The origin of the second sense is from the practice of some Chinese restaurants which — for a fixed price — instruct the customer to make selections such as “one from Column A, two from Column B, one from Column C”, where the columns may contain, for example, a selection of soups, appetizers, and entrees.
Author: dave
The word is derived from a Greek word “toxikón”, which is a the arrow of type of bow.
It is thought that this word became our western world meaning of “poisonous” because of the story of Hercules.
Hercules’ second labor was to kill the nine-headed Hydra.
Once Hercules slayed the Hydra, he dipped his arrows in the Hydra’s blood. This made his arrows poisonous.
Categories
Cruft
The origin of the term is uncertain, but it may be derived from Harvard University Cruft Laboratory, which was the Harvard Physics Department’s radar lab during World War II. As late as the early 1990s, unused technical equipment could be seen stacked in front of Cruft Hall’s windows. According to students, if the place filled with useless machinery is called Cruft Hall, the machinery itself must be cruft. This image of “discarded technical clutter” quickly migrated from hardware to software.
Cruft may also be a play on the old typeface form of the letter “s”, rendering “crust” as “cruſt”.
Another possible origin is that the word evokes the words crust, fluff and scruffy. The latter word is the source of similar words in Jamaican English such as cruff, meaning scurfy, coarse or uncouth.
From Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cruft
Skullduggery (spelled with either a “k” or “c” and/or two “l”s) comes from the Scottish word for adultry: “sculdudrie”. The word is used in modern parlance as a term for underhanded dealings or trickery, often political in nature. Ex. The skullduggery that was Watergate.
The word Skullduggery has been used to title various things from a 1970s Burt Reynolds film to the University of Adelaide orientation week, established in 1896.
This refers to an addict’s skin reaction to heroin withdrawal. As an addict stops using the drug, blood is drawn toward the internal organs, thereby leaving the skin to resemble a cold, plucked turkey.
The origin dates back to 1910 and originally meant “without preparation,” referring to the ease of making a dish of cold turkey. In 1922, the expression acquired its darker connotation related to drug withdrawal.