S
ShamelessFlirt
Guest
Word oddities & Trivia - http://members.aol.com/gulfhigh2/words.html
English language links - http://phrontistery.50megs.com/langlink.html
http://www.world-english.org/english
http://www.cooper.com/alan/homonym.html
http://phrontistery.50megs.com/lipworks.html
****
111,111,111 x 111,111,111 = 12,345,678,987,654,321
****
What Happens Between Consenting Monarchs...
Debunked: The etymology of the 4-letter word "fuck" is an acronym of old. [e.g. "Fornication Under Consent of the King."]
While the exact origin of "fuck" is not known, it does come from a Germanic root and cognates can be found in almost all the Germanic languages.
Also, acronymns are pretty much a 20th century invention. The earliest known acronym is ANZAC (Australia-New Zealand Army Corps), dating to the First World War. There are some older words where acronymic phrases were created out of existing words, but none that were created from a phrase until the 20th century.
****
Ernest Vincent Wright wrote a novel with over 50,000 words, none of which had the letter "E".
Gadsby was the book.
The longest one-syllable word in the English language is "screeched."
The combination "ough" can be pronounced in nine different ways. The following sentence contains them all: "A rough-coated, dough-faced, thoughtful ploughman strode through the streets of Scarborough; after falling into a slough, he coughed and hiccoughed."
The verb "cleave" is the only English word with two synonyms which are antonyms of each other: adhere and separate.
The word philatelist (stamp collector) stems for the Latin phase "Happy to avoid paying taxes".
The only 15 letter word that can be spelled without repeating a letter is uncopyrightable.
Facetious and abstemious contain all the vowels in the correct order, as does arsenious, meaning "containing arsenic."
There are only four words in the English language which end in "dous": tremendous, horrendous, stupendous, and hazardous.
The word "Checkmate" in chess comes from the Persian phrase "Shah Mat," which means, "the king is dead".
Pinocchio is Italian for "pine head."
The longest word in the English language, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, is pneumonoultramicroscopicsilicovolcanoconiosis. The only other word with the same amount of letters is pneumonoultramicroscopicsilicovolcanoconioses, its plural.
Hydroxydesoxycorticosterone and hydroxydeoxycorticosterones are the largest anagrams.
The Sanskrit word for "war" means "desire for more cows."
Canada is an Indian word meaning "Big Village."
Los Angeles' full name is "El Pueblo de Nuestra Senora la Reinad e los Angeles de Porciuncula." That makes it the world's longest place name and the Biggest abbreiviation by ration when reduced to "LA".
No word in the English language rhymes with month, orange, silver or purple.
"Dreamt" is the only English word that ends in the letters "mt".
The phrase "sleep tight" derives from the fact that early mattresses were filled with straw and held up with rope stretched across the bedframe. A tight sleep was a comfortable sleep.
The saying "it's so cold out there it could freeze the balls off a brass monkey" came from when they had old cannons like ones used in the Civil War. The cannonballs were stacked in a pyramid formation, called a brass monkey. When it got extremely cold outside, they would crack and break off... Thus the saying.
The sentence "The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog." uses every letter in the alphabet.
Stewardesses' is the longest word that is typed with only the left hand.
"I am" is the shortest complete sentence in the English language.
Clans of long ago that wanted to get rid of their unwanted people without killing them used to burn their houses down -hence the expression "to get fired."
There are 293 ways to make change for a dollar.
The average secretary's left hand does 56% of the typing.
Maine is the only state whose name is just one syllable.
The name for Oz in the "Wizard of Oz" was thought up when the creator, Frank Baum, looked at his filing cabinet and saw A-N and O-Z, hence "Oz."
Typewriter is the only ten letter word you can type on the top of your keyboard.
Skepticisms is the longest word that alternates hands!
The English-language alphabet originally had only 24 letters. One missing letter was J, which was the last letter to be added to the alphabet. The other latecomer to the alphabet was U.
"Fan" is an abbreviation for the word "fanatic." Toward the turn of the 19th century, various media referred to football enthusiasts first as "football fanatics," and later as a "football fan."
The proper name of our sole natural satellite is "the Moon" and therefore...it should be capitalized. The 60-odd natural satellites of other planets, however are called "moons" (in lower case) because each has been given a proper name, such as Deimos, Amalthea, Hyperion, Miranda, Larissa, or Charon.
The word "snorkel" comes from the German word "schnoerkel", which was a tube used by German submarine crews in WW2. The subs used an electric battery when traveling underwater, which had to be recharged using diesel engines, which needed air to run. To avoid the hazard of surfacing to run the engines, the Germans used the schnoerkel to feed air from the surface into the engines.
The name "fez" is Turkish for "Hat".
The combination "ough" can be pronounced in nine different ways. The following sentence contains them all: "A rough-coated, dough-faced, thoughtful plough man strode through the streets of Scarborough; after falling into a slough, he coughed and hiccoughed."
"The verb "cleave" is the only English word with two synonyms which are antonyms of each other: adhere and separate.
"Jerkwater" is a railroad term. Until about fifty years ago, most trains were pulled by thirsty steam engines that needed to refill their boilers from water towers next to the tracks. But some towns were so small and inconsequential that they lacked a water tower. When trains stopped in those places, the crew had to find a nearby stream or well and, bucket-brigade style, "jerk" the water to the train. Those little dots on the map became known as jerkwater towns.
Malcolm Lowry had pnigophobia—the fear of choking on fish bones.
Augustus Caesar had achluophobia—the fear of sitting in the dark.
Androphobia is a fear of men.
Caligynephobia is a fear of beautiful women.
Pentheraphobia is a fear of a mother-in-law.
Scopophobia is a fear of being looked at.
Phobophobia is a fear of fearing.
Mageiricophobia is the intense fear of having to cook.
Papaphobia is the fear of Popes.
Taphephobia is the fear of being buried alive.
Clinophobia is the fear of beds.
Incredible means not believable. Incredulous means not believing. When someone's story is truly incredible, you ought to be incredulous.
The terms "prime minister," "premier" and "chancellor" all refer to the leading minister of a government, and any differences from nation to nation stem from different systems of government, not from title definitions.
Tennis pro Evonne Goolagong's last name means "kangaroo's nose" in Australia's aboriginal language.
A "sysygy" occurs when all the planets of the our Solar System line up.
The most common letters in the English language are R S T L N E. Sound familiar? Watch an episode of "Wheel of Fortune"...
A "necropsy" is an autopsy on animals.
EEG stands for Electroencephalogram.
The English word pajamas has it's origin in Persian. It is a combination of the Persian words pa (leg) and jamah (garment).
The ZIP in zip code stands for "Zone Improvement Plan."
Yucatan, as in the peninsula, is from Maya "u" + "u" + "uthaan" meaning "listen how they speak," and is what the Maya said when they first heard the Spaniards.
Punctuation was not invented until the 1500's.
"Catch 22" has come to mean a problematic situation for which the only solution is denied by a circumstance inherent in the problem. The original "Catch-22," in Joseph Heller's 1961 novel of the same name, is the catch that prevents a US Air Force pilot in World War II from asking to be grounded on the basis of insanity. The pilot knows that military regulations permit insane pilots to be grounded and not forced to fly further dangerous bombing missions. However, the regulation prevents airmen from escaping bombing missions by pleading insanity by stating that any airman rational enough to WANT to be grounded cannot possibly be insane and therefore is fit to fly. From the novel: a man "would be crazy to fly more missions and sane if he didn't, but if he was sane, he had to fly them. If he flew them he was crazy and didn't have to: but if he didn't he was sane and had to."
The custom of saying "Bless you" when someone sneezes was first used by ancients when they believed that breath was the essence of life, and when you sneeze a part of you life is escaping. Evil spirits rush into your body and occupy the empty space. By saying "God bless you" the speaker is protecting the sneezer from that spirits.
Lycanthropy is a disease in which a man thinks he's a wolf. It is the scientific name for "wolf man" or, werewolf.
"Evian" spelled backwards is naive.
Author Margaret Wolfe Hungerford, who sometimes wrote under the name "The Duchess," observed in her novel "Molly Bawn" that "beauty is in the eye of the beholder." The phrase has passed into the English language.
The "glair" is the white or clear part of an egg. The word glair comes from the Latin clarus, meaning "clear."
The longest word used by Shakespeare in any of his works is "honorificabilitudinitatibus," found in "Love's Labors Lost." Unfortunately he's no longer around to tell us what it means.
Colgate faced a big obstacle marketing toothpaste in Spanish speaking countries. Colgate translates into the command "go hang yourself."
The right side of a boat was called the starboard side due to the fact that the astronavigators used to stand out on the plank (which was on the right side) to get an unobstructed view of the stars. The left side was called the port side because that was the side that you put in on at the port. This was so that they didn't knock off the starboard.
Ever wonder where the phrase "two bits" came from? Some coins used in the American colonies before the Revolutionary War were Spanish dollars, which could be cut into pieces, or bits. Since two pieces equaled one-fourth dollar, the expression "two bits" came into being as a name for 25 cents.
Montgomery Ward was the first to advertise "Satisfaction guaranteed or your money back" in 1874 — two years after Aaron Montgomery Ward, launched his first mail-order catalog.
OK is the most successful of all Americanisms. It has invaded hundreds of other languages and been adopted by them as a word. Mencken claims that US troops deployed overseas during WWII found it already in use by Bedouins in the Sahara to the Japanese in the Pacific. It was also the fourth word spoken on the surface of the moon. It stands for oll korrect, a misspelling of all correct.
When Coca-Cola began to be sold in China, they used characters that would sound like "Coca-Cola" when spoken. Unfortunately, what they turned out to mean was "Bite the wax tadpole".
Clans of long ago that wanted to get rid of their unwanted people without killing them used to burn their houses down - hence the expression "to get fired."
Pokemon stands for "pocket monster."
The name Ethiopia mean "land of sunburned faces" in Greek.
A coward was originally a boy who took care of cows.
MAFIA is an acronym for Morte Alla Francia Italia Anela, or "Death to the French is Italy's Cry"
The Sanskrit word for "war" means "desire for more cows."
When a film is in production, the last shot of the day is the "martini shot," the next to last one is the "Abby Singer".
"Hara kiri" is an impolite way of saying the Japanese word "seppuku" which means, literally, "belly splitting."
A bird watching term: peebeegeebee = a pied-billed grebe.
"Big cheese" and "big wheel" are Medieval terms of envious respect for those who could afford to buy whole wheels of cheese at a time, an expense few could enjoy. Both these terms are often used sarcastically today.
When two words are combined to form a single word (e.g., motor + hotel = motel, breakfast + lunch = brunch) the new word is called a "portmanteau."
The slash character is called a virgule, or solidus. A URL uses slash characters, not back slash characters.
"Corduroy" comes from the French, "cord du roi" or "cloth of the king."
In the Greek alphabet "X" is the first letter for the word Christ, "Xristos." Xmas means "Christ's mass."
If you come from Manchester, you are a Mancunian.
There are six words in the English language with the letter combination "uu." Muumuu, vacuum, continuum, duumvirate, duumvir and residuum.
The abbreviation "ORD" for Chicago's O'Hare airport comes from the old name "Orchard Field."
A pregnant goldfish is called a "twit"
The longest one syllable word in the english language is "screeched"
Tom Sawyer was the first novel written on a typewriter
****
Q: Why do X's at the end of a letter signify kisses?
A: In the Middle Ages, when many people were unable to read or write, documents were often signed using an X. Kissing the X represented an oath to fulfill obligations specified in the document. The X and the kiss eventually became synonymous.
Q: Why is shifting responsibility to someone else called "passing the buck"?
A: In card games, it was once customary to pass an item, called a buck, from player to player to indicate whose turn it was to deal. If a player did not wish to assume the responsibility, he would "pass the buck" to the next player.
Q: Why are people in the public eye said to be "in the limelight"?
A: Invented in 1825, limelight was used in lighthouses and stage lighting by burning a cylinder of lime which produced a brilliant light. In the theater, performers on stage "in the limelight" were seen by the audience to be the center of attention.
Q: Why do ships and aircraft in trouble use "mayday" as their call for help?
A: This comes from the French word m'aidez -meaning "help me"-and is pronounced "mayday,"
Q: Why is someone who is feeling great "on cloud nine"?
A: Types of clouds are numbered according to the altitudes they attain, with nine being the highest cloud. If someone is said to be on cloud nine, that person is floating well above worldly cares.
Q: Why are Zero scores in tennis called "love"?
A: In France, where tennis first became popular, a big, round zero on scoreboard looked like an egg and was called "l'oeuf," which is French for "egg". When tennis was introduced in the US, Americans pronounced it "love."
Q: Why are many coin banks shaped like pigs?
A: Long ago, dishes and cookware in Europe were made of a dense, orange clay called "pygg". When people saved coins in jars made of this clay, the jars became known as "pygg banks." When an English potter misunderstood the word, he made a bank that resembled a pig. And it caught on.
Q: How did the word "Caddy" originate?
A: When Mary, later Queen of Scots, went to France as a young girl (for education & survival), Louis, King of France, learned that she loved the Scot game "golf". So he had the first golf course outside of Scotland built for her enjoyment. To make sure she was properly chaperoned (and guarded) while she played, Louis hired cadets from a military school to accompany her. Mary liked this a lot and when she returned to Scotland (not a very good idea in the long run), she took the practice with her. In French the word cadet is pronounced 'ca-day' & the Scots changed it into "caddie".
English language links - http://phrontistery.50megs.com/langlink.html
http://www.world-english.org/english
http://www.cooper.com/alan/homonym.html
http://phrontistery.50megs.com/lipworks.html
****
111,111,111 x 111,111,111 = 12,345,678,987,654,321
****
What Happens Between Consenting Monarchs...
Debunked: The etymology of the 4-letter word "fuck" is an acronym of old. [e.g. "Fornication Under Consent of the King."]
While the exact origin of "fuck" is not known, it does come from a Germanic root and cognates can be found in almost all the Germanic languages.
Also, acronymns are pretty much a 20th century invention. The earliest known acronym is ANZAC (Australia-New Zealand Army Corps), dating to the First World War. There are some older words where acronymic phrases were created out of existing words, but none that were created from a phrase until the 20th century.
****
Ernest Vincent Wright wrote a novel with over 50,000 words, none of which had the letter "E".
Gadsby was the book.
The longest one-syllable word in the English language is "screeched."
The combination "ough" can be pronounced in nine different ways. The following sentence contains them all: "A rough-coated, dough-faced, thoughtful ploughman strode through the streets of Scarborough; after falling into a slough, he coughed and hiccoughed."
The verb "cleave" is the only English word with two synonyms which are antonyms of each other: adhere and separate.
The word philatelist (stamp collector) stems for the Latin phase "Happy to avoid paying taxes".
The only 15 letter word that can be spelled without repeating a letter is uncopyrightable.
Facetious and abstemious contain all the vowels in the correct order, as does arsenious, meaning "containing arsenic."
There are only four words in the English language which end in "dous": tremendous, horrendous, stupendous, and hazardous.
The word "Checkmate" in chess comes from the Persian phrase "Shah Mat," which means, "the king is dead".
Pinocchio is Italian for "pine head."
The longest word in the English language, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, is pneumonoultramicroscopicsilicovolcanoconiosis. The only other word with the same amount of letters is pneumonoultramicroscopicsilicovolcanoconioses, its plural.
Hydroxydesoxycorticosterone and hydroxydeoxycorticosterones are the largest anagrams.
The Sanskrit word for "war" means "desire for more cows."
Canada is an Indian word meaning "Big Village."
Los Angeles' full name is "El Pueblo de Nuestra Senora la Reinad e los Angeles de Porciuncula." That makes it the world's longest place name and the Biggest abbreiviation by ration when reduced to "LA".
No word in the English language rhymes with month, orange, silver or purple.
"Dreamt" is the only English word that ends in the letters "mt".
The phrase "sleep tight" derives from the fact that early mattresses were filled with straw and held up with rope stretched across the bedframe. A tight sleep was a comfortable sleep.
The saying "it's so cold out there it could freeze the balls off a brass monkey" came from when they had old cannons like ones used in the Civil War. The cannonballs were stacked in a pyramid formation, called a brass monkey. When it got extremely cold outside, they would crack and break off... Thus the saying.
The sentence "The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog." uses every letter in the alphabet.
Stewardesses' is the longest word that is typed with only the left hand.
"I am" is the shortest complete sentence in the English language.
Clans of long ago that wanted to get rid of their unwanted people without killing them used to burn their houses down -hence the expression "to get fired."
There are 293 ways to make change for a dollar.
The average secretary's left hand does 56% of the typing.
Maine is the only state whose name is just one syllable.
The name for Oz in the "Wizard of Oz" was thought up when the creator, Frank Baum, looked at his filing cabinet and saw A-N and O-Z, hence "Oz."
Typewriter is the only ten letter word you can type on the top of your keyboard.
Skepticisms is the longest word that alternates hands!
The English-language alphabet originally had only 24 letters. One missing letter was J, which was the last letter to be added to the alphabet. The other latecomer to the alphabet was U.
"Fan" is an abbreviation for the word "fanatic." Toward the turn of the 19th century, various media referred to football enthusiasts first as "football fanatics," and later as a "football fan."
The proper name of our sole natural satellite is "the Moon" and therefore...it should be capitalized. The 60-odd natural satellites of other planets, however are called "moons" (in lower case) because each has been given a proper name, such as Deimos, Amalthea, Hyperion, Miranda, Larissa, or Charon.
The word "snorkel" comes from the German word "schnoerkel", which was a tube used by German submarine crews in WW2. The subs used an electric battery when traveling underwater, which had to be recharged using diesel engines, which needed air to run. To avoid the hazard of surfacing to run the engines, the Germans used the schnoerkel to feed air from the surface into the engines.
The name "fez" is Turkish for "Hat".
The combination "ough" can be pronounced in nine different ways. The following sentence contains them all: "A rough-coated, dough-faced, thoughtful plough man strode through the streets of Scarborough; after falling into a slough, he coughed and hiccoughed."
"The verb "cleave" is the only English word with two synonyms which are antonyms of each other: adhere and separate.
"Jerkwater" is a railroad term. Until about fifty years ago, most trains were pulled by thirsty steam engines that needed to refill their boilers from water towers next to the tracks. But some towns were so small and inconsequential that they lacked a water tower. When trains stopped in those places, the crew had to find a nearby stream or well and, bucket-brigade style, "jerk" the water to the train. Those little dots on the map became known as jerkwater towns.
Malcolm Lowry had pnigophobia—the fear of choking on fish bones.
Augustus Caesar had achluophobia—the fear of sitting in the dark.
Androphobia is a fear of men.
Caligynephobia is a fear of beautiful women.
Pentheraphobia is a fear of a mother-in-law.
Scopophobia is a fear of being looked at.
Phobophobia is a fear of fearing.
Mageiricophobia is the intense fear of having to cook.
Papaphobia is the fear of Popes.
Taphephobia is the fear of being buried alive.
Clinophobia is the fear of beds.
Incredible means not believable. Incredulous means not believing. When someone's story is truly incredible, you ought to be incredulous.
The terms "prime minister," "premier" and "chancellor" all refer to the leading minister of a government, and any differences from nation to nation stem from different systems of government, not from title definitions.
Tennis pro Evonne Goolagong's last name means "kangaroo's nose" in Australia's aboriginal language.
A "sysygy" occurs when all the planets of the our Solar System line up.
The most common letters in the English language are R S T L N E. Sound familiar? Watch an episode of "Wheel of Fortune"...
A "necropsy" is an autopsy on animals.
EEG stands for Electroencephalogram.
The English word pajamas has it's origin in Persian. It is a combination of the Persian words pa (leg) and jamah (garment).
The ZIP in zip code stands for "Zone Improvement Plan."
Yucatan, as in the peninsula, is from Maya "u" + "u" + "uthaan" meaning "listen how they speak," and is what the Maya said when they first heard the Spaniards.
Punctuation was not invented until the 1500's.
"Catch 22" has come to mean a problematic situation for which the only solution is denied by a circumstance inherent in the problem. The original "Catch-22," in Joseph Heller's 1961 novel of the same name, is the catch that prevents a US Air Force pilot in World War II from asking to be grounded on the basis of insanity. The pilot knows that military regulations permit insane pilots to be grounded and not forced to fly further dangerous bombing missions. However, the regulation prevents airmen from escaping bombing missions by pleading insanity by stating that any airman rational enough to WANT to be grounded cannot possibly be insane and therefore is fit to fly. From the novel: a man "would be crazy to fly more missions and sane if he didn't, but if he was sane, he had to fly them. If he flew them he was crazy and didn't have to: but if he didn't he was sane and had to."
The custom of saying "Bless you" when someone sneezes was first used by ancients when they believed that breath was the essence of life, and when you sneeze a part of you life is escaping. Evil spirits rush into your body and occupy the empty space. By saying "God bless you" the speaker is protecting the sneezer from that spirits.
Lycanthropy is a disease in which a man thinks he's a wolf. It is the scientific name for "wolf man" or, werewolf.
"Evian" spelled backwards is naive.
Author Margaret Wolfe Hungerford, who sometimes wrote under the name "The Duchess," observed in her novel "Molly Bawn" that "beauty is in the eye of the beholder." The phrase has passed into the English language.
The "glair" is the white or clear part of an egg. The word glair comes from the Latin clarus, meaning "clear."
The longest word used by Shakespeare in any of his works is "honorificabilitudinitatibus," found in "Love's Labors Lost." Unfortunately he's no longer around to tell us what it means.
Colgate faced a big obstacle marketing toothpaste in Spanish speaking countries. Colgate translates into the command "go hang yourself."
The right side of a boat was called the starboard side due to the fact that the astronavigators used to stand out on the plank (which was on the right side) to get an unobstructed view of the stars. The left side was called the port side because that was the side that you put in on at the port. This was so that they didn't knock off the starboard.
Ever wonder where the phrase "two bits" came from? Some coins used in the American colonies before the Revolutionary War were Spanish dollars, which could be cut into pieces, or bits. Since two pieces equaled one-fourth dollar, the expression "two bits" came into being as a name for 25 cents.
Montgomery Ward was the first to advertise "Satisfaction guaranteed or your money back" in 1874 — two years after Aaron Montgomery Ward, launched his first mail-order catalog.
OK is the most successful of all Americanisms. It has invaded hundreds of other languages and been adopted by them as a word. Mencken claims that US troops deployed overseas during WWII found it already in use by Bedouins in the Sahara to the Japanese in the Pacific. It was also the fourth word spoken on the surface of the moon. It stands for oll korrect, a misspelling of all correct.
When Coca-Cola began to be sold in China, they used characters that would sound like "Coca-Cola" when spoken. Unfortunately, what they turned out to mean was "Bite the wax tadpole".
Clans of long ago that wanted to get rid of their unwanted people without killing them used to burn their houses down - hence the expression "to get fired."
Pokemon stands for "pocket monster."
The name Ethiopia mean "land of sunburned faces" in Greek.
A coward was originally a boy who took care of cows.
MAFIA is an acronym for Morte Alla Francia Italia Anela, or "Death to the French is Italy's Cry"
The Sanskrit word for "war" means "desire for more cows."
When a film is in production, the last shot of the day is the "martini shot," the next to last one is the "Abby Singer".
"Hara kiri" is an impolite way of saying the Japanese word "seppuku" which means, literally, "belly splitting."
A bird watching term: peebeegeebee = a pied-billed grebe.
"Big cheese" and "big wheel" are Medieval terms of envious respect for those who could afford to buy whole wheels of cheese at a time, an expense few could enjoy. Both these terms are often used sarcastically today.
When two words are combined to form a single word (e.g., motor + hotel = motel, breakfast + lunch = brunch) the new word is called a "portmanteau."
The slash character is called a virgule, or solidus. A URL uses slash characters, not back slash characters.
"Corduroy" comes from the French, "cord du roi" or "cloth of the king."
In the Greek alphabet "X" is the first letter for the word Christ, "Xristos." Xmas means "Christ's mass."
If you come from Manchester, you are a Mancunian.
There are six words in the English language with the letter combination "uu." Muumuu, vacuum, continuum, duumvirate, duumvir and residuum.
The abbreviation "ORD" for Chicago's O'Hare airport comes from the old name "Orchard Field."
A pregnant goldfish is called a "twit"
The longest one syllable word in the english language is "screeched"
Tom Sawyer was the first novel written on a typewriter
****
Q: Why do X's at the end of a letter signify kisses?
A: In the Middle Ages, when many people were unable to read or write, documents were often signed using an X. Kissing the X represented an oath to fulfill obligations specified in the document. The X and the kiss eventually became synonymous.
Q: Why is shifting responsibility to someone else called "passing the buck"?
A: In card games, it was once customary to pass an item, called a buck, from player to player to indicate whose turn it was to deal. If a player did not wish to assume the responsibility, he would "pass the buck" to the next player.
Q: Why are people in the public eye said to be "in the limelight"?
A: Invented in 1825, limelight was used in lighthouses and stage lighting by burning a cylinder of lime which produced a brilliant light. In the theater, performers on stage "in the limelight" were seen by the audience to be the center of attention.
Q: Why do ships and aircraft in trouble use "mayday" as their call for help?
A: This comes from the French word m'aidez -meaning "help me"-and is pronounced "mayday,"
Q: Why is someone who is feeling great "on cloud nine"?
A: Types of clouds are numbered according to the altitudes they attain, with nine being the highest cloud. If someone is said to be on cloud nine, that person is floating well above worldly cares.
Q: Why are Zero scores in tennis called "love"?
A: In France, where tennis first became popular, a big, round zero on scoreboard looked like an egg and was called "l'oeuf," which is French for "egg". When tennis was introduced in the US, Americans pronounced it "love."
Q: Why are many coin banks shaped like pigs?
A: Long ago, dishes and cookware in Europe were made of a dense, orange clay called "pygg". When people saved coins in jars made of this clay, the jars became known as "pygg banks." When an English potter misunderstood the word, he made a bank that resembled a pig. And it caught on.
Q: How did the word "Caddy" originate?
A: When Mary, later Queen of Scots, went to France as a young girl (for education & survival), Louis, King of France, learned that she loved the Scot game "golf". So he had the first golf course outside of Scotland built for her enjoyment. To make sure she was properly chaperoned (and guarded) while she played, Louis hired cadets from a military school to accompany her. Mary liked this a lot and when she returned to Scotland (not a very good idea in the long run), she took the practice with her. In French the word cadet is pronounced 'ca-day' & the Scots changed it into "caddie".
