Samantha from Charleston, South Carolina, says her mother and grandmother are of Italian heritage, and have always advised keeping one’s neck warm as a precaution against the malaria. That sort of consigli della nonna, or “Grandmother’s advice” stems from folklore associating mal aria — literally, “bad air,” with disease and pestilence. The life-threatening, infectious disease called malaria also derives from Italian for “bad air.” Before the rise of germ theory, people assumed that one could get sick from the “bad air” in swamps. This is part of a complete episode.
If you start the phrase when in Rome… but don’t finish the sentence with do as the Romans do, or say birds of a feather… without adding flock together, you’re engaging in anapodoton, a term of rhetoric that refers to the...
There are many proposed origins for the exclamation of surprise, holy Toledo! But the most likely one involves not the city in Ohio, but instead Toledo, Spain, which has been a major religious center for centuries in the traditions of both Islam and...
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