When you kiss someone, you have to turn your head to one side to avoid mashing noses.
Psychologist Oner Güntürkün found that people favor turning to the right over the left by a 2:1 ratio.
A Good Word
Words dropped since the 1901 edition of the Chambers Dictionary:
- decacuminated adj. having the top cut off
- effodient adj. habitually digging (zoology)
- essorant adj. about to soar
- flipe v. to fold back, as a sleeve
- lectual adj. confining to the bed
- neogamist n. a person recently married
- nuciform adj. nut-shaped
- numerotage n. the numbering of yarns so as to denote their fineness
- pantogogue n. a medicine once believed capable of purging away all morbid humours
- parageusia n. a perverted sense of taste
- presultor n. the leader of a dance
- ramollescence n. softening, mollifying
- roytish adj. wild, irregular
- sagesse n. wisdom
- salebrous adj. rough, rugged
- sammy v. to moisten skins with water
- sarn n. a pavement
- scavilones n. men’s drawers worn in the sixteenth century under the hose
- tarabooka n. a drumlike instrument
- tortulous adj. having swellings at regular intervals
- wappet n. a yelping cur
Fire Hazard
The Hindenburg was the largest aircraft ever built, 10 times the size of a modern blimp and filled with 7 million cubic feet of flammable hydrogen.
And it had a smoking room.
What’s in a Name?
Michael Caine’s real name is Maurice Joseph Micklewhite.
He originally took the stage name Michael Scott, but his agent learned that another actor was using it and asked him to choose another one quickly.
Caine was standing in a phone booth in London’s Leicester Square. He looked around, saw The Caine Mutiny playing at the Odeon cinema, and suggested Michael Caine.
He once told an interviewer that if he had looked the other way, he would be known as “Michael One Hundred and One Dalmatians.”
Irish Bulls
Two examples of “Irish bulls,” or ludicrous published statements:
It is in a Belfast paper that may be read the account of a murder, the result of which is described thus: “They fired two shots at him; the first shot killed him, but the second was not fatal.”
Connoisseurs in [Irish] bulls will probably say that this is only a blunder. Perhaps the following will please them better: “A man was run down by a passenger train and killed; he was injured in a similar way a year ago.”
— From Henry B. Wheatley, Literary Blunders: A Chapter in the “History Of Human Error,” 1893
Unquote
“Just because swans mate for life, I don’t think it’s that big a deal. First of all, if you’re a swan, you’re probably not going to find a swan that looks much better than the one you’ve got, so why not mate for life?” — Jack Handy
Limerick
There once was a miser named Clarence
Who simonized both of his parents;
“The initial expense,”
He remarked, “is immense,
But it saves on the wearance and tearance.”
— Ogden Nash
Sealand
Behold the Principality of Sealand, a self-declared “micronation” on an old sea fort in the North Sea.
Its population is only five, but it has its own government (“Their Royal Highnesses Prince Roy and Princess Joan of Sealand”), constitution, government bureaus, senate, postage stamps, and currency.
And, now, it has an official athlete: In 2003 Darren Blackburn of Oakville, Ontario, Canada, started representing Sealand in local marathons and off-trail races. Presumably short ones.
Feather Report
Last year, 2,997 Dutch students set a record for the world’s largest pillow fight.
Clemenceau said, “War is much too serious a matter to be entrusted to the military.”
Punished for Talent
Italian stonemason Alceo Dossena (1878-1937) knew he had a knack for imitating the great sculptors of the past.
What he didn’t know was that his dealers were making a fortune by marketing his creations as originals.
Dossena was already 50 when he recognized some of his own sculptures in “ancient” museum collections. He had got only $200 for each sale. He won a suit against his dealers but died poor in 1937.