Wednesday, August 10, 2005

English is big

The Internet is bigger:

Third Degree - "intense interrogation by police," 1900, probably a reference to Third Degree of master mason in Freemasonry (1772), the conferring of which included an interrogation ceremony.

[ Online Etymology Dictionary ]

Seriously, where would I have gone 15 years ago to research the things that I can investigate so quickly now?

english

Comments [3] |

Wednesday, August 10, 2005 9:00:01 AM (Eastern Standard Time, UTC-05:00)

I would have just gone to "World Book" and then given up.

Alex

Wednesday, August 10, 2005 9:07:40 AM (Eastern Standard Time, UTC-05:00)

I would have thought it was a reference to third degree burns.

BTW, spambots have figured out your homebrew blog commenting? Wow.

Joe Grossberg

Wednesday, August 10, 2005 9:11:19 AM (Eastern Standard Time, UTC-05:00)

It's not homebrew, it's pretty much just dasBlog. I've altered stuff here and there, but not the commenting part. (Though perhaps I'll just rename a few of these fields and that'll do it).

And my brief research seemed to indicate that "third degree burns" may have been derived from "the third degree", so they could be related, just the other way around...

Kearns

Comments are closed.