Language: Interesting Facts

• Comets are collections of icy and rocky debris, usually with a ‘tail’ of gas and dust streaming out behind them
• Saturn has sixty-one moons
• Impeccable literally means ‘unable to sin’
• Cognoscenti means those in the know
• Collipygion means having a nice backside
• Marie Curie died in 1934 from acute radiation sickness and even now all of her research notes are too radioactive for safe handling and are kept in lead-lined storage boxes
• Mellifluous literally means’ flowing with honey’
• Pundit comes from the Hindi for a learned man
• Versatile is a versatile word
• Antediluvian means of or belonging to the time before the biblical Flood
• Animadversion is a strong criticism, considered but disparaging remark.
• Calumny is another word for strong criticism
• Enormity doesn’t mean enormous, it means appalling-ness and great wickedness
• Fatuous means silly and empty-headed
• Harridan is a polite word for an old bag, a bossy or nagging woman of a certain age
• Mute is a unit of quantity in chemistry
• The heart of an insect doesn’t carry oxygen, only food, therefore its blood is green
• An adult human body has 206 bones
• Fingers and toes are known as phalanges
• The human body contains more than 600 skeletal muscles