Beautiful English Online

Have you ever been "in hock"?

Here are the necessary criteria:

When one gambler is caught by another, smarter than himself, and is beat, then he is in hock. Men are only caught, or put in hock, on the race-tracks, or on the steamboats down South... Among thieves a man is in hock, when he is in prison... ‘If the cove should be caught in the hock he won't snickle,’ if the fellow should be caught in the act, he would not tell. -- G.W. Matsell, Vocabulum (1859) via OED

Yuchi

Yuchi is spoken in Oklahoma, USA, by just five people all aged over 75. Yuchi is an isolate language (that is, it cannot be shown to be related to any other language spoken on earth). Their own name for themselves is Tsoyaha, meaning "Children of the Sun". Yuchi nouns have 10 genders, indicated by word endings: six for Yuchi people (depending on kinship relations to the person speaking), one for non-Yuchis and animals, and three for inanimate objects (horizontal, vertical, and round). Efforts are now under way to document the language with sound and video recordings, and to revitalise it by teaching it to children. -- Phenomenica

What would the Blue Man Group be in Old Norse?

In Old Norse the word blá was . . . used to describe black [as well as blue] (and the common word for people of African descent was thus blámenn 'blue/black men'). In Swedish, blå, the modern word for blue, was used this way until the early 20th century. -- "Distinguishing blue from green in language," Wikipedia

It's a shambles

 

According to the Free Dictionary,

A place or situation referred to as a shambles is usually a mess, but it is no longer always the bloody mess it once was. The history of the word begins innocently enough with the Latin word scamnum, "a stool or bench serving as a seat, step, or support for the feet, for example." The diminutive scamillum, "low stool," was borrowed by speakers of Old English as sceamol, "stool, bench, table." Old English sceamol became Middle English shamel, which developed the specific sense in the singular and plural of "a place where meat is butchered and sold." The Middle English compound shamelhouse meant "slaughterhouse," a sense that the plural shambles developed (first recorded in 1548) along with the figurative sense "a place or scene of bloodshed" (first recorded in 1593). Our current, more generalized meaning, "a scene or condition of disorder," is first recorded in 1926.

The photo above shows the York Shambles today. It was identified as a butchers' row or shambles as far back as the Domesday Book. Via ORB