It is pretty common knowledge that when Christopher Columbus headed out he thought he was heading for the Far East by way of the west. Europeans knew about trade goods, particularly spices, from the Indiesnbsp; even though they didnrsquo;t have much idea

A rerun episode from New Year's Day 2006 I hope you had a good new year and that my exploration of hangover is purely of academic interest to you. I once bought a greeting card with a hangover theme.nbsp; It talked about how wonderful it was to have a h

In Paris one of the leading newspapers is Le Monde, which of course is French for ldquo;The World.rdquo; This is a clue for us as to what the word ldquo;mundanerdquo; is all about. Literally mundane means ldquo;of the worldrdquo; and when I hear people

We all know that the earth is a sphere. The book Longitude by Dava Sobel tells the story of John Harrison who figured out how to calculate how far east or west a ship was on the ocean.nbsp; A few weeks ago I talked about the shiprsquo;s log. Once sailor

When the word rug first appeared in English it was closer to rag in meaning. It seems likely they might once have been the same word. In the 1550s we find the first references to rugs and at the time these were rough pieces of fabric. Although you might

Itrsquo;s nice that the words pen and pencil are so similar, but they are totally unrelated. The word pen comes to us ultimately from a Latin word meaning ldquo;feather.rdquo; This is because for most of the history of writing with pen and ink, a pen wa

Once upon a time someone figured out that it was easier and safer to hunt groceries or injure an enemy if you could somehow hit them from a distance. Spears and arrows helped deliver a sharp rock accurately and with more force but it was sometimes hard t

The Oxford English Dictionary claims that blizzard is a fairly new word. New for them means less than 200 years old. The earliest citation for the word seems to be 1829 but at first the word didnrsquo;t mean a violent snowstorm, it seemed to mean to hit

About 2500 years ago a fellow named Hanno was put in charge of sixty ships and sailed out of the Mediterranean and down the western coast of Africa. SPONSOR: GotoMeeting Hold your meetings online for just $49/mo. Try GoToMeeting FREE for 30 da

I must be one of the last people in the western world to have diapered my children in reusable cloth diapers. Certainly the word deserves more respect that to be used once in a rather disgusting way and then discarded. SPONSOR: GotoMeeting Hold your