Very cool, thanks for finding that. I must admit that factlet (which turns out to be a factoid after all) always hovered in a grey-area part of my brain between “interesting enough to remember” and “urgent enough to actually research/verify” (hence why I wisely added the “not verified” parenthesis).
I’m sure that’s what’s you were taught, but it’s not true: https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/news-etymology/
It doesn’t work in other languages either.
The Dutch word for news is nieuws, but that does not form an acronym of noord, oost, west, zuid.
The German word is Nachrichten. Which is very far from Nord Ost Süd West.
Very cool, thanks for finding that. I must admit that factlet (which turns out to be a factoid after all) always hovered in a grey-area part of my brain between “interesting enough to remember” and “urgent enough to actually research/verify” (hence why I wisely added the “not verified” parenthesis).