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(No news flashes or commentary on current events here, just the history of the words.) The verb to indict and the noun indictment have, what on first…
Dave Wilton
A Hoosier is a person from the state of Indiana, but where the term comes from is a mystery. That, however, hasn’t stopped speculation about its origin…
Dave Wilton
21 February 2023 The trans-Neptunian object Pluto was discovered in 1930 by Clyde Tombaugh, a twenty-four-year-old researcher at the Lowell Observatory…
Dave Wilton
March Madness is the originally popular, later trademarked, name for the US National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) basketball championship…
Dave Wilton
Boron is brittle, lustrous metalloid with the atomic number five and the symbol B. Its salt, borax, has been known since antiquity, but its pure form…
Dave Wilton
Whore is an old word, and its core meaning, that of a prostitute, has remained unchanged from its Old English origin, although it has acquired a few…
Dave Wilton
Uranus is the seventh planet and the first to be recognized as such in modern times. It is at the limits of human vision and can only be seen with the…
Dave Wilton
Bohrium. element 107, symbol Bh, is named for physicist Niels Bohr (1885–1962). The element was first synthesized in 1981 at the Gesellschaft für…
Dave Wilton
Whence blackmail? The mail in blackmail is unrelated to either the type of armor or the postal service. It comes from the Old Norse mali meaning…
Dave Wilton
This Substack post comes to you in bits and bytes. But what are bits and bytes and why are they called that? A bit is a basic unit of information that…
Dave Wilton
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Bismuth is a brittle, silvery-white metal which takes on a rosy tint through oxidation when exposed to air. It is atomic number 83 and uses the symbol…
Dave Wilton
New York City is known as the Big Apple. The nickname dates to the early twentieth century and arises out of a confluence of several discourses: Black…
Dave Wilton
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