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The term ‘First World War’ was coined by the Times correspondent Charles à Court Repington in his diary entry for 10 September 1918, before the war had ended. He thought the term could be used as a warning for future generations.
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Word of the Day: GRAMMAGRAM — a word or phrase whose pronunciation can be expressed as a sequence of letters. For instance, SX for ‘Essex’, NME for ‘enemy’, or ICQ for ‘I seek you’.
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Glow in the dark mushrooms can produce enough light to read by.
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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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After the French Revolution, saints' days were replaced with days honoring important items in rural French life.
June 21 was the day to honor the onion.
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Last month, gravitational wave scientists took suggestions for the collective noun for a group of black holes.
They've narrowed down the list to ten, and are considering: graveyard, horde, perforation, swarm, colloquium, disaster, sieve, brood and doom.
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A CAPITONYM is a word that means something different if it's capitalised - for instance "polish" and "Polish".
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‘Cow-juice’ was a 19th-century slang term for milk.
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Marvel has argued in court that the X-Men are definitively not human (for the purpose of selling action figures as toys, not dolls, and thus paying lower tax).
(Image: Manuel García Melgar; CC BY-NC.)
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"I'd take the awe of understanding over the awe of ignorance any day." DOUGLAS ADAMS
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We are here on Earth to fart around, and don’t let anybody ever tell you any different. KURT VONNEGUT
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For over 100 years people tried to crack this code on a gravestone in Ontario until a 94 year-old woman solved it in the 1970s. (Image: Mac Armstrong).
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The botanist Edward Salisbury once managed to grow 300 plants from the debris he’d collected in his trouser turn-ups, comprising over twenty different species of weeds.
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This house (located in Rockport, Massachusetts) was constructed entirely from newspaper, glue, and varnish.
It has so far survived 96 years of Massachusetts winters.
(Image: Danielle Walquist Lynch; CC BY.)
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‘Roomba’, the name of the robotic vacuum cleaner, was created by marketing specialists. Before that, the company had tried to come up with the name on their own and held an internal contest. The best entry was ‘Cyber Suck’.
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In 1926 the White House was sent a raccoon to eat for Thanksgiving, but President Calvin Coolidge and his wife Grace kept 'Rebecca' as a pet.
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Word of the day: ATTACHIANT(E) (French neologism) - someone you can't live with but can't live without.
It is a combination of "attachant" (endearing) and "chiant" (incredibly annoying).
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Spiders can have arachnophobia.
(Image: Thomas Shahan; CC BY-NC-ND.)
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‘Spocking’ is a Canadian practice whereby the features of the prime minister Wilfred Laurier on the Canadian five-dollar bill are altered so that he begins to look like the Star Trek character Spock. [📷: Kelapstick. CCA SA 4.0]
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Victorian Christmas cards were often secular in theme and their content could be quite morbid: many featured dead birds or anthropomorphic frogs in various states of jeopardy.
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"Getting an education was a bit like a communicable sexual disease. It made you unsuitable for a lot of jobs and then you had the urge to pass it on." TERRY PRATCHETT
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This is how scientists predict the continents will move over the next 200 million years.
(Animation: Sammy2012; CC BY-SA.)
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Ronald Reagan’s library just burned down. Both books were destroyed. But the real horror: He had not finished colouring the second one. GORE VIDAL
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A statue of Nelson Mandela installed in Pretoria in 2014 had to be altered when people spotted a rabbit sculpted inside one ear. (Image: PHParsons, CC-SA-3.0)
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In 1871, lawyer Clement Vallandigham was defending a client accused of murder.
In demonstrating how the victim might have accidentally shot himself, he accidentally shot himself.
He died. His client was acquitted.
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A Quite Interesting Twitter feed from the team behind the BBC TV show QI.
linktr.ee/TheQIElves