Lardog's Useless Trivia

Titles of Nobility
English English vs. American English
True Stories: Cover Me!, Voice of Disneyland, and Fast Food
How to Prove It
Random Facts

Titles of Nobility

• King / Royal Family - the King is referred to as the Archduke in Austria.
  The Queen Mother is the mother of the current Queen.
  The Magna Carta refers to King John as "...King of England, Lord of Ireland, Duke of Normandy and Aquitaine, and Count of Anjou."
• Duke - sovereign of a state or Duchy, highest noble title short of the Royal Family
• Marquis
• Count - referred to as Earl in England
• Viscount
• Baron - lowest noble title, also used in America for top industrialists and financiers

• Baronet - lowest degree of hereditary honor, baronets and below are commoners. Entitles bearer to be addressed as Sir and their wives as Lady.
• Knight - not hereditary, conferred by the King with a ceremonial tap of his sword. Also addressed as Sir.
• Esquire - eldest sons of noblemen, also sheriffs & justices.
• Gentleman - member of the gentry, or anyone having a Coat of Arms but without a title. In America, any man with good manners.
• Yeoman - a free man or distinguished servant, or (military) a naval petty officer who performs clerical duties.

• Lord - a title that can be used for all holders of power and authority. It can also be bestowed on certain offical persons, e.g. Lord high chancellor.
• Don - used in South America and Italy, a generic term for anyone of great importance.
• Mister - title of courtesy, means nothing, archaic for master.
• Honorable - title of quality, for children of earls, viscounts and barons. In America, used for holders of high public offices (governors, judges, mayors, congressmen & senators).

English English vs. American English

Aso confusing (assuming you are an American attempting to understand British):
a fag is a cigarette, to fag for someone is to do their chores, faggots are liver meatballs or sticks
pants are men's underwear (say trousers or breeches), knickers are women's panties
suspenders are women's stocking garters (say braces), jumpers are sweaters, trainers are tennis shoes
feminine towels are feminine pads, a rubber is always a pencil eraser
pissed means drunk, slash is urination, spunk always means semen (say enthusiasm)
snogging is to french kiss, to chunder is to vomit, to pub crawl is to go bar hopping

off licences or offies are liquor stores
wallop is cheap beer, beer is like fermented oatmeal (say lager or name a brand)
codswallop is weak beer or anything insubstantial (named after someone named Cod)
cider always contains alcohol, scrumpy is strong cider
lemonade is 7-up (say squash), sherbet is a fizzy powder
biscuits are cookies, chips are french fries (say crisps)
a chip buttie is a french fries, ketchup & butter sandwich
a doughnut is somehow different and always has jelly inside
a 99 is vanilla ice cream with a piece of chocolate, a spotted dick is a type of dessert

a stone is 14 pounds, a pint is 1.2 US pints (19.2 oz instead of 16 oz) which is 1.6 US bottles or cans (12 oz)
a billion is a trillion (10¹², say thousand million for 10⁹)
a pony is 25£ (pounds money), a monkey is 500£, an archer is 2000£
a liberal has middle-of-the road politics (say progressive, left-wing or socialist)
a tory is a member of the Conservative Party, as opposed to the Labour Party
the dole is public welfare

knackered means tired, a kip is a nap
rounders is baseball, cricket is not played in America, football means soccer - an English invention (football is not played in the UK)
a car's boot is its trunk and its bonnet is its hood, a lorry is a truck, to drive a stick has nothing to do with automobiles
gas is one of the states of matter (say petrol), aluminium (al-yoo-min-ee-um) is aluminum
a lift is an elevator, a spanner is both a wrench and a curse word
a hotel ground floor is the first floor, the 1st floor is the 2nd floor etc.
bins are trash cans, a jock is a Scotsman, a crustie is a homeless hippy
surgery is a consultation with any professional, a doctor is anyone with a Doctoral degree (say surgeon)
a barrister is a lawyer who argues in court trials, a solicitor deals outside of court
to table a motion is to talk about it now (say postpone)
momentarily means for a short duration (say soon)
choked means disappointed, chuffed means happy
to grass on someone is to tattle or narc on them, a supergrass is a stool pigeon
to nick is to steal, a nick or gaol is a jail, but good nick means good condition
a banger is both a sausage and an old car
to half inch is to borrow without asking
the letter Z is pronounced zed
please and sorry are said much more often than we do, excuse me is sarcastic (ala Steve Martin, say pardon me)
a play that goes down a bomb is a success
fancy means desire (say swank), to fiddle is to cheat, to rabbit is to talk about trivia
a goggle box is a television, a boffin is a scientist, a dummy is a child's pacifier
dogs and blowers are telephones, a guy is an effigy of a famous mad bomber
a chemist is a drug store, a druggist is a pharmacist
a yard is a paved area, a garden contains grass or one or more plants
diabolical means incomplete or no fun, bumf is junk mail, a joint is a piece of meat, gammy means injured, funky means frightened, a yank is an American, a torch is a flashlight, and a joiner is a carpenter
and finally: A yearly TV license is required for every home with an operational television, whether or not anyone actually watches BBC programs. TV detector vans regularly drive around scanning for unlicensed violators.

British Curse Words

True Stories

Cover me!

The first officer shouted "Cover me!" and prepared to charge in. Unfortunately, "cover me" means very different things to policeman and army soldiers. To a policeman, "cover me" means to draw your weapon and prepare to shoot at anything threatening. The army platoon was well trained to respond to the order "cover", which means to immediately lay down a barrage of supressing fire.

Numerous rifles and machine guns immediately began straffing the upper portion of the house. The policeman hit the ground in terror, and the people in the house soon came running out with their hands over their heads. Over 200 bullets were retrieved from the house's structure.
-- from Major General James D. Delk, California National Guard Military Field Commander during the Los Angeles riots

Voice of Disneyland

Fast Food

My chicken rancher cousin from Seattle complains about how KFC buys the smallest chickens they can find so that they can sell by the piece. On a visit he asked me "Wanna see our quonset hut full of chickens?" (It's a hobby, actually.) Sure, let's take a look ... OH MY GOD! There were literally over 10,000 happy chickens in this huge long room, full of automated feeding & watering machinery.

Here's the top 10 fast food restaurants in the world for last year. I don't know what constitutes a unit sold - how would you count boxes of 6, 9 or 20 chicken fragments? From CFO Magazine, 9/97.
 

	1996 sales  $billion	% change  from 1995	billion units  sold 1996
McDonald's	16.4	3.1	12,094
Burger King	7.5	8.7	7,057
Pizza Hut	4.9	-1.9	8,701
Taco Bell	4.4	0	6,645
Wendy's	4.3	7.5	4,369
KFC	3.9	5.4	5,079
Hardee's	3.0	-3.2	3,225
Subway	2.7	3.8	10,848
Dairy Queen	2.6	8.3	5,035
Domino's Pizza	2.3	9.5	4,300

How to Prove It

• Proof by example:
  The author gives only the case n = 2 and suggests that it contains most of the ideas of the general proof
• Proof by intimidation:
  Example: "Trivial".
• Proof by vigorous hand waving:
  Works well in a classroom or seminar
• Proof by cumbersome notation:
  Best done with access to multiple alphabets
• Proof by exhaustion:
  An issue or two of a journal devoted to your proof helps
• Proof by omission:
  Example: "The reader may easily supply the details" or "The other 789 cases are analogous" or "..."
• Proof by obfuscation:
  A long plotless sequence of true yet meaningless syntactically related statements
• Proof by wishful citation:
  The author cites the negation, converse, or generalization of a theorem from the literature
• Proof by funding:
  How could three different government agencies be wrong?
• Proof by eminent authority:
  Example: "I saw Professor Minsky in the elevator, and he said it was probably NP-complete."
• Proof by personal communication:
  Example: Eight-dimensional colored cycle stripping is NP-complete [Minsky, personal communication]."
• Proof by reduction to the wrong problem:
  Example: "To see that infinite-dimensional colored cycle stripping is decidable, we reduce it to the halting problem."
• Proof by reference to inaccessible literature:
  The author cites a privately circulated memoir of the Slovobian Philological Society, 1883.
• Proof by importance:
  A large body of useful consequences all follow from the proposition in question
• Proof by accumulated evidence:
  Long and diligent search has not revealed a counterexample.
• Proof by cosmology:
  The negation of the proposition is unimaginable or meaningless. Popular for proofs of the existence of God.
• Proof by circular reference:
  Example: "In reference A, theorem 5 is said to follow from theorem 3 in reference B, which is shown to follow from corollary 6.2 in reference C, which is an easy consequence of theorem 5 in reference A."
• Proof by metaproof:
  A method is given to construct the desired proof. The correctness of the method is proved by any of these techniques.
• Proof by picture:
  A more convincing form of proof by example. Combines well with proof by omission.
• Proof by vehement assertion:
  It is useful to have some kind of authority relation to the audience.
• Proof by ghost reference:
  Nothing even remotely resembling the cited theorem appears in the cited reference.
• Proof by forward reference:
  Reference is usually to a forthcoming paper of the author, which is often not as forthcoming as anticipated.
• Proof by semantic shift:
  Some of the standard but inconvenient definitions are changed for the statement of the result
• Proof by appeal to intuition:
  Cloud-shaped drawings frequently help

Random Facts

The poisonous Gila Monster, Heloderma suspectum, is named after the Gila river in Mexico and Arizona.

The Terminator's vision shows Apple 2+ assembly code & COBOL. Schwarzenegger's voice is subsequently used in exactly 16 lines.

0ºF was the coldest temperature Gabriel Daniel Fahrenheit could produce in 1714 using only salt and ice. Anders Celsius came up with a different scale in 1742, followed by William Thomson, Lord Kelvin, in the 1800's.

George Washington was 6' 2", weighed 200 lbs, and never went to school. His Vice President John Adams  was a Harvard graduate.

Lardog's is hosted by