The World's Greatest Book of Useless Information (5 page)

FOREIGN TRANSLATION

German is considered the sister language of English.

Amphibious is based on Greek words that mean living a double life; amphibians live both on land and in water.

The word rodent comes from the Latin word rodere, meaning “to gnaw.”

The words assassination and bump were invented by Shakespeare.

The Old English word for sneeze is fneosam.

The U in U-?boats stands for “underwater.”

The word constipation comes from a Latin word that means “to crowd together.”

The word curfew originates from an old French word that means “cover fire.”

Corduroy comes from the French cord du roi or “cloth of the king.”

In French, essay means “to try, attempt.”

The word accordion comes from the German word akkord, which means “agreement, harmony.”

The word calendar comes from Latin and means “to call out.”

The word hangnail comes from the Middle English: ang-(“painful”) + nail. It has nothing to do with hanging.

The word kangaroo means “I don’t know” in the language of Australian Aborigines. When Captain Cook approached natives of the Endeavor River tribe to ask what the strange animal he spotted was, he got “kangaroo” for an answer.

The word cop came from the English term “Constable on Patrol.”

MAFIA is an acronym for Morte Alla Francia Italia Anela, or “Death to the French is Italy’s Cry.”

Mothers were originally named Mama or Mommy (in many languages) because they have mammary glands.

Influenza got its name from the fact that people believed the disease was because of the evil “influence” of stars.

THE NAKED TRUTH

A fable says that Truth and Falsehood went bathing; Falsehood came first out of the water and dressed herself in Truth’s garments. Truth, unwilling to take those of Falsehood, went naked.

IN CASE YOU WERE WONDERING

A prestidigitator is another word for magician.

A castrated rooster is called a capon.

A conchologist studies mollusks and shells.

A deltiologist collects postcards.

A fingerprint is also known as a dactylogram.

A funambulist is a tightrope walker.

A horologist measures time.

A klazomaniac is someone who feels like shouting.

A librocubicularist is someone who reads in bed.

A phrenologist feels and interprets skull features.

A sultan’s wife is called a sultana.

An anthropophagite eats people.

Killing a king is called regicide.

Spat-?out food is called chanking.

The ball on top of a flagpole is called the truck.

A fox’s tail is called a brush.

The two ends of a magnet are called poles.

The word diastima refers to having a gap between your teeth.

The word lethologica describes the state of not remembering the word you want to say.

The word samba means to rub navels together.

When your sink is full, the little hole that lets the water drain, instead of flowing over the side, is called a porcelator.

Women who wink at men are known as nictitating women.

A necropsy is an autopsy on animals.

A poem written to celebrate a wedding is called an epithalamium.

A scholar who studies the Marquis de Sade is called a Sadian, not a Sadist.

According to author Douglas Adams, a salween is the faint taste of dishwashing liquid in a cup of fresh tea.

Alma mater means “bountiful mother.”

An animal epidemic is called an epizootic.

Degringolade means “to fall and disintegrate.”

Dendrology is the study of trees.

Dibble means “to drink like a duck.”

EEG stands for electroencephalogram.

EMI stands for electrical and musical instrument.

Groaking is to watch people eating in the hope that they will offer you some.

“Hara kiri” is an impolite way of saying the Japanese word seppuku, which means, literally, “belly splitting.”

It is possible to drown and not die. Technically, the term drowning refers to the process of taking water into the lungs, not to death caused by that process.

Karaoke means “empty orchestra” in Japanese.

Kemosabe means “soggy shrub” in Navajo.

Koala is Aboriginal for “no drink.”

Lead poisoning is known as plumbism.

Scatologists are experts who study feces.

Sekkusu means “sex” in Japanese.

Spain literally means “the land of rabbits.”

The “You Are Here” arrow on a map is called the IDEO locator.

The third year of marriage is the leather anniversary.

The abbreviation “e.g.” stands for “exempli gratia,” or “for example.”

The abbreviation for pound, “lb.,” comes from the astrological sign Libra, meaning “balance.”

The French term bourrage de crane for wartime propaganda means “brain stuffing.”

The infinity character on the keyboard is called a lemniscate.

The Japanese translation of switch is pronounced suitchi.

The name for fungal remains found in coal is sclerotinite.

The phrase “jet lag” was once called boat lag, back before airplanes existed.

The Sanskrit word for war means “desire for more cows.”

The slang word crap comes from T. Crapper, the man who invented the modern toilet.

The slash character is called a virgule, or solidus. A URL uses slash characters, not backslash characters.

The word karate means “empty hand.”

The word byte is a contraction of “by eight.”

Trabant is the German word for “satellite.”

Zorro means “fox” in Spanish.

A coward was originally a boy who took care of cows.

A group of officers is called a mess.

The next-?to-?last event is the penultimate, and the second-?to-?last is the antepenultimate.

The symbol on the pound key is called an anoctothorpe.

SEMANTICS

Naked means “to be unprotected”; nude means “unclothed.”

A hamlet is a village without a church, and a town is not a city until it has a cathedral.

FUN WITH LETTERS

Certain sounds in the English language are real germ spreaders, particularly the sounds F, P, T, D, and S.

Of all the words in the English language, the word set has the most definitions.

Rhythm and syzygy are the longest English words without vowels.

Skepticisms is the longest typed word that alternates hands.

The letter J does not appear anywhere on the periodic table of elements.

The letter W is the only letter in the alphabet that doesn’t have one syllable; it has three.

The longest one-?syllable word in the English language is screeched.

The longest word in the English language is 1,909 letters long, and it refers to a distinct part of DNA.

The most used letter in the English alphabet is E; Q is the least used.

The oldest word in the English language is town.

The only fifteen-?letter word that can be spelled without repeating a letter is uncopyrightable.

The only contemporary words that end with -gry are angry and hungry.

The words racecar and kayak are palindromes; they’re the same whether they are read left to right or right to left.

Only four words in the English language end in -dous: tremendous, horrendous, stupendous, and hazardous.

Only three world capitals begin with the letter O in English: Ottawa, Canada; Oslo, Norway; and Ouagadougou, Burkina Faso.

Six words in the English language have the letter combination uu: muumuu, vacuum, continuum, duumvirate, duumvir, and residuum.

Ten body parts are only three letters long: eye, ear, leg, arm, jaw, gum, toe, lip, hip, and rib.

There was no punctuation until the fifteenth century.

When two words are combined to form a single word (e.g., motor + hotel = motel; breakfast + lunch = brunch), the new word is called a portmanteau.

You would have to count to one thousand to use the letter A in the English language to spell a whole number.

Bookkeeper is the only word in the English language with three consecutive double letters.

Facetious and abstemious contain all the vowels in the correct order, as does arsenious, meaning “containing arsenic.”

Cleveland spelled backward is DNA level C.

There are only twelve letters in the Hawaiian alphabet. Hawaiian words do not contain consonant clusters. For example, Kahlúa is not a Hawaiian word.

“I am” is the shortest complete sentence in the English language.

In England in the 1880s, pants was considered a dirty word.

In English, four is the only number that has the same number of letters as its value.

Stewardesses is the longest word that is typed with only the left hand.

No word in the English language rhymes with month, orange, silver, or purple.

Quisling is the only word in the English language to start with “quis.”

Maine is the only state whose name is just one syllable.

The most recent year that could be written upside down and right side up and appear the same was 1961. The next year this will be possible will be 6009.

LANGUAGE BARRIER

There are about five thousand different languages spoken on Earth.

Chevrolet tried marketing a Chevrolet Nova in Spanish-?speaking countries—it didn’t sell well because “no va” means “doesn’t go” in Spanish.

In Italy, a campaign for Schweppes Tonic Water translated the name into Schweppes Toilet Water.

In Papua New Guinea, there are villages within five miles of each other that speak different languages.

More than twenty-?six dialects of Quichua are spoken in Ecuador.

Native speakers of Japanese learn Spanish more easily than English. Native speakers of English learn Spanish more easily than Japanese.

Polish is the only word in the English language that, when capitalized, is changed from a noun or a verb to a nationality.

Rio de Janeiro translates to River of January.

The correct response to the Irish greeting “Top of the morning to you” is, “And the rest of the day to yourself.”

The D in D-?day stands for “day.” The French term for D-?day is J-?jour.

The Kentucky Fried Chicken slogan “Finger-?lickin’ good” came out as “Eat your fingers off” in Chinese.

The three best-?known western names in China are Jesus Christ, Richard Nixon, and Elvis Presley.

The stress in Hungarian words always falls on the first syllable.

No Spanish words begin with the letter W (except for those of American-?English origin).

The Eskimo language has more than twenty words to describe different kinds of snow.

WAS IT AT CHUCK E. CHEESE?

The earliest document in Latin in a woman’s handwriting is an invitation to a birthday party from the first century C.E.

SPECIAL OCCASIONS

World Tourist Day is observed on September 27.

October 10 is National Metric Day.

November 19 is Have a Bad Day Day.

November 29 is National Sinky Day, a day to eat over one’s sink and worship it.

COMMON THREADS

The most common name for a goldfish is Jaws.

The most common name in Italy is Mario Rossi.

The most common name in the world is Mohammed.

The most common Spanish surname is Garcia.

The most common Russian surname is Ivanov.

The most common Swedish surname is Johansson.

The most common name for a boat in 1996 was Serenity.

ON THE MENU

WATER WORLD

Drinking water after eating reduces the acid in your mouth by 61 percent.

Forty-?eight million people in the United States receive their drinking water from private or household wells.

In the typical Canadian home, 45 percent of water is used for the toilet, 28 percent is used for bathing and personal matters, 23 percent is used for laundry or dishes, and 4 percent is used for cooking or drinking purposes.

It’s impossible to get water out of a rimless tire.

Less than 2 percent of the water on Earth is fresh.

A tea in China called white tea is simply boiled water.

THE HOUSE THAT RONALD BUILT

Ray Kroc bought McDonald’s for $2.7 million in 1961 from the McDonald brothers.

Seven percent of Americans eat McDonald’s every day.

Four hundred quarter-?pounders can be made out of one cow.

A man named Ed Peterson is the inventor of the Egg McMuffin.

The big M on McDonald’s signs in Paris is the only one in the world that is white, rather than yellow; it was thought that yellow was too tacky.

McDonald’s in New Zealand serves apricot pies instead of cherry ones.

The McDonald’s at The Skydome in Toronto is the only one in the world that sells hot dogs.

On average, there are 178 sesame seeds on each McDonald’s Big Mac bun.

SODA OR POP?

Carbonated water, with nothing else in it, can dissolve limestone, talc, and many other low-?Mohs hardness minerals. Coincidentally, carbonated water is the main ingredient in soda pop.

The citrus soda 7-Up was created in 1929; “7” was selected because the original containers were seven ounces. “Up” indicated the direction of the bubbles.

Fanta Orange is the third largest selling soft drink in the world.

Coca-?Cola was first served at Jacob’s Pharmacy in Atlanta in 1886 for only five cents a glass. The formula for Coca-?Cola was created by pharmacist John Pemberton. Only two people in the world know the secret recipe for Coca-?Cola.

Earl Dean developed the bottle design for Coca-?Cola.

Coca-?Cola was originally green.

A can of Diet Coke will float in water, while a can of regular Coke sinks.

Coca-?Cola owns the world’s second largest truck fleet.

Coke is used to clean up blood spills on highways.

Diet Coke was only invented in 1983.

Pepsi originally contained pepsin, hence the name.

The first western consumer product sold in the former Soviet Union was Pepsi Cola.

In 1989, Pepsi came out with a morning soft drink called Pepsi AM. It didn’t last long on the market.

Pepsi is commonly used by wooden boat owners to clean mold from decks. You can spill it on for about thirty seconds, but it needs to be rinsed to be sure it does not erode the decks completely.