Revert back is commonly seen and always redundant: ‘If no other claimant can be found, the right to the money will revert back to her’ (Daily Telegraph). Delete back.
Successfully. ‘Japanese researchers have successfully developed a semiconductor chip made of gallium arsenide’ (Associated Press). It was thoughtful of the writer to tell us that the researchers had n...
The favourite activity is drinking a lot of beer and the second is throwing it up again)
The slight evolutionary change that pushed man’s larynx deeper into his throat, and thus made choking a possibility, also brought with it the possibility of sophisticated, well-articulated speech.
Jane Jacobs cites it in her landmark work of 1969, The Economy of Cities),
The confusion over the aluminum/aluminium spelling arose because of some uncharacteristic indecisiveness on Davy’s part. When he first isolated the element in 1808, he called it alumium. For some reas...
It occurred to me that never again would he be seven years, one month and six days old, so we had better catch these moments while we can.
22 million tonnes of such unwanted fish are dumped back in the sea each year, mostly in the form of corpses.
A filmmaker named Robert Goldstein was imprisoned for showing the British in a bad light in a movie about the American War of Independence.
Above all, the 1920s was a golden age for newspapers. Newspaper sales in the decade rose by about a fifth, to 36 million copies a day—or 1.4 newspapers for every household. New York City alone had twe...
All the light switches in the hallways were timed to go off after ten or fifteen seconds, presumably as an economy measure. This wasn’t so bad if your room was next to the elevator, but if it was very...
Although there was no reliable way of dating periods, there was no shortage of people willing to try. The most well known early attempt30 was made in 1650, when Archbishop James Ussher of the Church o...
As Edward P. Tryon of Columbia University once put it: In answer to the question of why it happened, I offer the modest proposal that our Universe is simply one of those things which happen from time...
As James Surowiecki noted in a New Yorker article, given a choice between developing antibiotics that people will take every day for two weeks and antidepressants that people will take every day for e...
Black bears rarely attack. But here's the thing. Sometimes they do. All bears are agile, cunning and immensely strong, and they are always hungry. If they want to kill you and eat you, they can, and p...
Bow was originally billed as the Brooklyn Bonfire, then as the Hottest Jazz Baby in Films, but in 1927 she became, and would forevermore remain, the It Girl. It was first a two-part article and then a...
Cressbrook Mill was operated mostly by orphans who were treated worse than abysmally.
Criminality was so widespread that its practitioners split into fields of specialization. Some became coney catchers, or swindlers (a coney was a rabbit reared for the table and thus unsuspectingly ta...
Dressing impractically is a way of showing that one doesn’t have to do physical work.
Even worse was the fate of an eighteenth-century Château Margaux reputed to have once been owned by Thomas Jefferson and valued, very precisely, at $519,750. While showing off his acquisition at a New...
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