Which one of the following use to mean food in general?
Have you ever wondered what the expression “meat and drink” means? It stems from an older meaning of the word "meat" that meant solid food in general, as opposed to drink.
What field of mathematics originated from the name of a medical technique use to set fractured bones?
Algebra can be translated as ‘reunion’ or ‘restoration’ from Arabic, and it originally referred to a way of mending of bones. The mathematical meaning was secondary and developed much later. This type of ‘mending’ referred to evening out the unknown quantities in an equation.
Which Ancient Greek myth changed the meaning of the word ‘clue’?
In the story of the infamous labyrinth and the Minotaur, Ariadne gives Theseus, the hero of the story, a ball (also called a CLEW) of yarn, which he can use to find his way out of the Labyrinth after defeating the Minotaur. This clew of yarn helped the hero to find his way out of a difficult situation, so the word came to mean a hint and was spelled differently with time.
Kind Midas and the golden touch
The Twelve Labours of Hercules
Geoffrey Chaucer used the word ‘jargon’ in his writings in 1386. What did he mean by it?
The word "jargon" comes from French, where the same word means ‘to chatter’, and it meant ‘a bird song’ back in the 14th century when it was added to English. Like we can't understand what the meaning of bird songs, the word eventually changed its meaning to any unintelligible language, and not only bird songs.
Which of the following was once a name for an unlicensed pub?
In late 18th century slang, to be “tiddly” meant drunk. With time, both the location and the game that we all know came to carry that meaning.
Which one of the following animals actually just meant ‘animal’ in the past?
De?r, the Old English ancestor of the word deer, originally just meant ‘beast’ or ‘animal’. With time, its meaning specified more and more until it came to basically mean Bambi and its family.
Who was the original treadmill invented for?
The first treadmills were big man-powered mills that were used as a labor punishment in prisons during the Victorian age.
Who could you call a girl in Middle English?
Girl use to mean a child or young person of either sex and it is perhaps related to a German dialectal word 'g?r' than means ‘child’.
A young person (both male and female)
A young female (both person and animal)
A ‘moment’ used to denote quite a definite time. How long did the original moment last?
In mediaeval timekeeping, 1 hour was divided into 4 15-minute-long periods called points, which were then divided into 10 shorter periods called moments, so in the past, a moment was precisely 90 seconds long.
Of these 4 words all denoting fanatics, which one originally meant an amateur bullfighter?
Aficionado has the common latin root with the word ‘affection’ and it comes from Spanish. So, it was first used to refer to those who like bullfighting. Centuries later, this word shifted to meaning an expert, how nice and optimistic!
One of the following words use to mean "to break church rules" in a dialect of Scots. Which one?
According to a 1808 Dictionary of the Scottish Language, ‘skulduggery’ or ‘sculduddery’, is defined as ‘those causes that come under the judgment of an ecclesiastical court which respect some breach of chastity’.
Which of these common expressions used to literally mean ‘to groom a chestnut horse’?
In French, from which this saying originated, to ‘curry’ literally means ‘to groom’, whereas favour refers to Favvel, a chestnut-coloured rebellious horse from French that couldn’t be tamed.
Cloud didn’t mean ‘cloud’ in Old English. What did it refer to?
The modern word ‘cloud’ comes from the Old English word ‘clud’, which meant ‘rock’ or ‘mass of stone’. Since heavy grey rain clouds do resemble rocks, the meaning gradually shifted to mean what it does today.
What, quite literally, is ‘bumph’?
A bumph is a shortened version of the word "bum-fodder", an early word for toilet paper. Slowly, it came to mean anything unimportant that can be thrown away, such as trashy literature, and with time, it gained the meaning of a convoluted text or paperwork. Quite ironic, we know.
Natalia J.
3/24/2020
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