In the eighteenth century the word awful meant awe-inspiring, and the word artificial meant full of great art.
During the Napoleonic Wars, Napoleon's soldiers bivouacked in the chapel of Santa Maria delle Gazie in Milan, where Leonardo's LAST SUPPER is located. The soldiers used the painting in target practice, shooting at the central figure of Christ's head. This is why the face of Christ is almost obliterated in the painting.
Auguste Rodin's statue THE THINKER, was not meant to be a portrait of a man in thought, but was meant to be a portrait of the poet Dante.
The only painting by an American hanging in the Louvre is WHISTLER'S MOTHER. The official title is ARRANGEMENT IN BLACK AND GRAY: The Artist's Mother.
Did you know that in the Bible it says that Moses had horns coming from his head? This is a mistaken translation as in Hebrew the words for horn and ray of light are spelled identically. The translators misinterpreted ray for horn, and thus Moses is often portrayed in western art as looking like a devil. Michelangelo created horns protruding from the head of his famous statue of Moses.
Facts about Mona Lisa: Her eyebrows are shaved off as it was the fashion in Renaissance Florence to do so. The real name of the painting is not MONA LISA, it is LA GIACONDA. It is a portrait of a middle-class Florentine woman, the wife of a merchant named Francesco del Giacondo. The painting measures 2 feet by 2 feet. An entire opera was written about the painting by Max von Schillings. X-rays of the painting show that there are three completely different versions of the same subject, all painted by Leonardo, under the final portrait.
Houdini was the first man to fly an airplane solo in Australia.
The top of the tower on the Empire State Building was originally intended (though never used) as a mooring place for dirigibles.
The name of the first airplane flown at Kitty Hawk by the Wright Brothers was BIRD OF PREY. The maiden flight of the BIRD OF PREY, however, was less than a flight, the plane stayed in the air only long enough to sail 59 feet.
Charles Lindbergh was not the first man to fly the Atlantic. He was the sixty-seventh. The first sixty-six made the crossing in dirigibles and twin-engine mail planes. Lindbergh was the first to make the dangerous flight alone.
Castor oil is used as a lubricant in jet planes.
Newborn babies are not blind as once thought. Studies have found that their vision is 20/50 and can easily discriminate between degrees of brightness. A fetus in the womb can hear. A survey conducted at Iowa State College in 1969 suggests that a parent's stress at the time of conception plays a major role in determining a baby's sex. The child tends to be of the same sex as the parent who is under less stress. Statistics based on more than a half-million births occurring in NYC hospitals between 1948 and 1957 show a significantly greater number of births taking place during the waning moon than during the waxing moon. Children born in the month of May are on the average 200 grams heavier at birth than children born in any other month. Up to the age of six or seven months a child can breathe and swallow at the same time. An adult cannot do this.
Studies of the Dead Sea Scrolls indicate that the passage in the Bible known as the Sermon on the Mount is actually an ancient Essene prayer dating to hundreds of years before the birth of Christ.
The Lord's Prayer appears twice in the Bible, in Matthew VI and Luke XI.
Two chapters in the Bible, 2 Kings 19 and Isaiah 37 are alike almost word for word.
The shortest verse in the Bible consists of two words: Jesus wept. John 11:35
The King James version of the Bible has 50 authors, 66 books, 1,189 chapters, and 31,173 verses.
In the history of printing, several early English Bibles are famous not so much for their workmanship or their beauty as for their textual idiosyncrasies. A few famous examples, much sought after by rare-Bible collectors are: THE BREECHES BIBLE (1560) so named because it states that Adam and Eve "sewed fig tree leaves together and made themselves breeches." THE BUG BIBLE (1551) so named because of an incorrect translation of a line in the Ninety-first Psalm. The line "Thou shalt not be afraid for the terror by night" reads "Thou shalt not be afraid of any buggies by night."
THE TREACLE BIBLE (1568) so named because it uses the word "treacle" for "balm" in the line "Is there no balm in Gilead?"
Nero did not fiddle while Rome burned. The fiddle had not yet been invented. Nor was Nero there. He was at his villa in Antium, 50 miles away.
Ancient Romans always entered the home of a friend on their right foot, the left side of the body was thought to portend evil. The Latin word for left is sinister, thus our English word sinister for anything threatening or malevolent.
Atomic theory was known to the ancient Greeks. It formed the basis of the Greek philosopher Democritus' theory of atomism and his materialistic explanation of the universe.
A stone phallus was set above the city gates of many ancient Roman towns as a protection against bad luck. Under the phallus appeared the inscription Hic Habit Felicitas...Happiness Dwells Here. The Romans often hung small phalli around children's necks as a protection against the evil eye.
Ancient Romans invented the level and the claw hammer.
The average American's vocabulary contains 10,000 words. Of all professionals in the US, journalists are credited with having the largest vocabulary, approximately 20,000 words. Clergymen, lawyers, and doctors each have about 15,000 words. Skilled workers who have not had a college education know between 5,000 and 7,000 words, and farm laborers about 1,600.
After his death, Alexander the Great's remains were preserved in a huge crock of honey. Among the ancient Egyptians, it was a common practice to bury the dead in this manner.
Undertakers report that human bodies do not deteriorate as quickly as they used to. The reason for this, they believe, is that the modern diet contains so many preservatives that these chemicals tend to prevent the body from decomposing too rapidly after death.
When a person dies, hearing is generally the last sense to go. The first sense lost is usually sight. Then follow taste, smell and touch.
Both George Washington and Thomas Jefferson grew Cannabis sativa (marijuana) on their plantations.
In the Middle Ages animals were tried and publicly executed. Birds, wolves, insects, all were tried by ecclesiastical courts as witches and heretics, and suffered excommunication, torture, and death. The last such trial took place in 1740, when a French judge found a cow guilty of sorcery and ordered it hanged by the neck until dead. In 1386 at Falaise a judge ordered a pig to have its legs mutilated and then be hanged for killing a little girl. The pig was dressed up in the child's jacket and dragged to the town square with all the ceremony due a first-rate criminal. The execution, it is recorded, cost 6 sows plus a pair of gloves for the executioner so that he might carry out the killing with clean hands.
During the French revolution, a magistrate named Jean Baptiste Carrier, commissioner of the National Convention at Nantes, dispatched a number of boatloads of political prisoners into the Loire River. When the boat was in midstream he ordered a trap door in the bottom of the boat opened, sending an entire group of prisoners to their death. From his merciless methods of extermination the word noyade, meaning mass drowning, was coined.
People condemned to the guillotine in France during the French revolution had the top of their head shaved. Two long locks of hair were left hanging at the temples.
Those condemned to die by the axe in medieval and Renaissance England were obliged to tip their executioner to ensure that he would complete the job in one blow. In some executions, notably that of Mary, Queen of Scots, it took fifteen whacks of the blade before the head was severed.
The Nazis used the guillotine to execute prisoners during WWII. Their version of the punishment had the condemned person lying on his back with his eyes forced open so that he had to watch the blade as it descended.
Until recent times, prisoners condemned to death in Mongolia were nailed into wooden boxes and left on the plains to die of exposure and starvation.
Before King George IV of England ordered a set of boots made to fit each of his feet, shoes were designed to be worn on either foot.
Kilts are not native to Scotland. The originated in France. The bagpipes originated in Iran. The shoestring was invented in England in 1790. Prior to this time all shoes were fastened with buckles.
In the late nineteenth century, it was the fashion among many English women to wear gold rings through their nipples. In an 1899 edition of the British journal Society, fascinating details are given about this peculiar fad. The woman who wished to wear such ornaments, the magazine said, had holes bored through her nipples and thin golden rings threaded through the holes. It was believed that wearing the rings were a stimulating sight for men when exposed. The operation was performed not by doctors, but by jewelers, as much of the ear piercing is done today.
Benjamin Franklin was the first head of the US post office.
The first macaroni factory in the US was established in 1848 by Antoine Zegera in Brooklyn, New York.
The first US Marine Corps officer of Chinese descent was commissioned in 1943. His name was Wilbur Size. The first black to be commissioned in the Marines, John Rudder, received his commission in 1948.
THE ADVENTURES OF TOM SAWYER was the first novel ever to be written on a typewriter. It was typed on a Remington in 1875 by Mark Twain himself. Twain, however, wished to withhold the fact. He did not want to write testimonials, he said, or answer questions concerning the operation of the "newfangled thing".
The A&P (The Great Atlantic and Pacific Tea Company) was the first chain-store business to be established. It began in 1842.
Benjamin Franklin was America's first political cartoonist. His drawing of a snake divided into eight parts was published in Philadelphia in 1842.
Andrew Jackson was the first president to ride in a railroad train. The first to use a telephone was James Garfield. Theodore Roosevelt was the first to ride in an automobile.
Theodore Roosevelt was the firs US president to visit a foreign country while in office. In November, 1906, he sailed on the U.S.S. Louisiana for Panama and Puerto Rico.
The telephone was not invented by Alexander Graham Bell. Its first creator was a German, Philip Reis, who in 1861 made a primitive sending-receiving transmitter which he called the telephone. Twelve years later Elisha Gray of Chicago completed a short-distance telephone communication. Bell's invention, patented in March 1876, was distinguished by the fact that it was the first sending-receiving mechanism over which the human voice could be transmitted.
The postage stamp was invented by an Englishman named James Chambers in 1834. Before that time envelopes had stamps engraved upon them. They were bulky, however, and Chambers' invention caught on immediately. Postage stamps were introduced to America in 1847.
Hames Ramsey invented a steam-driven motorboat in 1784. He ran it on the Potomac River, and the event was witnessed by George Washington.
Benjamin Franklin invented crop insurance.
The automobile was invented by several nineteenth-century engineers, paramount among them being two Germans, Gottlieb Daimler and Karl Benz.
The parachute was invented more than a hundred years before the airplane. It was the creation of a Frenchman, Louis Lenormand, who designed it in 1783 to save people who had to jump from burning buildings. In 1787 Jacques Garnerin gave a public exhibition of parachuting, descending 3,000 feet from a balloon.
The parking meter was invented by Carl Magee in Oklahoma City, and the first model appeared in 1935. Early models look almost exactly like modern ones: few items have changed as little through the years as the parking meter.
James J. Ritty invented the cash register in 1879. He was the owner of a tavern in Dayton, Ohio, and invented it to stop his patrons from pilfering house profits.
The monkey wrench is named after its inventor, a London blacksmith named Charles Moncke.
Camel's hair brushes are not made of camel's hair. They were invented by a man named Mr. Camel.
In 1739 a man named Plunket Fleeson invented wallpaper in Philadelphia. He stamped designs on paper with wood blocks and painted them in by hand. In August of that year, Fleeson advertised in the Pennsylvania Gazette the sale of bed ticks, choice of live geese feathers as well as paper hangings.
Leonardo de Vinci invented the scissors.
To decimate means to destroy one-tenth of something. Originally the word referred to a Roman military tradition in which an entire troop would be punished for disobedience by decimation, that is by killing of every tenth man. There are accounts of this form of punishment being used in the English and French armies up to the time of WWI.
In Middle English the word minister meant lowly person. It was originally adopted as a term of humility for men of the church.
The term "hooker," meaning a prostitute, originated with U.S. General Joseph Hooker, whose penchant for war was matched only by his predilection for paid female companionship. In New Orleans during the Civil War, Hooker spent so much time frolicking with ladies of the night that the women came to be called Hooker's division. Eventually these troops became know simply as hookers.(This is a family surname of mine...and although I do not so far find a direct lineage to General Hooker, it is a family joke. I also heard a version that in New York, there was a street named Hooks and that the ladies operated out of that area, thus they were called hookers. I like the General's story better.)
The original name for the butterfly was flutterby.
Facetious and abstemious are the only two words in the English language that contain the vowels a, e, I, o, and u in their proper order.
Eskimos have more than twenty words to describe snow.
What is called a French kiss in England and America is known as an English kiss in France.
The act of snapping your fingers is called fillip.
Clue originally meant a ball of thread, so this is why one is said to unravel the clues of a mystery.
The ampersand (&) was once a letter of the English alphabet.
The word gas was coined by the chemist JB van Helmont, and is from the Greek word chaos meaning unformed.
Naked and nude are not the same. Naked implies unprotected, nude means unclothed.
The word geriatrics was not coined until 1951.
In Elizabethan slang the term "to die" meant to have an orgasm. This double entendre was often used by John Donne (The Prohibition, The Canonization), and by Shakespeare in King Lear. Perhaps that is why today people use the term when they say "This cake is to die for." Hmm, that gives it a whole new meaning.
The word toast; meaning a proposal of health, originated in Rome. An actual bit of spiced, burned bread was dropped into wine to improve the drink's flavor, absorb its sediment, and thus make it more healthful.
The word turnpike originated in the days when toll collectors were armed with pikes, long-handled weapons with sharp iron heads. They used these weapons to prevent travelers who refused to pay the tariff from using their roads.
Clodhopper was an early English term for the peasantry. In those days the farmers traveled by foot, and had to jump across clods of plowed earth. Those who have to hop over clods.
The word robot was coined in 1920 in a play, R.U.R. The initials stood for Rossum's Universal Robots, and was written by the Czech dramatist Karel Capek.
Cinderella was originally a French story and the word vaire, which was a medieval French word for fur was incorrectly substituted in early versions with the word verre, or glass.(So she originally wore a furry slipper. I think I like glass better.)
The term freelance was invented by Sir Walter Scott to refer to itinerant mercenary soldiers who sold their abilities to the highest bidder.
The letter B took its present form from a symbol used in Egyptian hieroglyphics to represent a house. Its original Egyptian form looked very much like its modern one.
In England, corn means wheat, and in the Bible, corn means grain.
Prior to the adoption of the Twelfth Amendment in 1804, the candidate who ran second in a presidential race automatically became vice-president. Thomas Jefferson became John Adams' VP this way.
In Turkey in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, anyone caught drinking coffee was put to death.
The US Supreme Court once ruled Federal income tax unconstitutional. Income tax was first imposed during the Civil War as a temporary revenue-raising measure. In the late 1800s the government attempted to revive the levy again, but the Supreme Court ruled it in violation of the constitutional provision that direct taxes must be apportioned among the states according to their population. In 1913, however, Congress passed the Sixteenth Amendment, making a Federal impost legal once again.
In Arizona, it is illegal to hunt camels.
Voltaire considered Shakespeare's works so deplorable that re referred to the Bard as "that drunken fool."
All the proceeds earned from James M. Barrie's book PETER PAN, were bequeathed to the Great Ormond Street Hospital for Sick Children in London.
Marcel Proust's REMEMBRANCE OF THINGS PAST contains almost 1.5 million words.
Fagin, the sinister villain in Charles Dickens' OLIVER TWIST, was also the name of Dickens' best friend, Bob Fagin.
Emily Dickinson wrote more than nine hundred poems, only four of which were published during her lifetime.
Gibbon spent twenty years writing THE DECLINE AND FALL OF THE ROMAN EMPIRE. Noah Webster spent thirty-six years writing his dictionary.
There is no living descendant of William Shakespeare.
The great English poet John Keats died at the age of twenty-six.
Alfred, Lord Tennyson wrote a 6,000 word epic poem when he was twelve years old.
Robert Louis Stevenson said that he had envisioned the entire story of DR. JEKYLL AND MR. HYDE in a dream and simply recorded it the way he saw it. Stevenson claimed to be able to dream plots for his stories at will.
ALICE IN WONDERLAND was originally known as ALICE'S ADVENTURES UNDER GROUND and was illustrated by the author himself, Lewis Carroll, whose name was Charles Lutwidge Dodgson. He was a mathematics professor at Christ's Church, Oxford.
In PETER PAN the place where kids go was called Neverland, not Never-Never Land.
The fairy tales PUSS IN BOOTS, LITTLE RED RIDINGHOOD, CINDERELLA, and many others, were first written down by Charles Perrault, who also helped design part of the Louvre.
In GULIVER'S TRAVELS, Jonathan Swift described the two moons of Mars, Phobos and Deimos, giving their exact size and speeds of rotation. He did this more than a hundred years before either moon was discovered.
TREASURE ISLAND was created by Robert Louis Stevenson as a lark. He drew up a map for his stepson on a rainy day and the boy encouraged him to make up a story to go along with the treasure map. Stevenson liked the stories so much he wrote them down. These were the basis for his great novel.
KUBLA KHAN was written by Samuel Taylor Coleridge from a dream, and as he was in the midst of writing it down, someone knocked on his door. He rose to let them in, then found he could not remember the rest of the dream. That is why it is unfinished.
PRIDE AND PREJUDICE written by Jane Austen, was originally titled FIRST IMPRESSIONS.
Bobbing for apples at Halloween originated as part of a divinatory technique practiced by the Druids. Apples were floated in a tub of water on the 31st of October, the Druid New Year's Eve. Participants attempted to fish them out without using their hands. Those who succeeded were guaranteed a prosperous year.
The Three Kings of the Nativity story were actually sorcerers. They were magicians, priests of the Zoroastrian religion of Persia. The word magi (as in the Three Magi) is the plural of magus, meaning wizard in Old Persian. It is from this root word magic is derived.
Pirates believed that piercing the ears and wearing an earring improved eyesight. This idea, scoffed at for centuries, has been reevaluated in light of acupuncture theory. The point on the lobe where the ear was pierced corresponds to the auricular acupuncture point controlling the eyes.
Here are some real names: George Orwell-Eric Blair Ellery Queen-Frederic Dunnay and Manfred B. Lee Lenin-Vladimir Ulyanov Maxim Gorky-Alexey Peshkov George Eliot-Mary Ann Evans Baby Face Nelson-Lester Gillis Dutch Schults-Arthur Flegenheimer Josef Stalin-Josef Dzhugashvili Jules Verne-L.M. Olehewitz Voltaire-Francois Marie Arouet Donatello-Donato di Niccolo di Betto Bardi
In 1781 the planet Uranus was discovered and named by Sir William Herschel as Georgium Sidium in honor of King George III of England. For many years the planet was know as the Georgian. In 1850 it was christened Uranus in accordance with the tradition of naming planets for Roman gods.
Karl Marx once served as a reporter on the NY Herald Tribune, the paper was then known as the NY Tribune. In 1848 he worked in the London office of the Tribune and his boss, the managing editor, was Richard Henry Dana, who himself became world-famous as author of TWO YEARS BEFORE THE MAST.
There is absolutely no documented proof that Betsy Ross designed the American flag.
Attila the Hun was a dwarf. Pepin the Short, Aesop, Gregory of Tours, Charles III of Naples and the Pasha Hussain were all less than 3 ½ feet tall.
One of Napoleon's drinking cups was made from the skull of the famous Italian adventurer Cagliostro.
The Graham cracker was named after Sylvester Graham, 1794-1851, a New England minister. Graham not only invented the cracker, but also published a journal in Boston that took a rabid stand against tea, coffee, feather beds and women's corsets.
Alexandre Gustave Eiffel, the man who designed the Eiffel Tower, also designed the inner structure of the Statue of Liberty in NY Harbor.
The first president of the US was not George Washington, but John Hanson, Maryland's representative at the Continental Congress. On November 5, 1781, Hanson was elected by the Constitutional Congress to the office of President of the United States in Congress Assembled. He served for one year.
A man named David Rice Atchison was president of the US for one day, and didn't even know it. According to a nineteenth-century law, if neither the president nor the vice-president was in office, the president pro tem of the Senate became chief executive. March 4, 1849, President James Knox Polk's term had lapsed, and the newly elected Zachary Taylor could not yet be sworn in, because it was a Sunday. So, for one day Atchison was president. Several months later he learned of this law, as it was an obscure one, and it has since been changed.
Every navel orange comes from a single tree. In the early nineteenth century, a mutant tree appeared on a plantation in Brazil. It produced oranges without seeds. Every navel orange in the world today comes from a bud that was grafted from that mutant onto another tree, whose branches were then grafted onto another, and so forth.
Ever wonder where the word "shit" comes from. Well here it is:
Certain types of manure used to be transported (as everything was back then) by ship. In dry form it weighs a lot less, but once water (at sea) hit it, it not only became heavier, but the process of fermentation began again, of which a by-product is methane gas. As the stuff was stored below decks in bundles you can see what could (and did) happen, methane began to build up below decks and the first time someone came below at night with a lantern.
BOOOOM!
Several ships were destroyed in this manner before it was discovered what was happening. After that, the bundles of manure where always Stamped with the term "S.H.I.T" on them which meant to the sailors "Ship High In Transit." In other words, high enough off the lower decks so that any water that came into the hold would not touch this volatile cargo and start the production of methane.
