Learning a language is a life-long experience. For as much as one uses it, some words escape his vocabulary, hidden in never-explored topics and conversations. As a person who’s never had any interest in horseback riding, or spaghetti western movies, or horses in general, I had never met the word “stirrup”.
What’s most interesting about stirrups though is their history.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stirrups
I can’t believe it took us humans almost 5,000 years from the time the horse was domesticated to the day someone realized the chances to fall off a horse were very high without the possibility to use our feet to rebalance. Wow…
P.S.: I’m assuming there’s no english equivalent of the italian expression “perdere le staffe” (“losing the stirrups”).