Military research has a habit of producing things nobody anticipated, which then outlive the purpose they were built for. These twelve are all in ordinary use now, and all began…
No word is truly untranslatable — you can always explain it in a sentence. What these words offer is compression: a single term for something English needs a paragraph to…
Some words carry a location inside them. A city that made a fabric, a port that shipped a wine, an island that lent its name to a shape — the…
Words that come from people's names are called eponyms, and English is full of them. Most of the time we use them without any sense that there was once an…
We tend to assume that simple things are old things. If an object is uncomplicated and useful, surely someone thought of it long ago. In fact, the gap between when…
Source: Wikipedia
Great recipes are usually the product of careful planning, but a surprising number of beloved foods came about purely by accident. A mistake in the kitchen, a happy oversight,…