Well, well, well, it appears the staple of most kitchen cupboards , the eponymous tin of baked beans are not as they seem. They are not baked at all, they are stewed ! Heinz and the rest of the baked bean mafia have been lying to us for years. Most …
With the conquest of England in 1066 by William of Normandy, the Anglo-Saxon language of the British Isles underwent several alterations. As the French-speaking Normans established themselves as the ruling caste, they treated the native Saxons and their language as inferior. Many Saxon words were regarded as crude simply because …
In many western European languages, the turnip, like many other ostensibly sexless objects, possesses gender — masculine in French (navet), masculine in Spanish (nabo), feminine in German (Ruhe). This linguistic curiosity once led the touring Mark Twain to remark “In German, a young lady has no sex, while a …
Let us look at cleavage first. The word itself is a worry – it can mean rending things into separate parts, and also exactly the opposite when referring to things which cling together. In terms of low-cut necklines it somehow covers both possibilities: garments cut to show objects that are actually separate but …
In Jonathon Green`s majestic Dictionary of Slang (2011 )can be found wonderful counterpoints to today’s highly unimaginative, fuck, shag, and screw. Some of the following are so lovely, a campaign should be started to bring some of them back. Give someone a green gown (1351) Play nug-a-nug (1505) Play …
“Used in present-day English chiefly by America speakers as a synonym for the aubergine, aubergine was originally applied specifically to the white-skinned, egg-shaped variety of the vegetable. This was in the mid-eighteenth century (available evidence suggests that the term predates aubergine by about 30 years). By the middle of the …
