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Guglielmo Marconi, the inventor of radio, was the great-grandson of the inventor of Jameson’s Irish whiskey.

The German Staubsauger and Dutch Stofzuiger, both literally translate as ‘dust-sucker’ to mean vacuum cleaner.

Victorian pantomimes starting at 7pm often did not finish until midnight.

In 2014, a pair of underpants donated by the mayor of Brussels was stolen from the Brussels Underpants Museum.

Between 1939 and 1945, World War II claimed an average of 1256 lives per hour; between 1934 and 1945, Holocaust claimed an average of 169 lives per hour.

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Conversations: Genocide and Dogma

Helena
Consider the Holocaust: centuries before the mid 20th century, Christian Europeans had viewed the Jews as the worst species of heretics and attributed every societal ill to their continued presence among the faithful. In the 1930’s and 1940’s, while the hatred of Jews in Germany expressed itself in a predominately secular way, its roots were religious, and the explicitly religious demonization of the Jews of Europe continued. The anti-Semitism that built the Nazi death camps was a direct inheritance from medieval Christianity.

Sappho
Examples aplenty, the Vatican itself perpetuated the blood libel in its newspapers as late as 1914. And both Catholic and Protestant churches have a shameful record of complicity with the Nazi genocide.

Galene
Hang on, what is this so-called blood libel?

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The twenty most densely populated countries house 50% of all the people of the world.

On April Fool’s Day it is common in France to try to pin a paper cut-out of a fish to someone else’s back. Hence the name Poisson d’Avril, ‘April Fish’.

Mutterkuchen, the German word for placenta literally means ‘mother cake’.

The Japanese and Chinese get blue and green mixed up. The Japanese call the green light at the traffic light blue, ‘aoi shingou’; and often refer to green vegetables as blue as well, ‘aona’. The Chinese do the same when they talk about the dish bok choy, it contains a green vegetable called Chinese cabbage for which the Chinese use the character for blue. In Japanese, the character for green originally did not mean the colour green but instead symbolised youth. That is why, in Japanese, glossy hair is literally called ‘greenish black hair’ and a newborn baby is called a ‘green child’.

The Belgian astronomer and professor of physics Georges Lemaitre pioneered the Big Bang theory for the development of the universe in the 1920s. He was a Catholic priest.

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Franz Josef Haydn (1732-1809) is often said to be an Austrian composer but, though he was born in Austria, he was in fact 100% German. Haydn was from a poor background: his mother was a cook and his father was a wheelwright.

A young Ludwig van Beethoven

The chemical element germanium was discovered by the German chemist Clemens Winkler (1838-1904) and named after Germania, Latin for Germany.

The German poet Christian Morgenstern died of tuberculosis in 1914. He had contracted it from his mother, who had died 33 years earlier.

The German composer Beethoven was taught music by the Austrian composers Mozart and Haydn and the Italian composer Salieri. He himself was of Belgian extraction – his grandfather was a Belgian.

The Holy Roman Emperor Charles V of Germany (1500-58) was said to have spoken French to men, Italian to women, Spanish to God and German to horses.

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Shibboleth

A shibboleth is any distinguishing practice that is indicative of one’s social or regional origin. It usually refers to features of language, and particularly to a word whose pronunciation identifies its speaker as being a member or not a member of a particular group.

The term originates from the Hebrew word shibbóleth, which literally means the part of a plant containing grains, such as an ear of corn or a stalk of grain or, in different contexts, stream, torrent. The modern usage derives from an account in the Hebrew Bible, in which pronunciation of this word was used to distinguish Ephraimites, whose dialect lacked a /ʃ/ phoneme (as in shoe), from Gileadites whose dialect did include such a phoneme.

After the inhabitants of Gilead inflicted a military defeat upon the tribe of Ephraim around 1370–1070 BC, the surviving Ephraimites tried to cross the Jordan River back into their home territory and the Gileadites secured the river’s fords to stop them. In order to identify and kill these refugees, the Gileadites put each refugee to a simple test as we can read in chapter 12 of the Book of Judges:

5 And the Gileadites took the passages of Jordan before the Ephraimites: and it was so, that when those Ephraimites which were escaped said, Let me go over; that the men of Gilead said unto him, Art thou an Ephraimite? If he said, Nay;

6 Then said they unto him, Say now Shibboleth: and he said Sibboleth: for he could not frame to pronounce it right. Then they took him, and slew him at the passages of Jordan: and there fell at that time of the Ephraimites forty and two thousand

Since then, many shibboleths have been used for military purposes:

Fourteen Year Old Richard II Meets the Revolting Peasants

– “And many fflemmynges loste hir heedes at that tyme and namely they that koude nat say Breede and Chese, but Case and Brode.” The Peasants’ Revolt of AD 1381 also known as the Tyler’s Rebellion, or the Great Rising, was used by the merchants of London in an attempt to get a competitive edge in the trade with the Low Countries by reducing the number of competitors. A massacre among the Flemings in London – not just the Flemish merchants – ensued.

– “Schild en vriend” On 18 May 1302, the people of Bruges killed the French occupiers of the city during a nocturnal surprise attack. According to a famous legend, they stormed into the houses where they knew the tenants were forced to board and lodge French troops serving as city guards, roused every male person from his bed and forced them to repeat the challenge ‘schild en vriend’ (meaning: shield and friend). The Flemings pronounced ‘schild’ with a separate ‘s’ /s/ and ‘ch’ /x/ as in ‘Scheveningen’. Flemings would pronounce ‘vriend’ with a voiced v and a rolling r whereas French would render those as a voiceless /f/ and a fricative or approximant uvular /r/.Every Frenchman who failed the test was stabbed on the spot, still in his nightgown. Because the signal for the uprising was the matins bells of the city’s churches and monasteries, this became known as the Bruges Matins or ‘Brugse Metten’ in Dutch. Which became the name of the massacre.

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On Belgium

“Belgium; a country invented by England and Germany to sort out their differences.”

– Jeremy Clarkson