Salary- Salary comes from the Latin word meaning salt, sal, due to how valuable salt was in Roman times. Soldiers in Rome’s army were allotted an allowance to buy salt, essential for preserving food.
Defenestration- Defenestrate means to throw someone out a window. In Latin, fenestram means window, and the prefix de- means down from, so to defenestrate someone means to quite literally cast them down from a window.
Blockbuster- The blockbuster was originally a large bomb that could purportedly wipe out an entire city block. After the media used the word , it quickly became in style to use the word blockbuster to describe anything that was impressive.
Moment- Moment comes from the Latin momentus, meaning a short period of time, however the medieval world decided to make it a bit more exact. Medieval days were divided into 24 hours, which were then subdivided into four periods of 15 minutes. Those periods were divided into 10 sub periods called moments. Fifteen divided by 10 is 1.5 and 1.5 multiplied by 60 (the number of seconds in a minute) is 90, thus a moment was exactly 90 seconds.
Scissors- Scissors come from the latin word cisorium, meaning something used to cut. Someone, however, made a spelling error because they thought cissors (how it used to be spelled) came from the latin word scindare (meaning to split), and they added an s in front. The change caught on, and now we call cutting implements scissors instead of cissors.