Before I launch into the big finish for this A-Z Blog Challenge, I want to sincerely thank all of you who suffered through it with me—either by reading my blogs or by writing your own. I greatly appreciate your comments and likes and will repay in kind now that I’m finished with the constant state of panic I’ve been in every day this month as another daily deadline approached. My goals for this little project were to A) do it—actually […]
A-Z Blog
43 posts
The Yin-Yang symbol dates back at least to the 3rd century BCE and is a symbol meaning (among other things) balance in all things. It represents everything that exists and is the perfect balance of dark and light. Tracing the pattern of the sun throughout the year will produce a yinyang symbol on a grid. It is similar to the Golden Spiral, a mathematical construct present in nature and corresponding to the Fibonacci sequence. The ratio is present in everything […]
Just to show off, I have three magical X words for this post. Xenoglossey is the term for the phenomena of spontaneously speaking or writing a language other than one’s own without training in that language—speaking in tongues. It’s not one of those things that happen every day and many of the cited cases I’ve seen have been later debunked or in some way negated. Still, reports of hypnosis patients who burst into an ancient language or one they have […]
You may question whether whisky is a magic word. And that means you don’t drink Scotch. As for the spelling—no less a source of propriety than the NYTimes makes the difference between whisky (produced in Canada, Scotland, Japan) and whiskey (produced everywhere else.) Whisky, the word, comes from Gaelic uisge beatha meaning water of life. By law, it has to be aged at least three years to be called Scotch. A quick education—Scotchology 101. A single malt is whisky produced […]
If you are looking for voodoo dolls, zombies, and black magic, you’ve come to the wrong place. Voodoo (voudou, Vodou, Vodun) is probably as ancient as civilization in Africa, making the belief system that is Voodoo at least as old as Christianity. It came to the Western Hemisphere with the slave trade and is still practiced in the Caribbean, the southern U.S., and many other regions around the world. Voodoo has nothing to do with Satan. In fact, Voodoo shares […]
The word unicorn is from Latin uni meaning one and corn meaning horn. It’s been in our language with its present meaning since at least the 12th century. The mythical beast is depicted in European folklore as a goat or horse-like animal with one spiraled horn in the middle of its forehead. Before that, unicorns were described, not in mythology, but in natural science collections. They live at the edge of the wild and are difficult to catch. You have […]