Daniel in Wilmington, North Carolina, notes that in English, we literally break the fast in the morning, the source of the English word breakfast. In the same way, the Spanish word for “breakfast,” desayuno, comes from desayunar, meaning “not...
Jejune, meaning insipid or superficial, comes from the Latin jejunus, meaning empty. The same root gives us jejunum, the part of the small intestine that is usually empty when autopsied. The same idea of emptiness is reflected in the related French...
Antejentacular derives from Latin words that mean before breakfast. One might take, for example, an antejentacular walk before sitting down for the morning’s meal. Antejentacular comes from the Latin jejunus meaning fasting or barren. It’s related...
The Churches Conservation Trust helps maintain and repurpose more than 300 churches in Britain that are no longer used for worship. To raise money for the buildings’ upkeep, the trust now offers visitors the chance to have a sleepover in the...
A listener in San Antonio, Texas, has fond memories of chocolate gravy over biscuits, the word gravy in this sense having nothing to do with a meat-based sauce. Grant shares his mother’s own recipe, which she calls cocoa gravy. This is part of a...
If you’re sitting on a subway or airplane seat and someone’s invading your space, you can always offer the colorful rebuke “Lean on your own breakfast,” meaning “straighten up and move over.” This is part of a complete episode. Transcript of “Lean...