Collection of Mind-blowing Facts
Word of the Day: BLURSDAY (neologism) — a term to describe the current day when you are not sure what day of the week it is.
Blursday is a term that’s being tossed around on social media right now to describe the merging of minutes, hours and days since COVID-19 shut so much of the world down. Before the pandemic, it was a term that described a drunk or hungover day, according to Urban Dictionary. You can probably see the similarities.
There were only two English words that end in “gry”– hungry and angry. In 2018, the Oxford English Dictionary added a third– “hangry” (an irritable state induced by lack of food).
The correct plural of “dwarf” is “dwarfs”. “Dwarves” is a spelling popularised by J. R. R. Tolkien to make a distinction between his own creations and the “sillier creatures of these latter days”.
The word “museum” is derived from the word “musaeum” which translates to Institution Of The Muses, the Muses being the nine goddesses of the arts.
People whose mother language is anumeric (a language that has no way of expressing arbitrary numbers) struggle to compare and remember the exact size of collections of as little as four objects. This suggests that numeric abilities are intrinsically related to linguistic abilities.
The word Boycott is named after an Irish landlord named Charles Boycott. After Boycott attempted to evict 11 tenants, the local community decided to shun him. Workers would not work for him, traders would not trade with him, and the postman would not deliver the post.
According to the Oxford Dictionary, the word “kinda” has been around since the early 20th century. It calls “whatcha” a “nonstandard contraction.” “Hafta,” on the other hand, is called “informal”, while “lemme” is a “contraction”.
The name “Scotch Tape” was used as an insult to the inventor while he was inventing Masking Tape. ‘Scotch’ being derogatory slang for cheap or thrifty. He then went on to create Scotch Tape, and the name stuck.
The English word weird originally meant ‘having the power to control fate’, which is why Shakespeare named his witches in Macbeth The Weird Sisters. Later depictions of them dressed in odd and strange ways led to the current definition of the word.
Since the 1300’s, the pronoun “thou” was actually considered more informal and even derogatory than the pronoun “you.” This is also why its usage began declining in the 17th century; it was considered “impolite.”