Interesting facts about language

You probably already know that “the quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog” uses all the letters in the English alphabet. But were you aware that ‘pogonophobia’ meant the fear of beards? Or that ‘karaoke’ meant ‘empty orchestra’ in Japanese? How about the fact that clans of long ago, in order to get rid of their unwanted people without killing them, would burn their houses down, resulting in the expression “to get fired”? No? Well then, you’d better have a look at these fun language facts →