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About one quarter of all adults will never have a headache in their life.
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Word of the Day: ATTACHMEANT (neologism) — the file you forgot to attach to an email.
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Ancient Greek and Roman mimes were not silent — they were performers and entertainers who talked and sang. They were called ‘mimes’ because they were good at mimicking other people.
429
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According to one interpretation, the line ‘That which we call a rose / By any other name would smell as sweet’ from ‘Romeo and Juliet’ might have been a joke about a competitor of Shakespeare’s Globe called the Rose Theatre that was notorious for its clogged sewage system.
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As of 2021, the three most popular flag emoji are the rainbow flag (🏳️🌈), the U.S. flag (🇺🇸), and the red flag (🚩).
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Word of the Day: SERIEOTROHET (Swedish) — ‘series infidelity’: when you have been watching a TV show with your partner and then you watch a new episode without them.
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A 2016 study debunking the ‘5 second rule’ found it’s safer to eat foods dropped on the carpet than on tile, metallic, or wooden surfaces.
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Earl Tupper, Tupperware inventor, also tried to make drip-free ice cream and a fish propelled boat. (Image: Archive Center, NMAH)
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Darth Vader's heavy breathing is trademarked.
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In the 16th century, England was struck by a mysterious ‘sweating disease’ that killed thousands, and then disappeared after 70 years.
436
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"I am fond of pigs. Dogs look up to us. Cats look down on us. Pigs treat us as equals." WINSTON CHURCHILL
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Word of the day: ROKJESDAG (Dutch) - literally "skirt day", the first day of spring where it is warm enough to wear skirts
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97% of people are currently keeping a secret.
439
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The ‘step’ in words like ‘stepmother’ or ‘stepsister’ has nothing to do with our word ‘step’. It comes from Old English ‘astiepan’ (‘to bereave’), which produced ‘steopcild’ meaning ‘orphan’. So ‘stepmother’ originally meant someone who became mother to an orphan.
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We are pleased to update you that Yakei's rule has survived the mating season. No other macaques attempted to usurp her position. twitter.com/qikipedia/stat…
441
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In the early years of the BBC, there was a framed warning near the microphone in the radio studio that read: ‘If you sneeze or rustle papers you will DEAFEN THOUSANDS!!!’
442
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Lemmings don’t jump off cliffs deliberately. The 1958 Disney documentary that perpetuated the myth actually pushed a load of them off a Canadian cliff.
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Dolphins have no vocal cords. The voice of Flipper was actually a modified kookaburra’s call.
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American doctors have a phrase for a diagnosis that is usually the most obvious answer: ‘When you hear hoofbeats, think horses, not zebras.’
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The poo of iron age people shows humans were eating blue cheese and drinking beer 2700 years ago.
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The World Octopus Wrestling Championships took place in 1963 and then never again.
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In 1989, the Australian Labor Party insisted they weren’t bribing voters with a pre-election barbecue and denied “being involved in the dissemination of sausages”.
448
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All British cows must have passports.
449
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The Mars rover Perseverance has measured the speed of sound on Mars and it’s about 100 m/s slower than the speed of sound on Earth.
450
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What do they say?
WHAT DO THEY SAY! twitter.com/BillBailey/sta…
@qikipedia
A Quite Interesting Twitter feed from the team behind the BBC TV show QI.
linktr.ee/TheQIElves