Etymological Tidbits
From a list I've been compiling little by little for the past 4 years (mostly from two different Word of the Day sources: dictionary.com and mirriam-webster online) Chatoyant's poetic origin lies in the French chatoyer , "to gleam like a cat's eyes," from the French chat , "cat." Before the standardization of writing from left to right, ancient Greek inscribers once used a style called " boustrophedon ," a word meaning literally "turning like oxen in plowing." When they came to the end of a line, the ancient Greeks simply started the next line immediately below the last letter, writing the letters and words in the opposite direction, and thus following the analogy of oxen plowing left to right, then right to left. "Reverse boustrophedon" writing has also been found in which the inscribers turned the document 180 degrees before starting a new line so that the words are always read left to right with every half tur