Centuries ago, monks who took a vow of silence still had to communicate about everyday activities in the monastery, from gardening to equipment repair. So they developed their own hand signs, with hundreds of gestures for various words and ideas that are sometimes still used today. An excellent book on the power of silence in such places is A Time to Keep Silence (Bookshop|Amazon) by Patrick Leigh Fermor. 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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