True tea is made of the same plant no matter where on Earth you drink it, but tea preparations vary around the world. While the Chinese and Japanese generally prefer their hot tea without dairy, a splash of milk in your afternoon cuppa is quintessentially British. Britons may take milk in their tea for the flavor today, but that wasn’t the original intention.
The lexicographers working for Merriam-Webster aren’t snobs about words. They understand better than anyone that language is constantly evolving, and even the silliest slang deserves a spot in the dictionary if it’s used widely enough. After closely monitoring changes in the lexicon, Merriam-Webster added 455 terms to the dictionary in October 2021.
Though related, the two annual events differ greatly in traditions and tone. Whereas Halloween is a dark night of terror and mischief, Day of the Dead festivities unfold over two days in an explosion of color and life-affirming joy. Sure, the theme is death, but the point is to demonstrate love and respect for deceased family members.
The TV dinner isn’t exactly a beloved part of American cuisine. The frozen meals-in-a-tray have been the butt of countless jokes since their introduction in the 1950s. Even regular consumers of the product usually buy them for the convenience, not the taste.
In Celtic tradition, Samhain marked the day that summer was coming to a complete close. The harvest was ending and the throngs of winter were near. The shadowy winter was a time associated with death followed by eventual renewal. Celts believed that this was the night where the veil between the living and the dead was lifted and the spectral past returned to the Earth.
Leave it to the Victorians to celebrate Halloween in style. Their 19th-century aesthetic resulted in what we consider today to be strange societal quirks, from bizarre jobs (like leech collector) to fun slang (sad people “got the morbs”) to highly impractical fashion (toxic dyes and flammable fabrics were often the price of beauty).
Today, carving pumpkins into jack-o’-lanterns is ubiquitous with Halloween. In the 19th and early 20th centuries, however, chiseling ghoulish grins into turnips was the more common practice (at least in Ireland and other Celtic nations).
Whenever you read a given text, your brain processes the visual stimuli to create meaning and understand the content. Chances are, you don’t pay much attention to the way the information is presented in the material — particularly the font choice — because your main objective is reading comprehension rather than aesthetics.
There are dogs leaping for joy, lounging cats, and even a grinning horse. Pets never disappoint with their silly antics in front of the camera.
The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s (NOAA) Climate Prediction Center announced on Thursday that La Niña conditions have developed and are expected to continue, with an 87% chance that they will be in place from December to February.