2nd July 862 – St. Swithun, Bishop of Winchester died. 1698 – Thomas Savery patented the first steam engine. 1776 – The Continental Congress adopted a resolution severing ties with Great Britain although the wording of the formal Declaration of Independence was not approved until July 4. 1777 – Vermont became the first American territory […]

Tesco supermarkets have decided to only sell straight croissants.(Why? Well because UK customers have complained they cannot spread jam properly on a traditionally curved croissant. Now you probably know that the croissant is a French pastry, but what you might not know is that the word is French for crescent, and if you look crescent […]

For +april sis. We tend to use "agreeable" to describe a person.  It is faint praise though.  You can use it to describe the weather and temperature but as the following shows, it's a word in decline, and so it sounds a bit strange if you use it too much. Source google.com Maybe you could stage […]

So, what's wrong with this sentence? "I see some [foreign investment funds] looking for returns of 20 or 25% at a time when fellatio is close to zero." In a very unfortunate gaffe during a TV interview, France's ex-justice minister Rachida Dati mixed up the words "fellatio" and "inflation", The French word for fellatio is […]

There are problems with being a bilingual country. Canada's language commissioner said that federal institutions have their work cut out to create a truly bilingual environment where staff can choose to use French or English. Around 22 million Canadians, two thirds of the population, speak only English or French. Only five million, or 17.5 percent […]