Today is, of course, the 74th anniversary of the Kenneth Arnold UFO sighting . The event is celebrated by lexicographers everywhere becaus...

  The week is a curious thing: the division of our lives into a revolving, unfinishing cycles of seven days. Especially as seven days bears ...

  The nomenclature of England is a foggy thing, cunningly designed to confuse foreigners, who will wonder, in their simple foreign way, why ...

  The original logo There's a website where you can buy an Apple Macintosh for 40p. Well, in fact, you can buy three for £1.20. That amo...

  The Italian for a butterfly is a farfalla , and so the pasta that looks like a butterfly is called farfalle . One can think of this as bea...

  Tall? Sometimes an etymology is so obvious that I can't believe that I've never noticed it, and I marvel at my own duncedom. The G...

  I have, in my solitude, taken up playing the violin. Fiddling while Rome does not burn. I have long suspected that the only thing I truly ...