Mertcan Bulak
@MBulak
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Ağustos 2020 tarihinde katıldı
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Bizarre , for example, comes from the Basque word bizar or beard , because when Spanish soldiers arrived in the remote and clean - shaven villages of the Pyrenees, the locals thought that their bizars were bizarre .
The feathers that were stuck into the back of arrows were known by the Romans as the beard , or barbus , which is why arrows are barbs , and that’s ultimately the reason that barbed wire is simply wire that has grown a beard.
Italy was overrun by tribesmen who had huge long beards which they never even trimmed. These tribesmen were known as the longa barba , or longbeards , which was eventually shortened to Lombard , which is why a large part of northern Italy is still known as Lombardy.
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Cancer is the crab largely because Galen thought that some tumours resembled crabs and partly because both words come from the Indo - European root qarq , which meant hard.
People didn’t used to write 1 + 1, they would write the sentence I et I , which is Latin for one and one . To make the plus sign, all they did was drop the e in et and leave the crossed +
Average has an even more mundane explanation. It comes from the Old French avarie , which meant damage done to a ship . Ships were often co - owned and when one was damaged and the bill came in for repairs, each owner was expected to pay the average .
Calculus is a formidable word that loses some of its grandeur when you realise that a calculus is just a little pebble, because the Romans did their maths by counting up stones.
Oddly, an abacus, which you might reasonably have expected to mean little pebbles , comes ultimately from the Hebrew word abaq meaning dust . You see, the Greeks, who adopted the word, didn’t use pebbles; instead they used a board covered with sand, on which they could write out their calculations.