Spoonerism is a verbal mistake in which the speaker unintentionally switches the first sounds of two or more words often producing humorous results. The noun ‘spoonerism’ was formed after William Archibald Spooner, a highly respected university don in England. Spooner was known to be very absent-minded and he often transposed the letters of two words accidentally. One …
The projecting area between the two eyebrows, which is just above the nose, is called the glabella. It is triangular in shape. The name is derived from the Latin word glabellus, which means smooth.
The term bungalow gained currency in India in the seventeenth century when the English East India Company officers started coming to India. It is derived from the Hindi word bangla, which means belonging to Bengal. Bungalows are generally one and half-storeyed houses with a front porch. The architecture of bungalows is archetypal of eastern Indian residential buildings.
The phrase ‘in the limelight’ means at the centre of attention. However, limelight was actually a form of light which was invented in 1825 by burning a cylinder of lime (calcium oxide) that produced brilliant light. This light was used in lighthouses and theatres. In the theatre, the limelight was used to focus a performer …
The name dinosaur is derived from two Greek words: deinos meaning ‘fearfully great’ and sauros meaning ‘lizard’. It was coined by the English anatomist Richard Owen in 1842. Owen recognized that the huge fossilized bones unearthed at several places in nineteenth-century England were markedly different from the bones of the other existing reptiles.
The unit pound is abbreviated ‘lb’ which comes from the constellation Libra. The word libra means ‘balance scales’ in Latin. The ancient Romans used the term librapondo to refer to weight. Libra meant ‘weight’ and pondo meant ‘pound’. This was eventually shortened to libra which came to be abbreviated as ‘lb’.
