss and out of your mouth pops an obscene word that rhymes with what you meant to say. These slips, of tongue, the keyboard, or the pen, are generally termed “Freudian,” …
Walking into a beautiful mosque, church, synagogue, or temple may inspire a familiar feeling of awe, but these places are not in any way interchangeable. Obviously, the purpose of these sacred spaces will depend on those who worship there, and the word origins of these terms are equally varied. Let’s examine these words, starting with mosque. What is a mosque? A mosque is “a Muslim …
Today, this humble blog gets serious. Prepare to unravel (some) of the mysteries of money. Open your wallet and take out a dollar bill. What is this complicated piece of paper that so much of your life depends on? And really, what’s the deal with the pyramid with an eye on top? (Here’s a decent answer.) The U.S. is one of many countries to call …
Speaking in tongues, also referred to as gift of tongues or glossolalia, is a phenomenon that occurs when a person experiencing religious ecstasy or a trance utters incomprehensible sounds that they believe are a language spoken through them by a god or deity. It is believed that a person speaking in tongues is temporarily being gifted the ability to speak a language they do not …
Double or single scoop? Cone or cup? However you take it, all frozen desserts have one thing in common. Nothing tastes better on a summer afternoon than an ice-cold, sweet treat, and one of the most popular is frozen yogurt. Where does frozen yogurt get its name? Frozen yogurt is fairly new to the world of sweets. It was introduced in the 1970s under the …
Zedonk. Yes, this is for real. “The offspring of a zebra and a donkey.” Prepare yourself for an even larger dose of absurdity: there are plenty more zany names for unlikely crossbreeds, and we’ve collected a nonsensical herd of them. We don’t know if the baby zedonk, born in the state of Georgia about a week ago, has a name, but an Associated Press report notes that …
