An old Irish curse goes: May the devil make a ladder of your backbones while picking apples in the garden of hell. If you’d rather offer someone a friendlier wish, try May angels bless your sleep with the smell of apple pies. This is part of a...
Books were rare treasures in the Middle Ages, painstakingly copied out by hand. So how to protect them from theft? Scribes sometimes added a curse to the first page of those books that was supposed to keep thieves away — and some were as vicious as...
Dawn in Evansville, Indiana, wonders why we dismiss something as nonsense by exclaiming Fiddlesticks! The term arose in the 17th century, most likely because the bow for a fiddle is light, thin, and insubstantial, or in other words...
Responding to our conversation about the curses medieval scribes wrote in books to prevent their theft, a professor at the University of Massachusetts Amherst emails a modern-day book curse from the instructional manual Beginning Glassblowing by...
To warn away thieves, medieval scribes sometimes added a written curse to the colophon of a precious book. Curses were once considered such powerful deterrents that they were sometimes added to Anglo-Saxon legal documents. This is part of a complete...
Stepmother’s blessing is a slang term for hangnail. This is part of a complete episode. Transcript of “Stepmother’s Blessing” When it comes to lots of languages, stepmothers get a bad rap. Do you know what a...