Maverick steadfastly refused to brand his cattle. As a result, the word maverick entered the English lexicon, meaning both an unbranded range animal as well as a slang term for someone who exhibits a streak of stubborn independence.
- Log in to post comments
More like this
I am looking at the question: How many words are there in a language? I'd like to know for languages in general, comparatively, and for pedagogical reasons, in some well known western language which may as well be English.
What I found quite incidentally is a hornets nest of curmudgeonistic…
Breeding Ancient Cattle Back from Extinction:
The only place to see an aurochs in nature these days? A cave painting. The enormous wild cattle that once roamed the European plains have been extinct since 1627, when the last survivor died in a Polish nature reserve. But this could soon change thanks…
This isn't a contest, exactly, but more a question to the huddled masses. Mrs. R., who is Italian, was asking me the other day what the Yiddish word Mitvah meant. It turns out it isn't a Yiddish word (it's Hebrew) and while it has some kind of religious meaning about fulfilling commandments, I'm…
Science Scout twitter feed
Photo of a nice set of boobies we saw at the Natural History Museum from the SCQ
So the question, of course, is "what exactly is up with birds and breasts?" And I'm not talking about white meat versus dark meat preferences.
Instead, there is this uncomfortable…