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1/8/2003

That Bram Stoker’s 'Dracula' was partly inspired by the medieval Romanian Prince Vlad 'The Impaler', who skewered his enemies on wooden stakes, is well known. But another historical inspiration was Elizabeth Báthory, a Hungarian noblewoman convicted of multiple murder in 1610. After her husband died she had graduated from merely beating and torturing her female servants to kidnapping young girls and killing them to bathe in their blood, which she believed would keep her forever young.

4/8/2003

Pidgin Droppings: The word sampan (small boat) is not originally Chinese at all, but comes from a South American Indian language. How come? Spanish explorers and traders picked up the word in the 16th Century, and Portuguese traders took it to the Far East, where it became part of Chinese/Japanese pidgin Portuguese, and eventually drifted into mainstream Cantonese. English got it from there. Other words we have inherited from Afro/Asian pidgins are savvy (smart/knowledgeable) - pidgin for 'understand' from Portuguese 'know'; and piccaninny (black baby) - pidgin for 'child' from Portuguese 'little one'.

5/8/2003

Some people are scandalised by the goings-on of the Royal family. Well, how about George IV (who also ruled as Prince Regent during his father George IV's madness):
• He had any number of mistresses, drank like a fish, was probably addicted to laudanum, and had a huge gambling problem.
• He secretly married a Catholic widow, making himself ineligible to succeed to the throne.
• He agreed to (bigamously) marry his cousin Caroline, whom he’d never met, because his father said he would get Parliament to pay off his debts of £650,000 - scores of millions of dollars.
• He was drunk at the wedding and spent the wedding night passed out on the bedroom floor.
• When his daughter was born he made a will leaving everything to his first wife and one shilling to Caroline.
• Caroline ran off to Europe. She favoured see-through dresses, had a series of lovers of both sexes, and lived with her Italian manservant.
• Caroline returned to England to claim her rights when George was to be crowned, but he had friendly newspapers publish sordid stories about her and had her debarred from the ceremony. She showed up anyway but the doors were slammed in her face.

7/8/2003

In 1942 a proposal for a super-heavy tank for the German army was put forward. To be called the 'Rat', it was never built, but would have been imposing to say the least. While the ‘King Tiger’, the Germans’ biggest and most powerful production tank, was more than seven metres long and weighed around 70 tons, the Rat would have been 35 metres long and weighed over 1,000 tons. It was to be armed with two 280mm guns as used on the ‘Graf Spee’ pocket battleship.

8/8/2003

Many English speakers don't realise how difficult our language is to learn. For instance, few of us are even aware that when speaking, adding an 's' to make plurals is only the least common of three methods:
Adding 's' - macs, nips, pots, skiffs
Adding 'z' - mags, nibs, pods, hives, pills, hams, cans, cars, laws, toys, kiwis, pianos
Adding 'ez' - faces, wages, ashes, matches, masses, mazes
We know the rules instinctively - foreigners often have to be taught them.

11/8/2003

The current heatwave in Europe brings to mind an incident some years ago in Florence. A Scandinavian couple making love in the street had buckets of water thrown over them and hoses turned on them by outraged householders. They must have been pretty insatiable though, because eventually the police were called to cart them away. The police described the incident as 'man and woman overcome by intense heatwave'.

12/8/2003

Q: Heard about the ship carrying blue and white paint which sank, marooning all the crew? An old joke that brings up the question: why does 'maroon' have two such diffeent meanings?
A1: The colour sense comes from Italian & French for 'chestnut' (marrone/marron). Many people think of maroon as a wine type of colour, but if you think of a chestnut it's really reddish -brown. In fact in Italy 'marrone' is more commonly used for 'brown' than the Germanic 'bruno'.
A2: The 'lost' sense comes from Spanish 'cimmaron' ('wild'), from 'cima' ('mountaintop'). In parts of the USA camping in the wild is called 'marooning'.

13/8/2003

We all know that the world's tallest mountain is Mt Everest at almost 9km, but it depends on what is meant by 'tallest'. Everest reaches the highest above sea level, but if the criterion is the vertical distance from base to height, Hawaii's Mauna Loa is taller (about 5km of it is underwater). Both are midgets, though, compared to the tallest known mountain in the solar system - Olympus Mons on Mars, which is more than 26km tall.

14/8/2003

Q: Do the silent 'b' and 'p' in debt and receipt represent sounds that have been lost?
A: Not really. When they came into English nearly 1,000 years ago, these two words were already pronounced pretty much as now, and were spelt accordingly (dette or dete; receite or recete). But in the view of Latin-loving pedants in the 18th Century, many English words were simply 'debased' forms of Latin ones, so they 'improved' these two by putting in the 'b' from debita and the 'p' from recepta.

15/8/2003

After chess, the world's most widely played board game is mancala (or more correctly, games of the mancala family known as mancala, bao, wari, ayo, soro, mulabalaba, sadeqa and scores of other names). Many Westerners have never heard of it, but it's older than chess - it was played in Egypt at least 3,500 years ago - and is played today throughout Africa and in the Caribbean, south Asia and south-east Asia. Although there are fancy sets of equipment, all that is really needed is a piece of ground where rows of little hollows can be made, and a handful of seeds, shells or stones. The most sophisticated versions require as much skill and experience to play well as do go or chess.

18/8/2003

After the Battle of Culloden in 1746, which ended the Jacobite rebellion, Scots culture was ruthlessly suppressed, including the wearing of kilts in clan tartans. The first British king to wear one was George IV on a visit to Edinburgh in 1822, and since then a kilt seems to have become compulsory for royal males for any occasion with a hint of heather or haggis to it.

19/8/2003

Q: Which of these words is the odd one out, phonetically: bear, dear, ear, fear, gear, hear, near, pear, rear, tear, wear, year?
A: Tear is the only one which rhymes with all the others, because it is actually two homographs - words with different meanings and pronunciations but sharing the same spelling. As in 'shed a tear' it rhymes with dear, ear, fear, gear, hear, near, rear and year; as in 'tear a ligament' it rhymes with bear, pear and wear.

20/8/2003

NASA very generously gave one of its historic spacecraft to the US National Air & Space Museum. Bit of a problem for the museum's staff to take possession of it, though - Viking Lander I is still on Mars.

21/8/2003

When we encounter something new we tend to name it according to what we already know. So to the ancient Greeks the large animal that lived in African rivers was a hippopotamos - a 'river horse'. To the medieval Swedes the big tusked Arctic seal was a valross or 'whale-horse', while the first Englishmen to encounter a spiky yellow tropical fruit called it a pinappel ('pine cone'). Settlers in New Zealand knew the kahikatea and the rimu as white pine and red pine, the pukeko as the swamp hen, and the tui with its white throat as the parson bird. In New Guinea pidgin a piano was originally pikfela bokis yu faitim i crai ('big box that makes a noise when you hit it').

26/8/2003

Aimee McPherson, a famous evangelist in America in the early part of the 20th Century, had a firm belief in the nearness of the Second Coming and her own resurrection and so had a telephone line installed in her coffin when she died in 1944. Unfortunately she was cut off in 1951 - she failed to pay her line maintenance fee, I imagine.

27/8/2003

Being away on campaign does funny things to a general - in one of his letters to his wife Josephine, Napoleon once wrote: 'Home in three days, so don’t wash'.

28/8/2003

At the beginning of the 19th Century in England you could be hanged not just for the usual murder, rape, horse rustling etc, but even for forging a birth certificate, stealing a pocket handkerchief or impersonating a Chelsea pensioner.

29/8/2003

The 5280-foot, 1760-yard, 320-perch, 80-chain, 8-furlong mile (so beloved of backward countries like the USA) was originally a simple and logical measurement. In Roman times it consisted of 1,000 'paces' - mille passuum - and from surviving milestones it is known to have been about the same length as today (100-odd metres shorter). There were 5 'feet' to a 'pace', a foot being almost exactly the same as the modern measurement. But when the Romans left Britain, the Anglo-Saxons brought in the yard (a walking stick's length, as in 'yardstick'), the chain and perch (field measuring devices) etc, which didn't fit the Roman system. However, the mile survived because of the lasting legacy of the Roman roads, and in Elizabethan times it was standardised at 5280 feet (rather than 5,000) because that represented a nice round number of chains.

So what about the nautical mile? Created in the age of seafaring exploraton, this is based on the division of the globe into lines of longitude, and is equal to one sixtieth (one 'minute') of a degree of latitude at the equator. In other words, the circumference of the earth is 360 x 60 = 21,600 nautical miles. After a couple of centuries of a British standard of 6080 feet, an international standard of 1852 metres was agreed to in 1929.

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