Placebo (same spelling in English and Spanish) is a harmless substance given to a sick person instead of medicine, without telling them it is not real. They’re often used in tests in which some people take real medicine and others take a placebo, so that doctors can compare the results to see if the real medicine works properly.

The word placebo comes from Latin and it is the future of the verb to please or satisfy; it denotes the idea that doctors prescribe a placebo just to satisfy/please his patient.

Domingo – Pope Sylvester I hold office between the years 314 and 335, and he was the first to name the seventh day of the week dominicus, because it was “the day to consecrate the Lord” (Dominus). Before that, Romans had called Sunday dies solis (day of the sun) and such denomination influenced other languages like English (Sunday), German (Sonntag), Dtuch (zondag), and Swedish (söndag).

Pope Sylvester I was canonized as St. Sylvester – his day is celebrated on December 31st – and his calling Sunday the seventh day of the week had geographical impact almost ten centuries later: when Christopher Columbus arrived in the Caribbean on November 3rd 1493, he landed in an island in the Small Antilles, which he named Dominica, because it was a Sunday, according to the Julian calendar.

Ostra (oyster)

The word ostra, which comes from Latin ostrea, has a very interesting story in Spanish. Around the 14th century, it lost the r and became ostia, thus becoming a homophone with the word hostia (host as sacramental bread, coming from the Latin for sacrifice) and lending itself to all sorts of puns, which was considered a sacrilege. However sacrilegious it was, this form imposed itself in most of the Iberian Peninsula and, even today in Andalusia, the word for oyster is ostión. Later on, due to pressure from the Vatican, it adopted the form ostra, the same form in the language of Camões and Machado de Assis (Portuguese).

Nos vemos prontito.