Eponyms are one of the most fascinating examples of how the English language gains new words. In this article we take a colourful look at the phenomenon that is the eponym gathering together the stories of the people behind the words that have passed into our everyday vocabulary : Titch; Platonic; Maudlin and Machiavellian.
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How Can Flies Fly at Speed into a Pane of Glass and Seemingly Remain Uninjured ?
The answer lies in a basic physics equation – one we would all have learned at school – and in the fact that the anatomy of a fly is rather springy.
Shakespeare is often credited as a the most prolific contributor of many of the words we use today in the English language. However he’s not the only venerable writer to do so. Rudyard Kipling, author of The Jungle Book, was also a highly prolific contributor, coining and popularising many words and phrases still in use in modern English.
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When the “New Horizons” NASA space probe left earth on January 19th 2006, Pluto was the 9th and final planet from the sun. When it finally arrived 9 1/2 years later in July 2015 it wasn’t! By then Pluto had been down graded to a dwarf planet. So what happened to poor old Pluto to diminish it so?
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“It’s coming home, it’s coming home, it’s coming, Football’s coming home ” – So goes the ever popular 1996 “Three Lions” song. So when did the three lions symbol come to be used as England’s royal arms and therefore on the England team shirts ? The answers is somewhat surprising and reveals why in the past we might’ve been singing “three leopards on a shirt”
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