The Pinkerton Detective Agency came up with a creative logo for the company.
It was a picture of an eye with the logo ‘We Never Sleep’ underneath it. It was from this logo that the term, ‘private eye’ came to mean private investigators.
Category: Oddities
Life’s oddities
You might expect that the original pork barrels were barrels for storing pork — and you’re right. In the early 19th century, that’s exactly what ‘pork barrel’ meant.
But, the term was also used figuratively to mean ‘a supply of money’ or ‘one’s livelihood’ (a farmer, after all, could readily turn pork into cash).
When 20th-century legislators doled out appropriations that benefited their home districts, someone apparently made an association between the profit a farmer got from a barrel of pork and the benefits derived from certain state and federal projects. By 1909, ‘pork barrel’ was being used as a noun naming such government appropriations, and today the term is often used attributively in constructions such as ‘pork barrel politics’ or ‘pork barrel project.’
The phrase ‘never-never land’ is linked to a creation of the Scottish playwright Sir James Barrie. In Barrie’s play Peter Pan, first produced in 1904, Peter befriends the real-world children of the Darling family and spirits them off for a visit to Never Land, where children can fly and never have to become adults. In his 1908 play When Wendy Grew Up, Barrie changed the name to Never Never Land, perhaps influenced by already existing ‘never-never’ terms, such as Australia’s ‘never-never country’ (for its sparsely populated desert interior). Even before that, however, people had already begun to refer to a place that was overly idealistic or romantic as a ‘never-never land.’
The word was derived from the Persian language. The Egyptians used resin as one of the main ingredients in perserving their dead.
The word for resin in the Persian language is ‘mumme’. The Egyptians thought that they were referring to the perserved people, and not the resin.
The name just stuck.
The word was derived from the Latin words for ‘lord’ and ‘House’. It used to mean ‘the house of a lord’.
It later came to mean the rooms underneath the lord’s castle