A to Z English Words Origins
Henry Hitchings, an etymologist and author of The Secret Life of Words (which won the John Llewellyn Rhys Book Prize this week), presents an A-to-Z of his favourite words that have been absorbed into English from other languages. Funny, awesome as well as surprising origins of some common English words we hear everyday.
Check out all the words below:
Historical Timeline from 1949 to 1989:
Billy Joel
William Martin Joel, famously known as Billy Joel, is an American rock musician, songwriter and singer. He released his first hit single, Piano Man, in 1973. Recording Industry Association America labels Joel as The Sixth Best-Selling Recording Artist in the United States.
One of Billy Joel’s song in STORM FRONT album, We Didn’t Start The Fire, has been considered an essential education tool in terms of history. Each word in the song represents a clickable-historical event in the world. Check out the lyric below and hover your mouse on each word to see the hidden history behind it :
Animal-Assisted Therapies For Children With Special Needs:
Dolphins, the friendly mammals
According to wikipedia, animal-assisted therapy is a kind of therapy that involves an animal with special characteristics and it serves as a fundamental part of a person’s treatment. Animal-assisted therapies are designed to improve the physical, emotion, social and/or cognitive functioning of the patient. These therapies also provide educational and motivational effectiveness for the participants.
Many kinds of animals are used in therapies including dogs, cats, elephants, horses and dolphins as well as other small animals. Among them, the most popular methods are those assisted by Dolphins and horses. These forms of therapies, in the context of children with special needs, offer improvements in such areas as physical (Fine motor skills and balance) and also mental (improving self-confidence, verbal skills and attention skills); nevertheless, both may present some physical threats to both people and animals, which may be difficult to overcome. This post; however, will only concentrate on the dolphin therapy.
Motorcycle Madness:
I swear I was gonna photograph the house, using my bike as a foreground, but I ended up taking pictures of my bike with the house as the background. Here are the pictures, at least you can still see the house, it’s big, cozy and nice.
Baraka Badr Al-Din
Baraka, our second son, was born on February 9th 2008. We thanked Allah SWT that he was born healthy and handsome. We didn’t actually plan to have another baby in regards to the fact that our first son, Muhammad Ariq Azzarel was born with cerebral palsy due to lack of oxygen. We fully blamed ourselves for being ignorant during pregnancy, well, not totally ignorant actually. Both of us really paid attention in terms of nutrition, vitamins, medicines and so on. We really followed what the Gynecologist told us. Later on we learned that we’re not supposed to ’swallow’ any pieces of advice. We should’ve asked for others’ opinions and all those sort of things. More stories about Ariq can be found here.
The Stories Behind The World’s Famous Names
The following names are mentioned everyday in the world of Information and Technology. These companies were among the top in the technology and internet business industry. Here’s an interesting fact We know who they are and what they do, but we might not know how they settled with their brand name and the story behind it unless we really dig hard into the history book. Here are 18 Internet giants (inclusive of Yahoo, Xerox, Sun Microsystem, Sony, SAP, Red Hat, Oracle, Motorola, Lotus, Intel, Hewlett Packard, Hotmail, Google, Cisco, Apple Computers, Apache and Adobe) and stories on how they end up with their names. Read the rest of this entry »
Can You Guess The Movies?
A fun trivia from Empire Movie Magazine
Have a look at these pictures and try to guess each movie represented by one of the letters taken from the movie title’s typography? Should you answer all titles correctly, then you really are a movie freak.
Lighter sides on Obama’s winning the election:
Barack Obama, The 44th President Of The United States
Mural on the side of the Obama ‘08 campaign headquarters in Houston (Alabama and Milam). Based on a design by Shepard Fairey, creator of Obey Giant. Painted by Aerosol Warfare.
His name etched in history as America’s first black president, Barack Obama turned from the jubilation of victory to the sobering challenge of leading a nation worried about economic crisis, two unfinished wars and global uncertainty.
In November 2006, Obama carried …
1. His home state of Illinois.
2. His birth state of Hawaii.
3. The District of Columbia.
In November 2006, Obama got 28 total electoral votes.
In November 2006, John McCain carried 48 states, and rolled up 510 electoral votes.
How far has Barack Obama come in 24 months?
A Dream Comes True
A couple of New Yorkers decided to invest their retirement money to buy a house and a few acres of land in Portugal. The modest farmhouse had been vacant for 15 years; the owner and wife both had died, and there were no heirs. The house was sold to pay taxes.
There had been several lookers, but the large barn had steel doors, and they had been welded shut. Nobody wanted to go to the extra expense to see what was in the barn, and it wasn’t complimentary to the property anyway… so, nobody made an offer on the place.
The couple bought it at just over half of the property’s worth; moved in, and set about to tear in to the barn – curiosity was killing him. So, he and his wife bought a generator and a couple of grinders… and cut through the welds.
What was in the barn? Don’t miss it!
Anti Smoking Campaigns
Here are several great, creative as well as horrific posters submitted in regards to the Anti Smoking Campaigns. Some artistic and informative ways suggestions to stop killing ourselves through smoking.
Enough said, here are the entries:
2008 Summer Paralympic Games:
The 2008 Summer Paralympic Games, the thirteenth Paralympics, took place in China from September 6th to September 17th, Beijing is once again hosting athletes from around the world. Over 4,200 athletes – from six different disability groups – from 148 countries are taking part in the 2008 Summer Paralympic Games. Not only are the sports divided into events, but the events are divided into different disability categories, to even out the playing field as much as possible. The slogan for this year’s Paralympic Games is the same as the one for the Olympics held just last month: “One World, One Dream”
This 2008 Summer Paralympic Games, according to Phillip Craven, The President of International Paralympic Committee, is quoted as “The Greatest Paralympic Games Ever”.
