Posts Tagged ‘word with a past’
Word With a Past: Shoddy
In the early nineteenth century British textile manufacturers began to recycle woolen rags into a an inexpensive woolen cloth. The rags were shredded into fibers, mixed with new wood, and then spun and woven into the cloth, which was known as “shoddy”–a term that may have come from an old word meaning divide.* The process…
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Word With A Past: Pyrrhic Victory
Pyrrhus (319 to 272 BCE), king of the Greek city-state Epirus, was a second cousin of Alexander the Great. He earned a reputation as a successful general in the political chaos of the successor kingdoms that arose from the ruins of his famous cousin’s empire. A hundred years after Pyrrhus’s death, Hannibal, famous for crossing…
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Word With a Past: Genocide
Genocide as an activity is probably as old as the concepts of “us” and “them”. Genocide as a word is relatively new, coined by Polish-Jewish lawyer Raphael Lemkin in 1944, several years before the world knew about the horrors of the Nazi concentration camps As a result of studying the history of anti-Semitic pogroms in…
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