If we see “eke” at all these days, it’s when we “eke out” a living, but it comes from an old verb meaning to add, supplement, or grow. It’s the same word that gave us “eke-name” for “additional name,” which later, through mishearing of “an eke-name,” became “nickname.”
The 1997 Disney movie, Hercules, got it wrong. Hercules was Roman. Heracles was Greek.
In 1996, journalist Brian Bethel encountered black-eyed children wearing hoodies in Abilene, Texas, who may have been vampires or demonic.
In medieval times, monks were permitted to eat rabbit fetuses because the Church did not consider the unborn fetus of a rabbit to be “meat.”
A single LEGO brick can support 375,000 other bricks before collapsing. That’s roughly a two-mile-high tower.
This article appears in July 12 • 2013.