16 October 2024 The word heaven can be traced to the Proto-Germanic root *hemina- / *hemna- . That root gives us the Old English heofon , which is cognate with the Old Saxon heƀan , the Old Ic...

14 October 2024 The phrase spitting image , used to describe someone who looks very much like another person, particularly a close family member, is a relatively recent coinage based on a much older...

11 October 2023 Thallium is a chemical element with atomic number 81 and the symbol Tl . It was discovered independently by chemists William Crookes and Claude-Auguste Lamy in 1861, but Crookes wa...

9 October 2024 Moving to another country can be disorienting. But moving to Canada, at least to the anglophone provinces, from the United States is different. To the casual observer, things in Canada...

7 October 2024 Tarot is the name of a type of playing card which is often also used for cartomancy (i.e., divination or fortune-telling using cards). There are a wide variety of games that can be p...

4 October 2024 Strontium is a chemical element with atomic number 38 and the symbol Sr . It is a highly reactive, soft, silver-white/yellowish metal. The isotopes found in strontium ores are all s...

2 October 2024 An ass is domesticated equine , Equus asinus , otherwise known as a donkey . But an ass , or arse , can also refer to the human buttocks. These are two distinct words that happen ...

30 September 2024 Sanewashing is the portrayal of a radical or beyond-the-pale political idea as being within the mainstream of political discourse, making an insane idea appear sane. It is formed ...

30 September 2024 Weird , as we most often use it today, is an adjective meaning strange, odd, or uncanny. But that’s a relatively new sense, only arising in the last two hundred years or so; the wo...