What’s the first book you remember reading?
I still remember the day I started reading: I took the book off the nice lady at the kindy mid-read and told her that I could read it myself. The page, as I recall, was a billowy dark grey, a picture of a storm, perhaps. What the book was, alas, I no longer remember.
What about you?
The Origin of Squid
Do you know where the word squid comes from?
Because if you do, you’re the first. Dictionaries describe the etymology of the word as “obscure” and “unknown”. It just popped up in 1613 (shortly after the King James edition of the Bible came out) and stuck around. Before then, it seems they were lumped in with their cousins the cuttlefish – because one ten-tentacled sea-beastie is much like another.
Did You Know…
that Easter is named after a Germanic goddess associated with the dawn?
April was her month, and so the name carried across to the Christian festival which took place around that time. But only in Germanically descended languages, like English. Most other languages refer to the occasion with some form derived from Pesach or Pascha, which comes from the Passover feast which it originally – and not coincidentally – coincided with.
Myself, I feel English could do likewise. Or perhaps we can have two names: one, perhaps Passover-related, for the celebration of the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ; and “Easter” for the feast of chocolate eggs laid by a magical rabbit.