December 2008
13 famous numbers
The number zero was the the number that enabled the denominational number system and therefore the basis on which modern mathematics was built. Numerous old cultures did not have an equivalent for the zero like for instance the Romans. Its origin and thus the origin of the decimal system dates back to India in the 3rd century before Christ. Back then the numeric symbol however was different for...
Words
Wax poetic
Q. I am wondering if you could explain what “wax poetic” means and its origin. There is a US-based music band called Wax Poetic and I have heard the phrase or idiom on a couple of other occasions but have never been able to figure out what the speaker meant. [Erol Bozok, Turkey; a related question came from John Russo] A. These days, the verb “to wax” - if...
Words
TRUMAN SYNDROME Thanks to Dave Langford and Ansible, I’m now aware of this novel psychiatric classification. News of it came via an AP report on 24 November which has appeared in dozens of newspapers, though not the one that graces the Quinion breakfast table. The report says it’s “a delusion afflicting people who are convinced that their lives are secretly playing out on a...
Words
GIRNEY This turned up in an article in the issue of New Scientist for 22 November. I thought immediately of girning, which the Oxford English Dictionary defines as “showing one’s teeth in rage, pain or disappointment”, but which is often used for a comic grimace, such as in humorous competitions at fairs (“girn” comes from “grin”, by what’s...
Words
“Ecotarianism,” wrote Tony Turnbull in The Times on 25 September, “is the new buzzword, a kind of greatest hits of all our favourite food movements from the past decade. It’s about sourcing locally, organically, sustainably, in season and leaving Earth’s resources untouched. It’s goodbye to £3 chickens imported from Thailand and hello to bean casseroles; no...
Words
NOT TO BE SNEEZED AT Some fascinating comments came in following my item about this old idiom. The Revd Dr Margaret Joachim wrote, “There is a long tradition (particularly, I think, in Central Europe) of preceding a joke by sneezing, which indicated that what followed was not to be taken seriously. This made its way into music - the ‘sneeze’ at the beginning of Til...
10 firsts
“Firsts” are often interesting because they are groundbreaking, or give us a new way of looking at things. The “firsts” on this list are all tragic as they involve death or dying. There are, of course, many thousands of significant first events and in the future we will look at many others.
10 Mark Maples 1964
First: Person to be killed on a ride in Disneyland
15 year old Mark Maples stood up...
10 mysteries
10 Mokele-Mbembe
Mokele-mbembe is a cryptid supposed to live in the Congo River Basin. It is widely documented in local folklore as having an elephant-like body with a long neck and tail and a small head. This description fits with the description of a small Sauropod. This gives the legend some credence with cryptozoologists who continue to this day to search for the Mokele-mbembe in the hopes...
How common was the name Jesus?
On Christmas Day, Christians celebrate the birth of Jesus Christ. Was the Christian Messiah the first to have that name, or were there a lot of Jesuses running around back then? Many people shared the name. Christ’s given name, commonly Romanized as Yeshua, was quite common in first-century Galilee. (Jesus comes from the transliteration of Yeshua into Greek and then English.) Archaeologists...
Newspaper corrections
New Award: The Ian Mayes Award for Writing Wrongs Last year, Ian Mayes, one of the great correction writers of all time, stepped down as the readers’ editor of the Guardian. His corrections were sublime: to the point, witty, and self-effacing. (You can read the Regret the Error tribute to him at the end of last year’s Crunks, or buy his book of Guardian corrections.) With his blessing, I have...
A world enslaved
Standing in New York City, you are five hours away from being able to negotiate the sale, in broad daylight, of a healthy boy or girl. He or she can be used for anything, though sex and domestic labor are most common. Before you go, let’s be clear on what you are buying. A slave is a human being forced to work through fraud or threat of violence for no pay beyond subsistence. Agreed? Good.
Most...
All the gold in the world
It is amazing, but the total amount of gold in the world is a surprisingly small quantity. Here’s how you can calculate the total amount that is available.
If you look at a page like this one, or if you look it up in an encyclopedia, you will find that the annual worldwide production of gold is something like 50 million troy ounces per year. Gold has a specific gravity of 19.3, meaning that...
Cemetery in parking lot
There’s a spot in a Lowes movie theater parking lot in New Brunswick, New Jersey, where you’ll never forget where you parked your car: the grave of Mary Ellis. Yes, a cemetery right smack in the middle of a parking lot!
Not only is the grave of Mary Ellis embedded in a parking lot, it’s also the focus of a terrific legend. Mary, who came to New Brunswick in the 1790s to live with her sister,...
Buzzwords of 2008
By MARK LEIBOVICH and GRANT BARRETT
WASHINGTON — Politics without buzzwords is like sports without clichés, math without numbers or Blago without bleeps. Tough to imagine, in other words, especially in such a game-changer of a campaign year in which buzzwords were flying like shoes.
Buzzwords are what political wiseguys use to sound all important and knowing in a profession whose prime...
Hangover cures
National Geographic has an interesting article about some of the strangest hangover cures from around the world. Perhaps they mean “cure” in a way that you’ll never touch alcohol again if you’re forced to take these the morning after:
Germany: Pickled Herring Pickled or marinated herring is the main ingredient in a sour snack Germans call Rollmops. Considered an excellent way to ward...
Cotton & the Confederacy
With the fall of New Orleans in 1862, the defeat of the South in the American Civil War became almost assured, since with the fall of New Orleans, the South lost its primary means of paying for the war: “The fall of Vicksburg is always seen as one of the great turning points in the war. And yet, from a financial point of view, it was really not the decisive one. The key event had happened...
US hotels & taverns
The wretched state of America’s taverns and public houses circa 1790, the time of George Washington’s legendary tours of the United States. During these tours he eschewed invitations to stay at private homes to avoid the appearance of favoritism and instead stayed only in public houses. Within the next decade, America had invented its hotels, which were to become the most important...
Alfred the Great
In one of the Britain’s foundational myths, Alfred the Great (849-899) burns a cake: “The story of Alfred the Great burning the cakes has been recounted in dozens of different forms for over a thousand years. Alfred, king of Wessex—who had been fighting the Vikings all his short life, who had watched his father and brothers worn out by the struggle, seen his kinsmen die, his...
Dickens & Christmas
At the end of the 19th century, Charles Dickens’ short novel, A Christmas Carol, had readership second only to the Bible’s: “If only Ebenezer Scrooge had not, in the excitement of his transformation from miser to humanitarian, diverged from the traditional Christmas goose to surprise Bob Cratchit with a turkey ‘twice the size of Tiny Tim.’ But-alas—he did, and...
How Dickens invented Christmas
In October 1843 Charles Dickens’ “once unequaled popularity was at a nadir, his critical reputation in a shambles, his bank account overdrawn,” Les Standiford writes. His first five books — “Sketches by Boz,” “The Pickwick Papers,” “Oliver Twist,” “Nicholas Nickleby” and “The Old Curiosity Shop” — had made...
Deep Throat dies
For three decades it remained the last riddle of Watergate. Just who was “Deep Throat”, the federal government official who from the shadows of an underground car park guided Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein of The Washington Post in the treacherous early months of the investigation that toppled a President?
Only four people were in on the secret: Woodward and Bernstein, the...
Execution escapes
10 Elizabeth Proctor circa 1652
In 1692 Elizabeth Proctor and her husband John were accused of witchcraft in the Salem Witch Trials. After their arrest the court met in Salem to discuss the fate of John and Elizabeth and several others. In spite of the petitions and testimonies from friends, both John and Elizabeth were found guilty, and were sentenced to death. Elizabeth, who was pregnant at...
Words
Make no bones about
Meaning
To state a fact in a way that allows no doubt. To have no objection to.
Origin
This is another of those ancient phrases that we accept with our mother’s milk as an idiom but which seem quite strange when we later give it some thought. When we are trying to convey that we acknowledge or have no objection to something, why bring bones into it?
It has been...
Charlie Brown Christmas special
In December 1965 came A Charlie Brown Christmas, the most successful special in television history. In a simple story from Peanuts’ creator Charles Schulz where Charlie Brown looks for genuine meaning in Christmas while Snoopy and Lucy revel in its glitter, the show defied convention by using real kids’ voices, no laugh track, sophisticated original music and uncluttered graphics: ...
The Great Depression
The calamity of the Great Depression dwarfs the calamity of 2008, in large part because the Fed turned the crisis of 1929 into the Great Depression by acting to contract the money supply, helping cause U.S. output to decline by a third and unemployment to rise to 33%: “In perhaps the most important work of American economic history ever published, Milton Friedman and Anna Schwartz argued...