When most people today hear the word Grail, they picture a glittering chalice, the Holy Grail of Christian legend, often imagined as the cup of Christ at the Last Supper or the vessel that caught his blood at the Crucifixion. Yet in its earliest literary appearances the graal was nothing of the sort. Far from being a holy chalice, it was a large, ordinary serving dish - a domestic object brought at mealtime in the court of the mysterious Fisher King.
Headlines about the arrival of pumpkin spice lattes signal summer's end. And soon after the last bites of pumpkin pie at the Thanksgiving table, we turn to plans for winter holidays. In between, jack-o'-lanterns are the stars of Halloween. The seasonal gourds also evoke a romanticized ideal of simpler times, according to Cindy Ott, author of Pumpkin: The Curious History of an American Icon.
"For a long, long time, spicy meant exactly what it is supposed to be: that which is containing spice, or redolent of spice," Anatoly Liberman, a linguist at the University of Minnesota. But it was around the 19th century, that records show people started to use spicy in other less literal ways, he said. It can also refer to "racy" or "engagingly provocative" in reference to scandalous gossip or anything tantalizing.
And right there, at the very end of the loaf, facing you as you look in the bag, is...what? Is that the end of the loaf? The butt? The crust? The answer is none of those. It's the heel - the heel of the bread. It's OK if you used to call it something else, but heel is the correct term.
Many of the phrases we casually toss around today have surprisingly long histories, with roots that stretch back to the medieval world. From English law to Chaucer's poetry, from French allegories to Irish chronicles, these expressions reveal just how much of our everyday language was shaped by the Middle Ages. Here are 20 phrases that originated in the Middle Ages - and are still alive and well today.
In the extant myths of the Norse people and in the archaeological record alike, Mjölnir seems to have had several meanings. From its creation by dwarves to Bronze Age rock carvings, through the Christian conversion of Scandinavia to Thor's dressing as a bride after its theft by a giant, and into the mythic aftermath of Ragnarök, Mjölnir's symbolism reverberated through time.
My ignorance of loons was such that when I first saw a loon while kayaking, I thought it was a duck. To my great shame, I went so far as to ask these two other kayakers who were also looking at the loon, "What kind of duck is that?" That is how I learned what loons looked like. This is also when I took the only photo of a loon I got the entire weekend.
