This you probably do know about me - I'm a bit of a geek. As such, I subscribe to a variety of daily, geeky nuggets... from pointers to youtube videos of old Sesame Street segments set to the music of Phillip Glass (I kid you not - check it out here - it's pretty cool), to a link to a site that somehow makes the process of choosing for whom you're going to vote seem awfully similar to making hot dogs.
In one of my WOTD (word of the day) emails today, I read this. It's not the word so much - it's the etymology.
Narthex (n). Of all church architectural terms, this one is perhaps the most mysterious in origin: it denotes a portico at the Western end of a church, but it comes from a Greek word meaning "giant fennel." Etymologists speculate about how it got from one meaning to the other, but none of the stories seem very convincing.
Come on. Giant fennel? You can't make that up.
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