Uncle John's Bathroom Reader Extraordinary Book of Facts: And Bizarre Information (5 page)

ADIDAS

Adolph and Rudi Dassler formed Dassler Brothers Shoes in Germany in 1925. After World War II the partnership broke up, but each brother kept a piece of the shoe business. Rudi called his new company Puma; Adolph, whose nickname was Adi, renamed the old company after himself—Adi Dassler.

BOO

Meaning:
An exclamation used to frighten or surprise someone

Origin:
“The word
boh
!, used to frighten children, was the name of Boh, a great general, the son of the Norse god, Odin, whose very appellation struck immediate panic in his enemies.” (
Pulleyn’s Etymological Compendium
, by M. A. Thomas)

HANGNAIL

Meaning:
A small piece of skin that’s partially detached from the side or root of the fingernail

Origin:
“Had nothing to do with a hanging nail—the original word was angnail. The ang referred to the pain it caused—as in ang/uish.” (
Take My Words
, by Howard Richler)

GYPSY

Meaning:
A nomad, or a member of a nomadic tribe

Origin:
“In the early 16th century members of a wandering race who called themselves Romany appeared in Britain. They were actually of Hindu origin, but the British believed that they came from Egypt, and called them Egipcyans. This soon became shortened to Gipcyan, and by the year 1600, to Gipsy or Gypsey.” (
Webster’s Word Histories
)

PEDIGREE

Meaning:
A register recording a line of ancestors

Origin:
The term comes from the French words
pied de grue
, which mean “foot of a crane.” French families of old kept family trees, but that’s not what they called them. They thought the look of a genealogy chart—small at the top and branching out at the bottom—looked more like the webbed foot of a bird than the roots of a tree. Any Frenchman who came from a family prominent enough to have a family tree was said to have a
pied de grue
.

TROPHY

Meaning:
Something gained or given in victory or conquest

Origin:
From the old Greek word
trope
, which meant the turning point in a battle. The Greeks used to erect monuments at the exact spot on a battlefield where the tide had turned in their favor. Over the centuries the word evolved to represent any battle monument, whether or not it was on a battlefield . . . and even if it just commemorated a sporting victory.

CASTLE

Meaning:
A large building, usually of the medieval period, fortified as a stronghold

Origin:
“Castle was one of the earliest words adopted by the British from their Norman conquerors. Originally hailing from the Latin
castellum
(diminutive of castrum, ‘fort’), it reminds us that Old English also acquired castrum, still present in such place-names as Doncaster and Winchester. From Old French’s chastel (a version of castel) came the word château (circumflex accent marking the lost ‘s’).” (
The Secret Lives of Words
, by Paul West)

MIGRAINE

Meaning:
A severe recurring headache

Origin:
“Migraine had its beginning as a word in the Greco-Latin parts hemi-, ‘half,’ and cranium, ‘skull,’ which is descriptive of the violent headache that attacks one-half of the head.” (
Word Origins
, by Wilfred Funk)

BOULEVARD

Meaning:
A broad avenue, often with one or more strips of plantings (grass, trees, flower beds) on both sides or down the center

Origin:
“The name originally came from the Middle Low German Bolwerk, the top of the wide rampart—often 20 or more feet wide—that served as the defensive wall of medieval towns. As more sophisticated weaponry rendered such structures obsolete, they sometimes were razed to ground level and used as a wide street on the town’s perimeter. Vienna has such a broad boulevard, called the Ring, circling the old town on the site of its original city walls.” (
Fighting Words
, by Christine Ammer)

Seventy-two percent of Americans don’t know the people who live next door.

Eleven percent of Americans have thrown out a dish just because they don’t want to wash it.

Researchers say one in four people admits to snooping in their host’s medicine cabinet.

If you’re an average adult, you spend 11 to 13 minutes in the shower.

Every 45 seconds, a house catches fire in the United States.

More than 50 percent of Americans get out of bed before 7 a.m.

Americans recycle more than 60 percent of their soft-drink containers.

Seventy-four percent of Americans say they make their beds every day. Five percent say they never do.

Fifty-seven percent of American households have three or more telephones.

Half of all Americans live within 50 miles of where they grew up.

Do you alphabetize your spice rack? Only one in 12 Americans does.

Experts say the average person spends 30 years mad at a family member.

According to the U.S. Census Bureau, the average American marriage lasts 9.4 years.

In 71 percent of baby boomer households, both spouses work.

According to a Tupperware study, you’ll wind up throwing out about three fourths of your leftovers.

Forty percent of Americans who move to a new address switch toothpaste brands at the same time.

SCOTCH TAPE

Believe it or not, the sticky stuff gets its name from an ethnic slur. When two-toned paint jobs became popular in the 1920s, Detroit carmakers asked the 3-M Company for an alternative to masking tape that would provide a smooth, sharp edge where the two colors met. 3-M came up with two-inch-wide cellophane tape, but auto companies said it was too expensive. So 3-M lowered the price by applying adhesive only along the sides of the strip. That caused a problem: The new tape didn’t stick—and company painters complained to the 3-M sales reps, “Take this tape back to your stingy ‘Scotch’ bosses and tell them to put more adhesive on it!” The name—and the new tape—stuck.

BRASSIERES

Mary Phelps Jacob, a teenage debutante in 1913, wanted to wear a rose-garlanded dress to a party one evening. But as she later explained, her corset cover “kept peeping through the roses around my bosom.” So she took it off, pinned two handkerchiefs together, and tied them behind her back with some ribbon. “The result was delicious,” she later recalled. “I could move much more freely, a nearly naked feeling.” The contraption eventually became known as a brassiere—French for “arm protector”—a name borrowed from the corset cover it replaced. (Jacob later became famous for riding naked through the streets of Paris on an elephant.)

TOOTHPASTE TUBES

Toothpaste wasn’t packaged in collapsible tubes until 1892, when Dr. Washington Wentworth Sheffield, a Connecticut dentist, copied the idea from a tube of oil-based paint. Increased interest in sanitation and hygiene made it more popular than jars of toothpaste, which mingled germs from different brushes. Toothpaste tubes quickly became the standard.

WRISTWATCHES

Several Swiss watchmakers began attaching small watches to bracelets in 1790. Those early watches weren’t considered serious timepieces and remained strictly a women’s item until World War I, when armies recognized their usefulness in battle and began issuing them to servicemen instead of the traditional pocket watch.

FORKS

Before forks became popular, the difference between refined and common people was the number of fingers they ate with. The upper classes used three; everyone else used five. This began to change in the 11th century, when tiny, two-pronged forks became fashionable in Italian high society. But they didn’t catch on; the Catholic Church opposed them as unnatural (it was an insult to imply that the fingers God gave us weren’t good enough for food), and people who used them were ridiculed as effeminate or pretentious. Forks weren’t generally considered polite until the 18th century—some 800 years after they were first introduced.

PULL-TOP BEER CANS

In 1959 a mechanical engineer named Ermal Cleon Fraze was at a picnic when he realized he’d forgotten a can opener. No one else had one either, so he had to use the bumper of his car to open a can of soda. It took half an hour, and he vowed he’d never get stuck like that again. He patented the world’s first practical pull-top can later that year, and three years later, the Pittsburgh Brewing Company tried using it on its Iron City Beer. Now every beer company does.

CASH REGISTERS

In 1879 a Dayton, Ohio, saloon keeper named James J. Ritty was vacationing on a transatlantic steamer when he took a tour of the engine room and saw a machine that counted the number of revolutions of the ship’s propeller. He figured a similar machine might help him keep track of his saloon sales, and prevent dishonest bartenders from looting the till. When he got home, he and his brother invented Ritty’s Incorruptible Cashier—a machine with two rows of keys with amounts printed on them, a clocklike face that added up the amount of money collected, and a bell that rang after every transaction. It was the first product from the business that would become the National Cash Register Company (NCR).

A nonsmoking bartender inhales the equivalent of 36 cigarettes during an eight-hour shift.

Smokers need to ingest 40 percent more vitamin C than nonsmokers just to stay even.

In an average day 3,000 Americans take up smoking. Most of them are kids under age 18.

Twenty-one percent of U.S. smokers say they don’t believe nicotine is addictive.

Nearly 8,000 children each year are poisoned by eating cigarette butts.

Each puff of smoke inhaled from a cigarette contains 4 billion particles of dust.

The U.S. government approves 599 additives for use in the manufacture of cigarettes.

About 10 million cigarettes are sold every minute.

During London’s Great Plague of 1665, smoking tobacco was thought to have a protective effect.

Nonsmokers dream more at night than smokers do.

Christopher Columbus introduced the smoking of tobacco to Europe after discovering the “strange leaves” on the island of Cuba.

Nicotine is named for Jean Nicot de Villemain, France’s ambassador to Portugal, who wrote of tobacco’s medicinal properties, describing it as a panacea.

According to the American Heart Association, an estimated 47 million Americans smoke: 25.5 million men and 24.1 million women.

Emma Lazarus’s
The New Colossus
was inspired by the Colossus of Rhodes, one of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World.

Sculptor Frédéric-Auguste Bartholdi modeled the statue after his mother. When she got tired, his mistress stepped in for the final touches.

Lady Liberty stands looking eastward, across the Atlantic, to the Old World.

Winds of 50 miles per hour cause the statue to sway as much as three inches. Her torch sways five inches.

The 25 windows in the crown symbolize gemstones found on the earth and the heavens’ rays shining over the world.

The seven rays on her crown represent the seven seas and continents of the world.

The tablet that Lady Liberty holds in her left hand reads “July 4, 1776” in (mostly) Roman numerals.

Total weight of the concrete foundation: 54 million pounds (27,000 tons).

The statue’s two-layer gown would take about 4,000 square yards of cloth to duplicate.

The Statue of Liberty’s waist size is 35 (feet).

The Statue of Liberty’s mouth is three feet wide.

The Statue of Liberty’s index finger is eight feet long.

On average, the fingernails of the Statue of Liberty weigh 100 pounds each.

The Statue of Liberty is patented.

In the 1600s the Dutch used to cover their mirrors with curtains when not in use, lest the reflectiveness be used up!

In ancient China reflective pieces of polished brass were placed over doorknobs so that evil spirits would scare themselves away.

Ben Franklin mounted mirrors outside his second-story window so he could secretly see who was knocking at his front door.

The word
mirror
comes from the Latin
mirari
, meaning “to wonder at.” It’s also the root word for
miracle
and
admire
.

The world’s largest mirrors sit inside the twin Keck Telescopes—the world’s largest telescopes—at the W. M. Keck Observatory in Hawaii. Each mirror is made of 36 hexagonal segments that work together as a single piece. Diameter: ten meters (32 feet) across.

In olden days some thought that the reflection of the body in a shiny surface or mirror was an expression of the spiritual self, and therefore if anything happened to disturb that reflection, injury would follow. This was the origin of the superstition that breaking a mirror would bring seven years of bad luck.