Language & Origins
Rule of thumb has nothing to do with beating anyone
The supposed legal origin comes from a satirical attack on an eighteenth-century judge who never made the ruling. The phrase itself…
Suraj Dhanani
Contributing writer, Virgin Myth
Suraj writes about everyday misconceptions and collects them compulsively.
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15 articles
Language & Origins
Posh does not stand for port out starboard home
No shipping company ticket has ever been produced bearing the initials. The story is a backronym invented to explain a slang word…
Language & Origins
Nobody knows where the whole nine yards came from, and that is the finding
Every proposed origin has failed either on dates or on arithmetic. Researchers keep pushing the earliest known use backwards, and…
Language & Origins
The snow vocabulary claim grew by repetition and has no fixed number
A brief remark in an anthropology book was inflated by each retelling until the count reached the hundreds. The linguistics makes…
Language & Origins
The rule against splitting infinitives was imported from Latin by mistake
A Latin infinitive is a single word, so it cannot be split. English infinitives are two words, and putting an adverb between them…
Money Myths
Nobody was queuing to jump from windows in 1929
The image comes from a comedian's joke and a handful of prominent cases that the press amplified. The suicide rate that autumn does…
Language & Origins
Sushi means the rice, and the raw fish has a different name
The word refers to the vinegared rice at the centre of the dish. Raw fish served without it is sashimi, and the confusion has…
Language & Origins
The Chinese word for crisis does not contain opportunity
The second character means something closer to an incipient moment or a critical point. The uplifting reading was popularised in…
Money Myths
Tulip mania did not ruin the Dutch economy, and the panic came later
Almost everything popularly known about the bulb bubble traces to a Victorian anthology of follies. Archive work has found very few…
Money Myths
The big pack is not always the cheap pack, and shops know you assume it is
Unit pricing regularly shows the larger size costing more per gram than the smaller one. The assumption that bulk means value is…
Language & Origins
The X in Xmas is a Greek letter, and the objection is younger than the spelling
Scribes abbreviated the word using the first letter of a Greek name a very long time ago. The complaint that it crosses out the…
Language & Origins
Shakespeare invented far fewer words than the dictionary makes it look
The famous count comes from how many words he supplies the first recorded example of. First recorded is a fact about surviving…
Language & Origins
Sincere does not come from without wax, and the story is a good fake
The tale of sculptors filling cracks with wax is repeated in speeches and books everywhere. The Latin word does not break down the…
Language & Origins
Emoji has nothing to do with emotion, and the resemblance is a coincidence
The word is Japanese and means picture character. Its similarity to an English word beginning with the same sounds is one of the…
Language & Origins
Nobody has ever found the orange clay that piggy banks are named after
The story about a potter's clay called pygg is repeated in every account of the money box. No dictionary records the word, and…