Mental Floss: Instant Knowledge (32 page)

(in the courtroom)

USEFUL FOR:
cocktail parties, making headway with a judge, and clearing the awkward silence after someone’s just told a lawyer joke

KEYWORDS:
rats, courtroom, really bad excuses

THE FACT:
Believe it or not, there was a time in European history when people actually used to take animals to court. In this case, the rats actually managed to land themselves an amazing attorney.

When the French province of Autun’s barley began disappearing, the local rats were charged with stealing. When they failed to answer a summons (yes, really!), their appointed lawyer, Bartholomew Chassenée, argued that a single summons was invalid because the rats lived in different villages. New summonses were issued. This time Chassenée argued some of his clients were aged and infirm and needed more time. After that, he argued the rats were afraid to come to court because of all the cats along the way. When villagers refused to obey a court order to lock up their cats, charges against the rodents were dismissed. Chassenée later became France’s leading jurist. As for the dirty rats, they presumably returned to lives of crime.

(and one of the most one-sided battles of all time)

USEFUL FOR:
half-time shows, ballparks, and anytime you’re watching a team get slaughtered

KEYWORDS:
outmatch, crush, kill, bloodbath, or not really fair—even for love and war

THE FACT:
When the forces of British general Charles Gordon were surrounded and eventually destroyed by Islamic fundamentalist tribesmen at Khartoum, Sudan, in 1885, the blow to British prestige was tremendous. In fact, the British quickly decided not to get humiliated again.

The imperialist nation was so embarrassed that it decided the event demanded a total and overwhelming response. To get revenge, the British shipped a well-trained army to fight the native Muslim rebels in central Sudan. But the army wasn’t just well trained, they were well armed and were even carrying Gatling guns—prototype machine guns that drew ammunition from a long straight clip filing through the firing chamber. The result at the battle of Omdurman in 1898 was decisive and horrendous, resulting in the slaughter of tens of thousands of native tribesmen with virtually no British casualties.

(and Shakespeare’s knack for exaggerating)

USEFUL FOR:
cocktail parties, academic gatherings, and making small talk during Shakespeare intermissions

KEYWORDS:
hunchback, Richard III, or bad PR

THE FACT:
Despite what everybody thinks, Richard III probably was
not
a hunchback. So why’d old Will Shakespeare depict him that way?

To thrive as a playwright, Shakespeare needed to stay on the good side of his monarch, Elizabeth I. And since Queen Bess’s grandfather, Henry VII, had become king by defeating Richard III in battle, the queen had a family interest—and a personal stake—in seeing Richard remain a villain. Elizabeth’s father, Henry VIII, had previously commissioned a biography of Richard in which he was portrayed as physically and morally misshapen, and Shakespeare stuck to the script. Given the playwright’s skill, is it any wonder that the dramatic character of a hunchbacked bad guy caught on? Yet portraits painted during Richard’s lifetime showed no pronounced deformity.

USEFUL FOR:
cocktail parties, chatting about extreme sports, and impressing everyone at recess

KEYWORDS:
rock, paper, or scissors

THE FACT:
From the playground to the annual RPS International World Championship (really, people, we’re not kidding), outwitting your opponent is job number one for serious competitors. Not getting injured from playing might be number two.

According to the World RPS Society, one way to guess what hand someone will throw out is to know how many rounds they’ve won so far. Players who are in the lead will often use Scissors, because it’s believed to symbolize aggression, while Paper is used for a more subtle attack. Rock is usually a last resort, when players feel their strategies are failing. There are also techniques you can use to mask your move, such as cloaking, in which players will pretend to throw Rock and then stick out two fingers at the last second to make Scissors. But if you’re gonna play, be prepared to pay. In the late 1980s, Kenyan Mustafa Nwenge lost a match
and
the use of a finger when an overzealous opponent “cut his Paper” a little too zealously and crushed Nwenge’s finger ligaments. So what is it that beats hospital bill? Not playing with morons.

(the name on your thesaurus)

USEFUL FOR:
cocktail parties, academic gathers, and anytime you’re handing someone a thesaurus

KEYWORDS:
what’s another word for…

THE FACT:
You know his last name from the spine of your desk reference set, but did you know Peter Mark Roget was the Doogie Howser of the 1800s?

By the age of 14, he was studying medicine at Edinburgh University in Scotland, and in his spare time, compiling a well-indexed catalog of fancy words that he used to enhance his medical and theoretical papers. In one such paper, the young brainiac (see also
egghead, smarty-pants, Poindexter
) described the optical illusion one witnessed when viewing a moving carriage through the blinds of a window, explaining the eye’s ability to fill in the missing frames. It was groundbreaking research that would later lead to the invention of motion pictures. Of course, it would be decades until such technology was available, so Roget had to fall back on that book of words he’d been keeping. Fortunately, that worked out pretty well for him, and
Roget’s Thesaurus
was born (i.e. sprouted, emerged, germinated).