Shampoo: If you’ve ever got the tingles while getting your hair washed at a salon, the origin of the word shampoo will make sense to you. It comes from a conjugation of the Hindi verb campna or champna, meaning “to press or knead muscles”.A 1762 account from an officer of the East India Company abroad describes the process of being shampooed, which was a vigorous full-body massage done alongside hair-washing. The word, if not the full custom, was exported to England, where its hair-specific meaning coalesced.
Factoid: Today, factoid is often used to mean a short, somewhat trivial fact - the kind of thing a website devoted to curiosity and fun facts often shares. When Norman Mailer coined the term, though, he explained it as “facts which have no existence before appearing in a magazine or newspaper … not so much lies as a product to manipulate emotion in the Silent Majority”.
In the 1500, the King of England’s toilet was a luxurious affair: a velvet-cushioned portable seat called a “close-stool” below a pewter chamberpot enclosed in a wooden box. And from the 1500s into the 1700s, British kings appointed lucky nobles the strangely prestigious chance to sit with the king while he performed his most private task, to chat to him, maybe relax him, in a role known as the Groom of the Stool.
