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Pancake Day!

It’s Pancake Day! Today we’re going to look at five traditions associated with this time of year and find out where their names originate from. Pancake Here in the UK, we celebrate Shrove Tuesday by feasting on pancakes. Given that a pancake is essentially a type of cake that’s cooked in a pan, we don’t need to tell you where the word comes from, but it dates back to the early fifteenth century. The Old English ‘panna’ or ‘ponne’, comes from the Proto-Germanic ‘panna’, which is probably borrowed from the Latin ‘patina’ meaning ‘shallow pan, dish, stew pan’. The word ‘cake’ dates back t...

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Word of Wednesday: Easter

Easter, the holiday festival celebrating the resurrection of Jesus Christ. In other European languages, the festival has names derived from Jewish Passover or ‘pesah’. In English, curiously, the name for this Christian festival has origins in Paganism. Easter or ‘Eostre’, in Old English, possibly relates to the Germanic goddess of spring by the same name or variant, ‘Ostara’. Venerable Bede, the first writer of an English history, suggests that the Pagan Eostre celebrations included eggs and hares. Perhaps these familiar symbols of Easter may have non-Christian origins. Considering hares are native to the British Isles; and rabbits or the Easter bunnies, were introduced by the Romans. Thes...

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