Mark Twain was the pen name chosen by Samuel Langhore Clemens, author of favourite like The Adventures of Tom Sawyer. The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. Life on the Mississippi and The Prince and the Pauper. After working as a printer and a Mississippi pilot, he turned to writing, telling with charm and humor to the American people and places he …

You might think nobody would have the skill or the courage to steal something as precious and easily recognizable as the crown jewels. But on 9 may, 1671, a daring Irishman, Colonel Thomas Blood, made a near successful attempt to steal them. Although he and his accomplices were caught and imprisoned in the Tower of London, they were not executed, …

James Bond. Ian Fleming introduced Bond in his novel Casino Royal which was first published in 1953. Ian Fleming was born May 28, 1908 and educated at Eton Collage and then the military academy, Sandhurst. He worked with the well-known news agency Reuters and later as the foreign manager of a newspaper combine. Among his other Bond novels are Live …

A schlimazel is a person who is accident-prone and so, considered unlucky, and for the same reason, even thought of as a born loser. The person is inept and fails at most things he attempts. Schlimazel is also used as a verb, for instance, a person gets ‘schlimazzeled’. The word has its origins in the Yiddish vernacular.

One who does useless work. Originated from Latin nihil (nothing). Example like “You may find yourself worrying that you’re turning into a nihilarian.”

Flower child originated as a synonym for hippie, especially the idealistic young people who gathered in San Francisco and environs during the 1967 Summer of Love. It was the custom of “flower children” to wear and distribute flowers or floral-themed decorations to symbolize altruistic ideals of universal brotherhood, peace and love. The mass media picked up on the term and …

Harry Faversham is the hero of the novel The Four Feathers which was written by Alfred Edward Woodley Mason and first published with great success in 1902. When the story starts Harry Faversham is a young officer in the British army. He is tired of army life and wishes to settle down and marry his fiancee, Ethne Burroughs. Harry is …

The term stands for celebrities who attend posh soirees organized to collect saliva for genetic sequencing. Simply put, it is a celebrity spit party. The term is a combination of the words ‘spit’ and ‘glitterati’. A start-up called 23andMe hosted the parties as a promotional tool for popularizing personal genomics. The marketing strategy first began in January, 2011 at the …

Children born in the early 21st century will never know a world without the internet, cable TV, virtual libraries, and other forms of instant intellectual gratification. Critics of this phenomenon fear that instantaneous access has the potential to overload users. Instead of delving deeper into one discipline, many people are dabbling on the surface of many subjects. Author Richard Foreman …

This was George Borrow’s Wild Wales, its People, Language and Scenery which was published in 1862. It was the popular journal The Spectator which printed this well-earned praise.