Uncle John's Bathroom Reader Extraordinary Book of Facts: And Bizarre Information (42 page)

Difficult, Tennessee, gets its name because its residents couldn’t agree on a name for the town.

Smallest town in the United States: Hove Mobile Park City, North Dakota, with a population of two.

If New York City were as densely populated as Alaska, 14 people would live in Manhattan.

New York’s Times Square was originally known as Long Acre Square.

Largest private landowner in New York City: the Catholic Church. Second: Columbia University.

Dallas was named after George Mifflin Dallas, vice president of the United States from 1845 to 1849.

Greater Los Angeles is bigger than Rhode Island and Delaware combined.

Two nations in the world are smaller than New York’s Central Park: Monaco and Vatican City.

Southernmost state capital in the continental United States: Austin, Texas.

Birmingham, Alabama, has 22 more miles of canals than Venice, Italy.

The average American consumes 22 gallons of beer a year.

The beer-drinkingest state: Nevada, at 35 gallons per capita. Least beer-imbibing state: Utah, at 13 gallons per person each year.

Italy consumes more wine per capita than any other nation on earth.

Odds that a grain of rice grown in the United States will end up being brewed into beer: one in 10.

Most popular hard liquor in Scotland: vodka.

France produces 20 million bottles of wine a day.

Kentucky produces more whiskey than every other state combined.

In Bavaria, beer isn’t just an alcoholic drink—it’s considered a staple food, like bread or eggs.

The spiral-shaped part of a corkscrew is called a “worm.”

Wine is mentioned in every book of the Bible except Jonah.

What do you call the dent in the bottom of a champagne bottle? A kick (or a punt).

Gin
comes from the French
genièvre
, for “juniper.” (Gin is made from juniper berries.)

Why six-packs? Breweries thought six beers were “the maximum a woman could safely carry.”

By 3000 B.C. there were at least six different types of beer in Egypt.

During Prohibition, half of all federal prison inmates were in jail for violating liquor laws.

If you feed beer to a laboratory rat, it will live six times longer than a rat that drinks only water.

TO BE WELL-HEELED

Meaning:
To have plenty of money or be well-to-do

Origin:
“It might be assumed that well-heeled originally alluded to the condition of a rich person’s shoes. But that is not the case. In the 18th century, it was a fighting cock that was ‘well-heeled,’ that is, fitted with an artificial spur before facing an opponent in the pit. From that, men began to ‘heel’ themselves, to carry a gun, before entering a trouble zone. Perhaps because most troubles can be alleviated by money, the expression took on its present financial aspect.” (
Heavens to Betsy!
, by Charles Earle Funk)

TO HAVE SOMEONE OVER A BARREL

Meaning:
To have the upper hand

Origin:
“In the days before mouth-to-mouth resuscitation, lifeguards placed drowning victims over a barrel, which was rolled back and forth while the lifeguard tried to revive them. The person ‘over the barrel’ is in the other person’s power or at his mercy.” (
The Facts on File Encyclopedia of Word and Phrase Origins
, by Robert Hendrickson)

TO BE A BASKET CASE

Meaning:
An overly anxious or stressed person who can’t function normally

Origin:
“First appeared as a slang term in WWI meaning ‘a quadruple amputee.’ Soldiers who had lost all their limbs actually were carried in baskets, because if they were carried on stretchers, they’d be too likely to fall out.” (
Jesse’s Word of the Day
, by Jesse Sheidlower)

PULL THE WOOL OVER SOMEONE’S EYES

Meaning:
Fool someone

Origin:
“Goes back to the days when all gentlemen wore powdered wigs like the ones still worn by the judges in British courts. The word
wool
was then a popular, joking term for hair . . . The expression ‘pull the wool over his eyes’ came from the practice of tilting a man’s wig over his eyes, so he couldn’t see what was going on.”

LET THE CAT OUT OF THE BAG

Meaning:
Reveal the truth

Origin:
Refers to a con game practiced at country fairs in old England. A trickster tried to sell a cat in a burlap bag to an unwary bumpkin, saying it was a pig. If the victim figured out the trick and insisted on seeing the animal, the cat had to be let out of the bag.

CHEW THE FAT

Meaning:
Chat; engage in idle conversation

Origin:
Originally a sailor’s term. Before refrigeration, ships carried food that wouldn’t spoil. One of them was salted pork skin, a practically inedible morsel that consisted largely of fat. Sailors would only eat it when all the other food was gone . . . and they often complained as they did. This (and other) idle chatter eventually became known as “chewing the fat.”

HAVE A SCREW LOOSE

Meaning:
Something is wrong with a person or mechanism

Origin:
The phrase comes from the cotton industry and dates back as far as the 1780s, when the Industrial Revolution made mass production of textiles possible for the first time. Huge mills sprang up to take advantage of the new technology (and the cheap labor), but it was difficult to keep all the machines running properly; any machine that broke down or produced defective cloth was said to have “a screw loose” somewhere.

IN THE NICK OF TIME

Meaning:
Without a second to spare

Origin:
Even into the 18th century some businessmen still kept track of transactions and time by carving notches—or nicks—on a “tally stick.” Someone arriving just before the next nick was carved would arrive in time to save the next day’s interest—in the nick of time.

THE INCH.
In its earliest form, the inch was the width of a grown man’s thumb. In the 14th century, King Edward II of England decreed that “the length of an inch shall be equal to three grains of barley, dry and round, placed end to end lengthwise.” This evolved into today’s standard measurement.

THE FOOT.
Originally the length of a person’s foot, the foot was later standardized in English-speaking countries to be 12 inches long. In other parts of the world, however, it could be anywhere from 11 to 14 inches in length.

THE YARD.
Originally the standard length of the belt that Anglo-Saxons wore. In the early 1100s, King Henry I of England decreed that a yard would be the distance from his nose to the thumb of his outstretched arm, which came to about 36 inches.

THE MILE.
A descendant of the ancient Roman measure called the
mille passuum
, which meant “a thousand paces.” Each pace was the equivalent of 5 Roman feet, which meant there were 5,000 feet to the mile. Today there are 5,280 feet to the mile. Why the extra feet? Because when the English incorporated the mile into their system of measurement, they wanted it to be equal to 8 furlongs. A furlong—originally defined as the distance a horse could pull a plow without resting—was exactly 660 feet long, so the English multiplied 660 by 8 to get 5,280. (Why didn’t they just knock some feet off the furlong and keep the mile a tidy 5,000 feet long? Because property was measured in furlongs—and changing the furlong would have screwed up every property holding in the kingdom.)

While performing her duties as queen, Cleopatra sometimes wore a fake beard.

In her entire life, Queen Berengaria of England never once visited England.

By the time the king of Siam died in 1910, he had fathered 370 children.

King George I of England (1714–1727) was German. He couldn’t speak a word of English.

Queen Victoria’s first act as queen: moving out of her mother’s room.

Napoléon Bonaparte, a Frenchman, designed the flag of Italy.

King Henry VIII owned tennis shoes.

Queen Anne of England (1665–1714) had 17 children. They all died before her.

Anne Boleyn, second wife of Henry VIII, had six fingers on her left hand.

Louis XIV owned 413 beds.

England’s Prince Charles won the Alfred E. Neuman Look-Alike Contest in 1992.

Mary Stuart became Queen of Scotland when she was only six days old.

In her entire lifetime, Spain’s Queen Isabella (1451–1504) bathed twice. King Louis XIV bathed three times.

First photos of missing children on milk cartons

Soviet Union boycotted summer Olympics in L.A.

Newsweek
magazine dubbed 1984 the “Year of the Yuppie”

#1 movie:
Ghostbusters

NAMBY-PAMBY

Meaning:
Weak, wishy-washy

Origin:
“Derived from the name of Ambrose Philips, a little-known poet whose verse incurred the ridicule of two other 18th-century poets, Alexander Pope and Henry Carey. In poking fun at Philips, Carey used the nickname Namby Pamby: Amby came from Ambrose; Pamby repeated the sound and form, but added the initial of Philips’s surname. After being popularized by Pope in
The Dunciad
, namby-pamby went on to be used for people or things that are insipid, sentimental, or weak.” (
Word Mysteries & Histories
, by the Editors of The American Heritage Dictionaries)

KALEIDOSCOPE

Meaning:
A tubular optical toy; a constantly changing set of colors

Origin:
“In 1817 Dr. David Breuster invented a toy which he called a kaleidoscope. He selected three Greek words that when combined had a literal meaning of ‘observer of beautiful forms.’ The words were kalos (‘beautiful’), eidos (‘form’), and skopos (‘watcher’). The term has come into prominent use in its figurative sense; namely, a changing scene—that which subtly shifts color, shape, or mood.” (
The Story Behind the Word
, by Morton S. Freeman)

MONEY

Meaning:
Currency; a medium of exchange in the form of coins and

Origin:
“Hera, queen of the Greek gods, kept her name out of the vulgate [common speech] until she moved to Rome and became Juno. As Juno Moneta (Juno the Monitress), she presided over a Roman temple where gold was coined. Moneta became the eponym of money, and Moneta’s temple a mint.” (
Thou Improper, Thou Uncommon Noun
, by Willard Espy)

COOKIE

Meaning:
A small sweet cake, typically round, flat, and crisp

Origin:
“The word was borrowed from the Dutch
koekje
, ‘little cake,’ which is the diminutive of Dutch
koek
, ‘cake.’
Cookie
came into American English from the Dutch settlers of New York. It first appears in 1703 in the statement that ‘at a funeral, 800 cockies . . . were furnished.’ This early English spelling of the word differs from our modern spelling, but several other spellings also arose, such as
cookey
and
cooky
. The spelling
cookie
may have won out because the word is very common in the plural, spelled
cookies
.” (
Word Mysteries and Histories
, by the Editors of The American Heritage Dictionaries)

DRAB

Meaning:
Lacking brightness, dull

Origin:
“In the 16th century, drab was a word for a kind of cloth, coming into English from French drap, ‘cloth.’ From this, the word came to mean the common color of such cloth, which was its natural undyed color of dull brown or gray. Hence the fairly general meaning ‘dull,’ whether of an object’s color (where it usually is brown or gray still, as ‘drab’ walls) or in a figurative sense, as a ‘drab’ day or someone’s ‘drab’ existence.” (
Dunces, Gourmands & Petticoats
, by Adrian Room)