Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s grandfather Warren Delano made much of the family’s fortune by trading opium, a fact that the Roosevelt family has never exactly crowed about.
General admission for groundlings—those who stood in the open around the stage—was a penny. Those who wished to sit paid a penny more, and those who desired a cushion paid another penny on top of that...
Gibbs is perhaps the most brilliant person most people have never heard of. Modest to the point of near-invisibility, he passed virtually the whole of his life, apart from three years spent studying i...
Goldilocks effect—that everything is just right. (For the record, these three possible universes are known respectively as closed, open and flat.) Now,
Good lord, look at you! he cried, delighted at my grubbiness. What have you been doing? You're filthy! He looked me up and down admiringly, then said in a more solemn tone: You haven't been screwing h...
Greenland ice cores show the temperatures there changing by as much as 8 degrees Celsius in ten years, drastically altering rainfall patterns and growing conditions.
He had a boyish enthusiasm for warfare and was delighted beyond words to be made a colonel in the Illinois National Guard without ever having done anything to merit it other than to exist as a rich pe...
He was defiantly narrow-minded, barely educated, and at least close to functionally illiterate. His beliefs were powerful but consistently dubious, and made him seem, in the words of The New Yorker, m...
He was particularly prolific, as David Crystal points out, when it came to attaching un- prefixes to existing words to make new words that no one had thought of before – unmask, unhand, unlock, untie,...
Here is an extract from the Pentagon’s Department of Food Procurement specifications for a regulation Type 2 sandwich cookie: The cookie shall consist of two round cakes with a layer of filling betwee...
His real gift was as a phrasemaker. Shakespeare’s language, says Stanley Wells, has a quality, difficult to define, of memorability that has caused many phrases to enter the common language. Among the...
Hitler and Mussolini even went so far as to persecute Esperanto speakers.
Hobson’s choice is sometimes taken to mean a dilemma or difficult decision, but in fact means no choice at all. It derives from a sixteenth-century Cambridge stable-keeper named Thomas Hobson, who hir...
Houses are really quite odd things. They have almost no universally defining qualities: they can be of practically any shape, incorporate virtually any material, be of almost any size. Yet wherever we...
How do migrating birds know which one to follow? What if the lead bird just wants to be alone?
However, what America does possess in abundance is a legacy of colorful names. A mere sampling: Chocolate Bayou, Dime Box, Ding Dong, and Lick Skillet, Texas; Sweet Gum Head, Louisiana; Whynot, Missis...
Hunters will tell you that a moose is a wily and ferocious forest creature. Nonsense. A moose is a cow drawn by a three-year-old.
I also learned that about ten thousand containers fall off ships each year. Sometimes after a period of years the container doors pop open and the contents float to the surface.
I am not a religious soul, but I must say it does seem a little uncanny that on that morning of all mornings I should have looked over the bridge at such a propitious moment. I mentioned the story at...
I am quite certain that if the rest of the world vanished overnight and the development of cricket was left in Australian hands, within a generation the players would be wearing shorts and using the b...
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