In The Professor and the Madman: A Tale of Murder, Insanity, and the Making of the Oxford English Dictionary (Bookshop|Amazon), Simon Winchester refers to piling Pelion upon Ossa, meaning “making a difficult situation even more difficult.” Pelion...
A bunch of English words actually take from the names of old places: peach comes from Persia, bungalow refers to a house “of the Bengal type,” and laconic refers to the region of Sparta famous as a place where people valued speech that was brief and...