Posts Tagged ‘Words’
Public Toilets and Heads of State
As those of you who are reading along know, I recently learned that public toilets are called vespasianos in Italy, after the Roman emperor Vespasian, who introduced the concept to the empire. This led my brain to London bobbies, named after British Prime Minister Robert Peel, who founded the London police when he was Home…
Read More
Word with a Past: Assassin
The original Assassins were members of a revolutionary Shiite splinter group founded in eleventh century Persia by Hassan Sabbah. Like many schismatic religious groups, the Assassins believed that Muslims, including mainstream Shiites, had taken a wrong turn. Islam needed to go back to its foundations. As far as other Muslims were concerned, Sabbah’s beliefs were…
Read More
Word With a Past: Maffick
The Second Anglo-Boer War (1899-1902) started badly from the British point of view. British troops, supposedly the best trained and best equipped in the world, suffered a series of humiliating defeats at the hands of Boer farmers. (Anyone else hear echoes of another colonial war that pitted farmers against British regulars?) The only bright spot…
Read More