The Etymologicon. It's about the English language, in case you haven't guessed. It starts with a subject or a particular word and then just explains all the othe words it went into and why. It's a good trivia source, and I feel smarter just reading it. Things I have learnt across four pages:
- The word 'gentle' comes from the word 'gentleman', not vice versa!
- The word 'gentleman' actually comes from 'genos' as in 'genetics', used to mean 'well-bred'.
- This is also the source of the word 'generous', which originally meant high-born people but later grew by association to mean people with enough to spare.
- Robert Recorde invented the equals sign "=" simply becaue he didn't like having to write out 'is equal to' every calculation.
- He chose two horizontal lines of clearly equal length, because it was the most equal thing he could think of.
- Ironically, the gifted mathemetician late died in a debtors' prison, presumably meaning his accounting was somewhat poor.