Uncle John’s Heavy Duty Bathroom Reader@ (40 page)

—City News,
Toronto, August 2010

Cars didn’t have gas gauges until 1922. Before that you had to dip a stick in the tank.

SHEETHEADS

For some fans, being a “fanatic” isn’t enough—they want a title, too
.

• Rush Limbaugh adherents so completely agree with every opinion expressed by Limbaugh that they just say “Ditto,” and refer to themselves as
Dittoheads.

• Die-hard fans of
American Idol
singer Clay Aiken are
Claymates.

• Devotees of the series of
Twilight
vampire novels and movies are known as
Twi-Hards.

• The early days of the Internet coincided with the popularity of TV show
The X Files
. People who discussed the show online called themselves
X-Philes.

• Singer-songwriter Tori Amos coined a term for her highly loyal fan base, which they then adopted:
Ears With Feet.

• Playing off the state’s endless wheat fields, fans of the classic rock band Kansas call themselves
Wheatheads.

• The American sitcom
The Office
takes place at a small paper company called Dunder Mifflin.
Office
fans are thus
Dunderheads.

•
Glee
is a musical comedy TV show, for which its fans are “geeks.”
Glee
+ geeks =
Gleeks.

• Serious fans of
The Daily Show
call themselves
Stoned Slackers.
Why? That’s what Fox News pundit Bill O’Reilly derisively called
Daily Show
viewers when he appeared on the show in 2003.

• The fans of the Broadway musical
The Phantom of the Opera
are known as
Phans.

• Grateful Dead fans are well known to be
Deadheads.
Phish, a band heavily influenced by the Dead, has fans called
Phish Heads.

• Are you a big fan of the TV show
The West Wing?
Then you’re a
Wingnut.
(Secondary meaning: In the real world of politics, left-wing or right-wing extremists are also referred to as wingnuts.)

• Devoted users of Microsoft’s computer spreadsheet program Excel gave themselves this nickname:
Sheetheads.

First person featured on a Wheaties box: animal trainer Maria Rasputin (1934).

A TOY IS BORN

Even when all hope seems lost, don’t give up…because you just might get that random phone call from your sister-in-law in New Jersey
.

W
HEN LIFE GIVES YOU LEMONS…
In the 1930s, a Cincinnati soap company called Kutol Products expanded their line to include wallpaper cleaner. Their doughy detergent mixture was the best way to remove the soot from walls caused by coal-burning stoves—you just formed a handful of Kutol into a ball and rolled it over the soot.

But after World War II, fewer people had coal-burning stoves, and more people had easy-to-wash vinyl wallpaper. Result: Kutol’s sales plummeted. In 1949 the company’s owner was killed in a plane crash. His widow inherited the business, and she hired her 25-year-old son, Joe McVicker, to run it. Not long after, young McVicker was diagnosed with Hodgkin’s disease, a type of blood cancer. He was dying, he had a factory full of products that hardly anyone needed, and Kutol was on the verge of folding.

…MAKE LEMONADE

In December 1954, McVicker got a phone call from Kay Zufall, his sister-in-law, who ran a nursery school in New Jersey. She told him that because the clay her kids were using to sculpt Christmas tree ornaments was too hard for their little hands to manipulate—and it stained—she went to a hardware store and bought a tub of Kutol Wallpaper Cleaner. It was softer than clay, nontoxic, and didn’t stain. And it worked great. So McVicker sent a few tubs to the Cincinnati School District. Again, it was a hit.

Then, after receiving experimental radiation treatment, McVicker’s cancer went into remission. With a renewed sense of purpose, he had the detergent removed from Kutol Wallpaper Cleaner, added coloring and an almond scent, and decided to market it as Kutol’s Rainbow Modeling Compound. “Don’t call it that!” said Zufall. McVicker asked her what they should call it. “It’s dough you play with,” she replied, “so how about Play Dough?” Since 1955 two billion cans of Play-Doh have sold.

The Navy ship USS
New
York
was built with recycled World Trade Center steel.

IT’S GREEK TO US

The meanings have changed a bit, and they weren’t originally in English, of course, but many of today’s most common words and phrases are literally ancient, dating back to the heyday of ancient Greece
.

B
ITE THE DUST
Meaning:
To die suddenly
Origin:
Homer’s epic poem the
Iliad
. Written around the 8th century B.C., it’s a tale about the legendary Trojan War, which erupts when Troy kidnaps the Greek queen Helen. The Greeks invade Troy to retrieve Helen, and in one pre-battle passage, the Greek warrior Agamemnon prays to Zeus to make sure that the Trojans are absolutely slaughtered. “Do not let the sun go down until thousands who share in this quarrel fall headlong in the dust and bite the earth.” In other words, Agamemnon wanted his opponents dead, face-down in the dirt. In an 1898 English-language translation of the
Iliad,
“bite the earth” was changed to “bite the dust,” which is when it entered the vernacular.

DRACONIAN

Meaning:
Brutally strict

Origin:
In ancient Greece, administering punishment for murder (and other crimes) wasn’t the concern of government—it was a private issue, left up to the family of the victim. In 640 B.C., an Olympic champion named Cylon and a band of followers from the neighboring city-state of Megara attempted to take over Athens. The invasion was thwarted, but so many people were involved that the Athenian government, trying to avoid a bloodbath of Athenians killing Megarans and Megarans exacting revenge by killing Athenians, set up trials for Cylon and his followers. It worked so well that in 621 B.C., Athens gave a legislator named Draco full authority to enact a law requiring that murder charges be heard in state-sponsored trials. This is both the foundation for present-day justice…as well as for the death penalty. Draco meted out death sentences for many crimes—not just for murder—leading to the English adjective
draconic,
used to describe anything severe or strict. It became
draconian
in the late 1800s.

A cursed year: The “f-word” was first printed in English in 1475.

SWAN SONG

Meaning:
A triumphant final performance before death or retirement

Origin:
It first appears in
Phaedo,
Plato’s transcript of conversations between the philosopher Socrates and his students (including Plato himself) during Socrates’ final days—just before a death sentence for corrupting Greek youth (his students) was carried out against him. In one section, Socrates declares that he has to come to terms with his impending death and is at peace with it to such a degree that he can actually enjoy his final days. He tells his friends that he has “as much of the spirit of prophecy as do the swans. For they, when they perceive that they must die, having sung all their life long, do then sing more, and more sweetly, than ever, rejoicing in the thought that they are about to go away.” Socrates was revered, and after he died the quote was frequently repeated in documents by such philosophers and writers as Aeschylus, Aristotle, Cicero, Chaucer, and Shakespeare. That’s why we still say it today. Only problem: Swans don’t really sing—they honk.

MENTOR

Meaning: A person, usually older, who offers wisdom, advice, and guidance

Origin:
In Homer’s
Odyssey,
Mentor is the name of an older man who remains loyal to King Odysseus even after the king has been missing for 10 years and is presumed dead. All of Ithaca, Odysseus’ kingdom, believes that Odysseus’ wife, Penelope, should marry one of her many suitors…except Mentor, who has held out all along that Odysseus was still alive, and is ultimately proven right. The word came to mean not just a loyal friend but a wise one with the 1699 publishing of the novel
Telemaque
by Fenelon of Cambrai, a retelling of the
Odyssey
in which Mentor is the central character—a wise figure of near superhuman goodness.

IN A NUTSHELL

Meaning:
A complicated concept or experience expressed succinctly

The Statue of Liberty is 20 times taller than an average woman.

Origin:
The ancient Greek historian Pliny the Elder was known to stretch the truth a bit, especially when it came to the poems of Homer, which themselves were historical epics that embellished the truth. In
Natural History,
Pliny claims that a copy of Homer’s Iliad, written entirely on a piece of parchment, had once been found inside a nutshell. (There’s no way this be true—the
Iliad
is 15,690 lines long.) This amusing boast later became a Latin proverb,
in nuce Ilias,
or “the
Iliad
in a nutshell,” which expresses the same meaning it holds today. The 16th-century English writer Stephen Gosson was the first to use the phrase without mentioning the
Iliad,
but it was popularized by frequent usage in the works of 19th-century writers Charles Dickens and Robert Browning.

I’M SO AFRAID!

There’s a lot to be afraid of. Do you have any of these phobias?

Automatonophobia:
fear of robots

Nephophobia:
clouds

Vestiphobia:
clothes

Pedophobia:
children

Podophobia:
feet

Ouranophobia:
heaven

Cnidophobia:
insect bites

Barophobia:
gravity

Sciophobia:
shadows

Oneirophobia:
dreams

Caligynephobia:
beautiful women

Rhytiphobia:
wrinkles

Mycophobia:
mushrooms

Pteronophobia:
getting tickled (by feathers)

Cyclophobia:
bicycles

Defecaloesiphobia:
painful bowel movements

Xanthophobia:
things that are yellow, or even the word “yellow”

Toursiphobia:
pickles

Sinapiphobia:
mustard

Dendrophobia:
trees

Rothakinophobia:
peaches

Achondroplasiaphobia:
little people

Bambagiaphobia:
cotton balls

Catheterphobia:
balloons

Eel blood is toxic to humans.

THE NAME’S FAMILIAR

You already know the names—here are the people behind them
.

L
AURA ASHLEY
Welsh-born Laura Mountney left school at 16, became a secretary and, at 24, married engineer Bernard Ashley. Inspired by Victorian textiles, in 1953 the Ashleys invested £10 in supplies and began producing printed fabrics in their kitchen. That same year, while vacationing in Rome, they noticed a new fashion trend among young women, sparked by Audrey Hepburn’s appearance in the film
Roman Holiday:
colorful headscarves. So Ashley designed a line of scarves—and that proved to be her first success. Within a few years, Ashley added home furnishings and clothing to the line. By 1970 business was brisk—in a single week, one London shop sold 4,000 Laura Ashley dresses. Laura died in 1985, Bernard in 2009, but the brand—synonymous with pastels and floral prints—still generates $600 million annually.

DINTY MOORE

In the 1910s comic strip
Bringing Up Father,
Dinty Moore is the name of a tavern owner who serves corned beef and cabbage to the strip’s main character, an Irish immigrant named Jiggs. Author George McManus’s inspiration for Dinty was a real-life New York restaurant owner named James Moore, who capitalized on the popularity of the strip by legally changing his first name to Dinty and opening a chain of diners. His specialty: corned beef. Moore didn’t start the line of Dinty Moore canned products (notably beef stew) available today; Hormel Foods licensed the name and introduced the product in 1935, using Jiggs in early advertising. Dinty Moore Beef Stew is still the bestselling canned stew in the U.S.