Page 44 - Language Facts
Three towns in Italy are named 'Albino,' 'Magenta,' and 'Bra.'
The name of the color magenta comes from the Battle of Magenta, which was fought where the city now stands. Sad to say, albinism and brassieres did not originate in the other two cities.
(Sources: 1, 2, 3)
The words 'moron,' 'imbecile,' and 'idiot' were once medical terms.
These were all words used to describe a person whose IQ was below 70. More specifically, those who had an IQ between 0 and 25 were idiots, those between 26 and 50 were deemed imbeciles, and those scoring between 51 and 70 were considered morons.
It wasn't long, however, before they all became commonly used as insults. Therefore, the term 'retarded' was used to replace them, since its Latin root has the innocent meaning of "to make slow, delay, or hinder." Naturally, history repeated itself, and that too became a derogatory word.
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Some awesome lists!
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The word 'news' is not an acronym that stands for 'North, East, West, and South.
Quite simply, it is a word that is used to refer to recent events...or in other words, NEW things...NEWS. It's really not any more complicated than that.
(source)
One of the longest words in the english language without the letter E is Floccinaucinihilipilification. It means the act of declaring something worthless.
The word was derived from a grammar book that listed four different Latin words that all roughly meant "of little or no value" (floccus, pilus, nihil, and nauci). There were strung together with "-fication" into one word as a joke. Fittingly, we now have an unnecessarily long, pointless word that describes the act of deciding that something is totally and absolutely valueless.
Think you can use it in a sentence? Its first recorded use was in 1741 by poet William Shenstone:
"I loved him for nothing so much as his flocci-nauci-nihili-pili-fication of money."
More recently it was used by the late Senator Jesse Helms in 1999:
"I note your distress at my floccinaucinihilipilification of the CTBT [Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty".
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