17/ix mmxv

Sometime around 1500 BC, after being hit by a terrible earthquake, the residents of Crete tried to calm the earth by lowering a large basket of olives into a well.

About one in four animals on earth is a beetle.

In Tanzania there are 125,000 people for every doctor, compared to one doctor for every 156 people in Cuba.

Asteroid 1227 is called geranium.

Novelist Joseph Conrad’s real name was Teodor Józef Konrad Nałęcz-Korzeniowski. He became fluent in English only in his 20s. He never lost his Polish accent.

See other: Quite Interesting Facts

Missouri

Missouri was named after a tribe of Sioux Indians called the Missouris. While often mistranslated as ‘muddy water,’ the word actually means ‘town of the large canoes.’

Most people who are vaguely familiar with Missouri probably think of a place where all the festivals are named after a fruit, vegetable, or grain; where most local gas stations sell live bait; and, where everyone ends their sentences with an unnecessary preposition. E.g. “Where’s my coat at?” or “If you go to the mall I wanna go with.”

According Business Insider research, in 2014, Missouri was considered one of the ‘most normal’ States in the US. Now, before we discard Missouri as one of the most – if not the most – average, unassuming, bland, vanilla US State, consider the following points:

• In 1865, Missouri became the first slave state to free its slaves.
• Missouri is known as the “Show Me State”, and the state animal is the Mule.
• The tallest man in documented medical history was Robert Pershing Wadlow from St. Louis. He was 8 feet, 11.1 inches tall.
• In 1811, New Madrid, Missouri was struck by the most powerful earthquake in US history; it was felt over 1000 miles away.
• The state musical instrument of Missouri is the fiddle and the state folk dance is the square dance.
• At the St. Louis World’s Fair in 1904, Richard Blechyden, served tea with ice and invented iced tea.
• In 1904, St. Louis, Missouri hosted the first Olympic Games held in the US. It lasted for four and a half months. ‘Climbing a greased pole’ was one of the events. Also, during the marathon almost half of the runners got heat stroke.

“I’ll be deep in the cold, cold ground before I recognize Missouri”
– Abe ‘Grandpa’ Simpson

• Samuel Clemens, more familiarly known as Mark Twain, author of Tom Sawyer and The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, was born in Florida, Missouri and grew up near a place called Hannibal. Other famous writers from Missouri include T.S. Eliot and Maya Angelou.
• On March 18, 1925, Missouri was hit by the most destructive tornado in US history, at least 695 people were killed, over 15,000 homes demolished, and ninety percent of the city of Annapolis was destroyed.
• President Harry S. Truman was born in Lamar, May 8, 1884. Harry Truman was the only U.S. President to hail from Missouri. After he left the White House in 1953, he and his wife Bess moved back to the Independence home they shared with his mother-in-law and lived off his $112.56 monthly Army pension.
• Some of the names of Frontier Missouri chewing tobacco include “Scalping Knife,” “My Wife’s Hat,” “Lock and Chain,” and “Wiggletail Twist.”
• In 2007, St. Louis, Missouri was dubbed ‘the most smoker-friendly city in the US’ by Forbes Magazine.
• Dr Pepper was introduced at the 1904 World’s Fair in St. Louis, Missouri. 7-Up also was invented in St. Louis.
• To appeal to as many voters as possible, politicians sometimes pronounce “Missouri” two different ways—Missouree and Missourah—in the same speech. The Missourah pronunciation is usually more prevalent in rural areas.

4/xii mmxiv

The December 2013 FIDE rating list recorded 1441 chess players holding the Grandmaster title, out of those 31 were women.

The Latin haedus means both ‘child’ and ‘young goat’.

Bonnie Prince Charles had a Polish mother, princess Maria Klementyna Sobieska, and spoke English with a Polish accent.

The phrase ‘OMG’ meaning ‘Oh my God’ dates back to 1917.

According to research conducted by the Daily Mail, British women spend 474 days putting on their make-up; this translates as three hours, 19 minutes each week in front of the mirror. The power of make-up is so strong that 27 per cent admit feeling ‘vulnerable’ without it. It also found losing expensive cosmetics now costs the typical British woman £248 a year. In fact, women mislay so much make-up they spend a staggering £15,872 replacing it during their lifetime.

See other: Quite Interesting Facts

Four Yorkshiremen

First Yorkshireman: Aye, very passable, that, very passable bit of risotto.
Second Yorkshireman: Nothing like a good glass of Château de Chasselas, eh, Josiah?
Third Yorkshireman: You’re right there, Obadiah.
Fourth Yorkshireman: Who’d have thought thirty year ago we’d all be sittin’ here drinking Château de Chasselas, eh?
First Yorkshireman: In them days we was glad to have the price of a cup o’ tea.
Second Yorkshireman: A cup o’ cold tea.
Fourth Yorkshireman: Without milk or sugar.
Third Yorkshireman: Or tea.
First Yorkshireman: In a cracked cup, an’ all.
Fourth Yorkshireman: Oh, we never had a cup. We used to have to drink out of a rolled up newspaper.
Second Yorkshireman: The best we could manage was to suck on a piece of damp cloth.

Third Yorkshireman: But you know, we were happy in those days, though we were poor.
First Yorkshireman: Because we were poor. My old Dad used to say to me, “Money doesn’t buy you happiness, son”.
Fourth Yorkshireman: Aye, ‘e was right.
First Yorkshireman: Aye, ‘e was.

Fourth Yorkshireman: I was happier then and I had nothin’. We used to live in this tiny old house with great big holes in the roof.
Second Yorkshireman: House! You were lucky to live in a house! We used to live in one room, all twenty-six of us, no furniture, ‘alf the floor was missing, and we were all ‘uddled together in one corner for fear of falling.
Third Yorkshireman: Eh, you were lucky to have a room! We used to have to live in t’ corridor!
First Yorkshireman: Oh, we used to dream of livin’ in a corridor! Would ha’ been a palace to us. We used to live in an old water tank on a rubbish tip. We got woke up every morning by having a load of rotting fish dumped all over us! House? Huh.
Fourth Yorkshireman: Well, when I say ‘house’ it was only a hole in the ground covered by a sheet of tarpaulin, but it was a house to us.

Second Yorkshireman: We were evicted from our ‘ole in the ground; we ‘ad to go and live in a lake.
Third Yorkshireman: You were lucky to have a lake! There were a hundred and fifty of us living in t’ shoebox in t’ middle o’ road.
First Yorkshireman: Cardboard box?
Third Yorkshireman: Aye.
First Yorkshireman: You were lucky. We lived for three months in a paper bag in a septic tank. We used to have to get up at six in the morning, clean the paper bag, eat a crust of stale bread, go to work down t’ mill, fourteen hours a day, week-in week-out, for sixpence a week, and when we got home our Dad would thrash us to sleep wi’ his belt.

Second Yorkshireman: Luxury. We used to have to get out of the lake at six o’clock in the morning, clean the lake, eat a handful of ‘ot gravel, work twenty hour day at mill for tuppence a month, come home, and Dad would thrash us to sleep with a broken bottle, if we were lucky!
Third Yorkshireman: Well, of course, we had it tough. We used to ‘ave to get up out of shoebox at twelve o’clock at night and lick road clean wit’ tongue. We had two bits of cold gravel, worked twenty-four hours a day at mill for sixpence every four years, and when we got home our Dad would slice us in two wit’ bread knife.
Fourth Yorkshireman: Right. I had to get up in the morning at ten o’clock at night half an hour before I went to bed, drink a cup of sulphuric acid, work twenty-nine hours a day down mill, and pay mill owner for permission to come to work, and when we got home, our Dad and our mother would kill us and dance about on our graves singing Hallelujah.

First Yorkshireman: And you try and tell the young people of today that… they won’t believe you.
All: They won’t!

– Chapman. G., Cleese. J., Idle. E., Jones. T., Palin. M. (1969) At Last the 1948 Show.

Did Americans have British Accents in 1776?

It is obvious to assume that Americans used to have accents similar to today’s British accents, and that American accents diverged after the Revolutionary War, while British accents remained more or less the same.

Amos Doolittle’s 1775 engraving depicting the British entering Concord

Americans in 1776 did have British accents in that American accents and British accents hadn’t yet diverged – an answer which is not too surprising.

What is surprising, though, is that those accents were much closer to today’s American accents than to today’s British accents. While both have changed over time, it’s actually British accents that have changed much more drastically since then.

First, let’s be clear: the terms British accent and American accent are oversimplifications; there were, and still are, innumerable constantly-evolving regional British and American accents. What most Americans think of as the British accent is the standardized Received Pronunciation, also known as ‘BBC English’.

While there are many differences between today’s British accents and today’s American accents, perhaps the most noticeable difference is rhotacism. While most American accents are rhotic, the standard British accent is non-rhotic. (Rhotic speakers pronounce the ‘R’ sound in the word ‘hard’. Non-rhotic speakers do not.)

In 1776, both American accents and British accents were largely rhotic. It was around this time that non-rhotic speech took off in southern England, especially among the upper class. This prestige non-rhotic speech was standardized, and has been spreading in Britain ever since. Most American accents, however, remained rhotic. However, there are a few fascinating exceptions: like Irish and Scottish accents, New York and Boston accents became non-rhotic.

See other: Hall of Fame Posts

See other: Admin’s Choice Posts

World Languages: kut

Turkish: [Noun] luck.

Serbo-Croatian: [Noun] kȗt m (Cyrillic spelling: ку̑т) corner, angle.

English: [Noun] a traditional Korean shamanic ritual.

Finnish: [Adjective] (Finglish) good.

Dutch: [Interjection] (vulgar, slang, hollandic) damn. (vulgar, slang, hollandic) not entertaining. [Noun] (vulgar, slang) vulva, especially the vagina; cunt, pussy. (Dialect, invective) derogatory for intensely disliked female person; cunt.

Swedish: [Noun] a puppy; a young seal, chiefly of grey seal.

Geordie Accent

Geordie is a regional nickname for a person from Tyneside, a region of the north east of England, or the name of the English-language dialect spoken by its inhabitants. Depending on who is using it, the catchment area for the term ‘Geordie’ can be as large as the whole of north east England, or as small as the city of Newcastle upon Tyne.

In most aspects Geordie speech is a direct continuation and development of the language spoken by the Anglo-Saxon settlers of this region. Initially mercenaries employed by the ancient Brythons to fight the Pictish invaders after the end of Roman rule in Britannia in the 5th century, the Angles, Saxons and Jutes who thus arrived became, over time, ascendant politically and – through population transfer from tribal homelands in northern Europe – culturally over the native British. The Anglo-Saxon kingdoms that emerged during the Dark Ages spoke largely mutually-intelligible varieties of what we now call Old English, each varying somewhat in phonology, morphology, syntax and lexicon. This Anglo-Saxon influence on Geordie can be seen today, to the extent that poems by the Anglo-Saxon scholar the Venerable Bede translates more successfully into Geordie than into modern day English. Thus, in northern England, dominated by the kingdom of Northumbria, was found a distinct Northumbrian Old English dialect.

Phonetically, Geordie consonants generally follow those of Received Pronunciation. Some phonological characteristics specific to Geordie are listed as follows:

– Geordie is non-rhotic, like most Anglo-English dialects. This means speakers do not pronounce /r/ unless it is followed by a vowel sound in that same phrase or prosodic unit. The rhotic sound (/r/) in Geordie is pronounced as [ɹ].

– Unusual for language, there is some differentiation in pronunciation in the Geordie dialect based upon the speaker’s sex. For example, English sound /aʊ/, pronounced generically in Geordie as [əʊ], may also have other, more specific pronunciations depending upon whether one is male or female. Males alone often pronounce the sound /aʊ/ as [uː], for example, the word house (/haʊs/) pronounced as [huːs]. Females, on the other hand, will often pronounce this sound as [eʉ], thus: [heʉs].

– /ɪŋ/ appearing in an unstressed final syllable of a word (such as in reading) is pronounced as [ən] (thus, reading is [ˈɹiːdən]).

– /ər/ appearing at the end of a word (such as in sugar) is pronounced as [a] (thus, sugar is [ˈʃʊga]).

– Yod-coalescence in both stressed and unstressed syllables (so that dew becomes [dʒuː]).

– T-glottalization, in which /t/ is replaced by [ʔ] before a syllabic nasal (e.g. button as [ˈbʊʔən]), in absolute final position (get as [gɛʔ]), and whenever the /t/ is intervocalic so long as the latter vowel is not stressed (pity as [ˈpɪʔi]).

– /æ/ specifically in the words had, have, has and having is pronounced as [ɛ].

– /ɛ/ specifically in words with the spelling “ea” (such as bread and deaf) may be pronounced as [iː].

– /əʊ/ specifically at the ends of words, with the spelling “ow” (such as in throw and follow) is pronounced as [a] in monosyllabic words and [ə] in polysyllabic words (thus, window as [ˈwɪndə]).

On American English

“You prefer the general American accent? Samson liked Delilah.”

– Willem Etsenmaker