Obscure facts ya know!

Post Reply New Topic

From what I can discover, he's still a serious Christian these days, votes for the GOP and hosts an annual golf tournament à la Bob Hope.

Rock stars don't seem to be what they used to be.....

'Buckwheat' of the 'Little Rascals' films, William Thomas, became a successful film lab technician, but, sadly died of a heart attack aged only forty-nine.

You cannot spread butter on Welsh laverbread as is not bread.

the 'R" sounds (rhotics) are almost invariably the last to be learned in children.

The synthetic international language Volapuk was deliberately designed without the letter 'R', in recognition of the fact that people in some parts of the world are not familiar with the sound, or find it difficult to pronounce.

During the ugly history of America's treatment of Native Americans, their children were taken from their homes, forced into 'Indian Schools' where their hair was cut, they were punished if they tried to practice their own religions, and they were not allowed to speak their own languages.

Murder of a culture.

During the Victorian era, a certain very popular shade of green in wallpaper manufacture was obtained by adding arsenic to the dye or ink that it was printed with.

^ Napoleon Bonaparte died from arsenic poisoning, according to a number of researchers, and some have pointed to its presence in the wallpaper in the bedroom of the house on St Helena, where he spent his exile.

http://www.victorianweb.org/history/arsenic.html

Lucretius was according to some sources poisoned to death by his Xanthippeish wife, who wanted to keep his love just for her by giving him love potion....some claim he died in insanity, before committing suicide aged 44.

^ Bet you wish he'd done that a few years earlier!

Tav without a dagesh is assumed to have been pronounced [θ] at the time niqqud (or nikudot) was introduced.

in modern hebrew, both tav (ת) and tav dagesh (תּ) are pronounced [t]. ashkenazis can differ.

The old German coin, the Thaler, is generally pronounced 'Taler', including in the UK. This is the same word as "Dollar" by the way (Swedish/Norwegian/Danish Daler).