Not all woods float; some are so dense that they sink – ebony and greenheart are two examples; there are others.
One other is the iron tree. The wood from the this is apparently also bullet-proof (caveat, Mario, who told me this, has a very small gun)
Here I am planting one with the mayor of Costa Rica, Mato Grosso du Sol, Brazil.
.
Useless fact, the customs staff at Sao Paulo Airport do not know that there is a town called Costa Rica in their country and will try to get you to get on the wrong plane, to the other more famous Costa Rica.
.
The leader of the third expedition to reach the South Pole was Sir Edmund Hillary, over 40 years after Admundsen and Scott.
.
Only twelve people have ever walked on the moon.
Only four of them are still alive.
.
HM Quenn Elizabeth II is the most senior living heir to Charlamane, through the Saxa-Coburg-Gotha line.
Useless fact, the customs staff at Sao Paulo Airport do not know that there is a town called Costa Rica in their country and will try to get you to get on the wrong plane, to the other more famous Costa Rica.
That's confusing!
Lots of 'sinkers' in Australia. Tallowwood for one.
Here's part of a 40m one we had to fell at the weekend.
[img] 
[/img]
i had no idea that potatoes can kill you until just now watching this
Chickens use their wings to create downforce when running to increase grip.
Wasn’t it originally ‘a norange’ as in the Spanish naranja and it evolved into ‘an orange’. Might be wrong, always possible.
Quite true. Many other 'an' words when through the same process, a napron, a nowl, etc...
Chickens use their wings to create downforce when running to increase grip.
on a similar note.
The fastest flying (As in sustained flappy flappy flight) bird in the uk is a duck (eider), it also has the smallest wing area:weight ratio (so it has to fly fast to generate lift.)
Payment on demand…on the nail is derived from (corn/grain) merchants in Bristol making their payments on the pedestals – referred to as nails – on Exchange Street.
To the best of my knowledge, they’re still there.
They sure are. They are outside the Corn Exchange, which has a clock on it with two minute hands. It shows London and Bristol time. Needed when high speed rail travel came.
If you were born in 1970, you were as close (in time) then to the First World War as you were to 2022.
I love these ones. When Top Gun was made, F-14s were closer to the end of active service Spitfires than they are to the production of F-35s now.
Chas and Dave play on "My Name is..." by Eminem
The phrase to pool some money comes from an old French game where people threw stones at chickens/poulet.
The English word for sky is derived from a Norse word for cloud.
Orientation means to face East. I’m less convinced about the maps story. Got a citation for that?
Think you're right. I'm sure I had citations for it when I first heard it, but can't find them now, and it seems Islamic maps mostly had South at the top. It looks more likely that the general use of orientate (ie, establish bearings, not specifically to East) might be from churches being built with the altar at the East end.
Quite true. Many other ‘an’ words when through the same process, a napron, a nowl, etc…
Hate to go all Buzz Killington on this one, but while metanalysis has happened (mostly before dictionaries, printing etc), this is a bit of folk etymology for which, amongst others, QI needs to hold its hand up. It didn’t happen with orange as the word made it to us by coming through France rather than directly from Spanish. I think oranges were originally known as pommes d’orenge and later just as orange in French. Now, newt, on the other hand has had it happen, just the other way round. 😀
It’s a hue of orange.
Sir Hugh of Orange was the only French knight on King Arthur's round table... possibly.
If take all the oxygen molecules contained in the average person and spread them evenly around the world in a layer 100km up - they'd still only be 0.3mm apart.
For plenty of mind blowing facts and concepts about humans i can definitely recommend The Self Delusion by Tom Oliver.
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2020/jan/18/the-self-delusion-tom-oliver-review
It didn’t happen with orange as the word made it to us by coming through France rather than directly from Spanish
Yeah Lots of these about. Also new and novel things were often attributed to far off places that were being discovered at the time Turkey (the Bird) is called that in the UK because Turkey (the country) was all the rage at the time. The French for Turkey is Dinde, which is a version of D'Inde - from the Indies...because that was fashionable at the time.
Robin Red Breast (the bird with the obviously orange chest) is one of the last birds commonly referred to it by it's medieval name. They were fond of giving animals just regulars names. Jack, Jenny, Robin, etc.
Every day someone unwittingly does the longest poo in the world for that day.
Not strictly correct. On an average day I'm pretty sure loads of people do the longest poo for that day.
If you replaced every atom in 12g of carbon with a ping pong ball the ping pong balls would cover the USA to a depth of many 10s of miles. Over 40 I think
In the dialect of the North East asking to go home is identical to asking to go home in Danish
Many of the world’s rivers are, for exactly the same reason, called River River.
Really? You sure? Sounds like bollocks to me as with most of these totally made up origins of phrases. Someone invents it, it's funny, smart arses repeat and so it goes on.
If you replaced every atom in 12g of carbon with a ping pong ball the ping pong balls would cover the USA to a depth of many 10s of miles. Over 40 I think
Talk about making a mountain out of a mole-hill…
The best dictionary definition of all time is the Chambers definition for litotes – affirmation by negation of the contrary.
So it's not just "understatement" then?
I love these ones.
Since its removal, the Berlin wall has now been down for longer than it'd been up. (As of about four years ago.)
In the dialect of the North East asking to go home is identical to asking to go home in Danish
See also Yorkshire slang 'laik' meaning to play or skive off work. The modern Swedish word for 'play' is 'lek' as in lekplatz for playground.
Whilst we're on linguistics, the Swedish for fire is 'brand' from where we get branding for marking cattle with a hot iron and also where we get the word brand meaning company identity.
Also, the Swedish for beach is 'strand'. The famous street in London is so called because it's the road that originally ran along the beach between the old Roman town of Londinium and the town to the West where the Saxons built their church and monastery, called Westminster. The Strand is no longer by the river of course as the land has been reclaimed over the years and the river is now something like 1/3 of its original width.
Not all woods float; some are so dense that they sink – ebony and greenheart are two examples; there are others. Don’t make a canoe from either of those woods.
Likewise, don't try to make boats from steel or iron, they'll sink too 🙂
In the dialect of the North East asking to go home is identical to asking to go home in Danish
The great vowel shift probably. It really didn't make it past the north midlands, which is why Scots people still refer to their "Hoose" rather than their "House", so pronunciation wise; Bite used to sound like bit, Boot used to sound more like Boat. Meet used to sound more like Mate
Also, many of the names of rivers in England are derived from Celtic roots, because the whole of Britain was Celtic at one point and the languges spoken in most of Great Britain were dialects of the langauge that would evolve into modern Welsh. This is why lots of places in England have Welsh names (although I'm not sure if they are in use these days) that aren't necessarily related to their English versions. Some are, because the Saxons used the existing Celtic names. However many don't have a Welsh name because a lot of places were founded by the Saxons. Apparently they planned out the settlement of their new land by setting up market towns that were a sensible distance apart across the country so people could get their goods to market and weren't that far from a local government hub. And today if you drive around much of rural England on A roads you will see that it is very frequently about 10-15 miles to the next town, this is why. French départements are also organised so that no-one would be more than a day's ride from their administrative hub but not necessarily their market as this was set up much later when bureaucracy was more of a thing, and more people had horses which is why départements are bigger than the separation between market towns in England.
Genetic studies show that the modern populations of Wales and Ireland are the closest to the original British population, however the whole of Britain is not that far removed from the people who originally settled here after the ice age. In other words, whilst Saxons invaded and brought language and government they didn't bring that many actual people.
Magenta seems to be a weird exception to how our brains usually perceive colours that our eyes don't have actual receptors for (i.e. colours other than red, green and blue). Usually our brains average the wavelengths we're seeing and fills in an appropriate colour. E.g. if we are seeing light made up of red and green wavelengths we split the difference and call what we're seeing yellow.
Magenta is a mixture of red and blue light, but the mid point between these wavelengths is green, so normally that's what we'd see. Except that would mean things reflecting red and blue wavelengths would look green and our brains/evolution reckoned that there's enough green things in the world already so we perceive it as another colour instead.
I only had this explained to me yesterday so I might have got it a bit wrong. Here's what's hopefully a better explanation: https://medium.com/swlh/magenta-the-color-that-doesnt-exist-and-why-ec40a6348256
Hopefully it's true! 🙂
A full hard drive weighs more than an empty hard drive.
Robin Red Breast (the bird with the obviously orange chest) is one of the last birds commonly referred to it by it’s medieval name. They were fond of giving animals just regulars names. Jack, Jenny, Robin, etc.
The Wheatear is a good example descriptive naming. It isn't named because it has ears that look like wheat, it's because it has a white back end, and the Anglo-Saxons called it a White-Arse.
Not all woods float; some are so dense that they sink – ebony and greenheart are two examples; there are others. Don’t make a canoe from either of those woods.
Likewise, don’t try to make boats from steel or iron, they’ll sink too 🙂
I guess the second comment was a bit tongue in cheek? There is (was?) a boat local to me that is made from concrete.
I love these ones. When Top Gun was made, F-14s were closer to the end of active service Spitfires than they are to the production of F-35s now.
Spitfire left service in 1961.
Top gun 1986
F35 first flight 2006
What am I missing?
@donk I grew up in stony Stratford. My parents are still there.
Ride a “cock horse to Banbury cross”
Same cock hotel
A full hard drive weighs more than an empty hard drive.
This isn't true. What is true is that a full USB drive (or SSD) weighs less than an empty one. No, wait, come back, I'm serious!
A traditional spinnydisc HDD stores data by magnetic polarisation. Imagine a platter full of microscopically small bar magnets. So when writing data nothing is added or removed to turn a 0 into a 1, they're just spun around.
However, a solid state stores data by charging and discharging its cells. A zero is negatively charged, a one is discharged, so a drive full-formatted to all zeros will have infinitesimally more mass because of the extra electrons.
Top Gun might have been 1986 but the F-14 had been in service well before then...according to the ever accurate Wikipedia - 1974 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grumman_F-14_Tomcat - however, doing a search in Google for "when did the f-14 tomcat enter service" returns the first result as 1972...
This thread is starting to put me in mind of the Hackenthorpe Book of Lies
Did you know...
that El Greco's real name was E.L. Grecott?
Chuck Berry wrote many of Shakespeare's plays?
the Everly Brothers turned down a knighthood?
The Hackenthorpe Book of Lies contains over 60 million untrue facts and figures
Did you know that the reason why windows steam up in cold weather is because of all the fish in the atmosphere?
Did you know that Moslems are forbidden to eat glass?
Did you know that the oldest rock in the world is the famous Hackenthorpe Rock, in North Ealing, which is 2 trillion years old?
Did you know that Milton was a woman?
Did you know that from the top of the Prudential Assurance Building in Bromley you can see 8 continents?
Did you know that the highest point in the world is only 8 foot?
This plane went into production in 1929.
They were flown and operated almost exclusively by women in the Second World War.
They also saw combat in the Korean War. It is the only biplane credited with a kill on a jet
The Exchequer (as in chancellor of) came about in Henry the firsts time when one of his clerics who looked after the crowns money had a large table with raised sides made and had squares not unlike a chess board drawn on and this was used to apportion the money's received from the various sherrifs when due. The squares were given a nomination and money of that value put on the relevant squares which allowed quick and easy viewing of how much was raised from each party. The name stuck and the table became known as the Exchequer.
Many of the world’s rivers are, for exactly the same reason, called River River.
Really? You sure? Sounds like bollocks to me as with most of these totally made up origins of phrases.
Apologies, not read the source comment above, but isn't River Avon an example of this?
Every day someone unwittingly does the longest poo in the world for that day.
Not strictly correct. On an average day I’m pretty sure loads of people do the longest poo for that day.
How does that work? Surely one of them is the lognest, although we'll never know which?
On the river thing,
Pendle Hill's name comes from something like Penhull, which in turn comes from the Cumbrian Pen meaning Hill, and the (something, Old English?) Hyll when means Hill. So it's literally Hill Hill Hill.
There's another one somewhere which is Hill Hill Hill Hill, but I can never remember it.
The flanges on the wheels of normal trains are not what keeps them from derailing for the vast majority of the time.
The fact the wheel profiles are conical means the flanges don't normally contact the rail, with exceptions normally being tight radius curves, a high degree of cant, switches & crossings and of course track or rolling stock defects.
Dublin means Blackpool.
The Dublin Tower is built on foundations of cotton wool, so it is.
The Dublin Tower is built on foundations of cotton wool, so it is.
Ribblehead Viaduct is built on a foundation (partially anyway) of wool. Stopped it sinking into the bog.
The centre of a flame is hollow.
Dublin means Blackpool.
Indeed, an anglicisation of Dubh Linn, literally Black Pool. Which is weird, as in Irish, the colour adjective (in this case Dubh) always comes after the noun. There aren’t really exceptions like in French (grand, petit, etc). Never quite figured that one out. I assume there’s a good reason somewhere.
If you’re expecting to see “Dubh Linn” on the signposts, you’ll be disappointed. The official Irish name is Baile Átha Cliath (Bol-yeh Aw-ha Klee-ya) which means town of the hurdled ford. 😀
Every day someone unwittingly does the longest poo in the world for that day.
Not strictly correct. On an average day I’m pretty sure loads of people do the longest poo for that day.
How does that work? Surely one of them is the lognest, although we’ll never know which?
All depends when the big poos happen. Fair enough, if the first person to poo happens to be the totally largestest then it is indeed just thag ond person.
But say
Eric does 1.2kg at 08.00
Paul does 1.1kg at 09.00
Tim 1.5kg at 10.00
Paula does 2kg at lunchtime
Eric, Tim and Paula will all be doing the longest ( ok biggest) at the point they do it.
Like seb coe broke the 1500m record, but doesn't hold it just now...
Or something.
Like seb coe broke the 1500m record,
Jesus that is a long one! What was he eating?
Pen meaning Hill
In Welsh pen means head, and when it appears in toponyms it's the same. So for example Fan means 'a high place' and Pen y Fan means 'Head of the high places'. It's called that because there's a string of hills, moors and mountains that starts in the West (near Carmarthen) and gets taller and taller until the last and tallest one - Pen y Fan. So it's a bit more subtle than simply 'hill hill'. As in English - there are many words that are applied to hills but they are (or were) all subtly different, and some that I think are regional. For example there are lots of 'Ho' in the South but not elsewhere, likewise tor.
Just found out that Ho is also common in the Channel Islands and Normandy as a suffix -hou but is still apparently from Anglo Saxon. Interesting.
Are turkeys from India/the east then? I assumed they were from the Americas where wild turkeys live. Ah, just checked Wiki and they are from the Americas, but it addresses the etymology.
Johnx2
Bastard, just choked on my coffee 🙂
the only biplane credited with a kill on a jet
TBF the PO-2 dropped a bomb on it while it (an F86) was parked.
See also Yorkshire slang ‘laik’ meaning to play or skive off work. The modern Swedish word for ‘play’ is ‘lek’ as in lekplatz for playground.
Remember "Laik" from when I was a kid. Spice for sweets, jumpers for goalposts etc etc.
Lek/laik/lake (variety of spellings in English) also gives the English word Lek - a site for male mating displays, mammals or birds.
"The term derives from the Swedish lek, a noun which typically denotes pleasurable and less rule-bound games and activities"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lek_mating#Etymology
So round where I live on the moors there's more than one "Cock Lakes", relating to where the grouse display. I assume.
Are turkeys from India/the east then?
No, in the same way that coffee wasn't either. Ottoman and orientalism was just getting going as an art form, and damn near everything was labelled as Turkish or Ottoman or oriental. It was coming into fashion just on the very very start of what we'd recognise as a consumer culture in Europe (although it's still quite a bit earlier than the Early Modern period). So it's just a cover word for "Stuff that's new and exciting"
Only twelve people have ever walked on the moon
Oo! Just to add to that, only twelve pilots ever flew the amazeballs Bell X-15 rocket plane.
One man did both... 😉
[i]It’s a hue of orange.
Sir Hugh of Orange was the only French knight on King Arthur’s round table… possibly.
[/i]
I think he called himself Mr Brown so they didn't realise he was French - might need to fact check that
also gives the English word Lek – a site for male mating displays, mammals or birds
Brilliant, didn't know that thanks 🙂
When I worked in Sweden I spent some time discussing these things with the Swedes and of course they had no idea about obscure Yorkshire dialect words or the names of streets in London. They were also fascinated to learn about the islands in the Bristol Channel called 'holm' which is a Swedish word for island (there is apparently more than one).
Also, Swedish for snow is 'snö' which I think is the same as 'snow' would be pronounced in parts of Lancashire maybe? ö is a vowel as in the word 'girl' in RP English.
In Welsh pen means head, and when it appears in toponyms it’s the same. So for example Fan means ‘a high place’ and Pen y Fan means ‘Head of the high places’.
That's interesting. So in Pen Y Bont - Bridgend - it's using "head" as you would the head of a river (or ofc, a trail head).
So it’s a bit more subtle than simply ‘hill hill’.
But it's not from Welsh, it's from (presumably closely related) Cumbrian.
“The term derives from the Swedish lek, a noun which typically denotes pleasurable and less rule-bound games and activities”
Surely related, LEGO comes from "leg godt" which is "play good" in Danish.
I too got told off by my gran for laikin' abeht when I was a kid.
Swedish for snow is ‘snö’ which I think is the same as ‘snow’ would be pronounced in parts of Lancashire maybe?
Sounds like t'other side o't Pennines to me. Sheffield-ish.
The highest point on earth is 8480 feet lower than Everest
#oblatespheroid
That’s interesting. So in Pen Y Bont – Bridgend – it’s using “head” as you would the head of a river (or ofc, a trail head).
Yes, the English translation of 'end' presumably refers to the same thing because the two words are similar in many of their usages. Pen is also used for 'top' and 'end'.
But it’s not from Welsh, it’s from (presumably closely related) Cumbrian.
Yes, except that the shared language from back then is called Cymbric, from where we get Cumbria and also Cymru and Cymry (which means Welsh people or more properly British people since Wales is an invention of Saxons, derived from something like wealas which means 'foreigners' or 'people who talk funny' in old Germanic. See also Wallonia in Belgium and others "The modern names for various Romance-speaking people in Continental Europe (e.g. Wallonia, Wallachia, Valais, Vlachs, the German Welsch, and Włochy, the Polish name for Italy) have a similar etymology" from Wiki)
Common and basic words are often old ones which means that they are often shared by related langauges from further back in time. I am wondering if it's related to beinn in Gaelic?
Incidentally there are lots of place names in Southern Scotland that have Cumbric origins. That group of langauges was spoken across mainland Britain until the Gaels came from Ireland bringing Gaelic to Scotland and it eventually spread throughout Scotland for a time where it was then pushed back by Anglo-Saxon from the South).
Its possible you’ve haven’t been to all of the west of Scotland yet
Whilst this is true I've never heard of it being used by a west coaster. That covers an area from Stranraer up to Helensburgh and Glasgow.
I say it. A lot.
I love roasted cheese.
Case in point, by any measure you're closer geographically to the east coast than the west.
If you were born in 1970, you were as close (in time) then to the First World War as you were to 2022.
And if you were born in 1983 that applied to 2021 and WW2
Not strictly correct. On an average day I’m pretty sure loads of people do the longest poo for that day.
How does that work? Surely one of them is the lognest, although we’ll never know which?
All depends when the big poos happen. Fair enough, if the first person to poo happens to be the totally largestest then it is indeed just thag ond person.
But say
Eric does 1.2kg at 08.00
Paul does 1.1kg at 09.00
Tim 1.5kg at 10.00
Paula does 2kg at lunchtimeEric, Tim and Paula will all be doing the longest ( ok biggest) at the point they do it.
Like seb coe broke the 1500m record, but doesn’t hold it just now…
Or something.
Nope, look back at the original statement:
Every day someone unwittingly does the longest poo in the world for that day.
The operative term being 'for that day' so as measured over the entirety of a calendar 24h period.
It's also 'longest' which is a measure of length, not necessarily a pan cracker.
In the dialect of the North East asking to go home is identical to asking to go home in Danish
Geordie and Northumberian have many danish words in it, supposedly one of the languages still close to old English.
More time separates the T.Rex from Stegosaurus than from humans today. Also the Stegosaurus tail spikes are named after a Farside comic.
Geordie and Northumberian have many danish words in it, supposedly one of the languages still close to old English.
Makes sense given they're about the furthest away from Modern English.
Stegosaurus tail spikes are named after a Farside comic
Aye, the Thagomizer.
I knew that Far Side one but didn't believe it was true until now.
A thagomizer (/ˈθæɡəmaɪzər/) is the distinctive arrangement of four spikes on the tails of stegosaurine dinosaurs. These spikes are believed to have been a defensive measure against predators.[2][1]
The arrangement of spikes originally had no distinct name; cartoonist Gary Larson invented the name "thagomizer" in 1982 as a joke in his comic strip Far Side, and it was gradually adopted as an informal term sometimes used within scientific circles, research, and education.
From that Dimensions thread
Maths in Imperial is really screwed up as they seem to change the number base with every change in measurements.
Howe many yards in a mile? 1760.
Wow, strange number to choose and quite big. There must be lots of feet per yard right? No, 3
Oh, um and inches in a foot is...? 12 seemed about right
And smaller than inches is? Thousands of an inch of course.
Nothing bigger? Well, you could have 1/4 inch or 1/2 inch I suppose.
And you refer to those as 250 and 500 thousands of an inch normally, right? Sod off Jonny foreigner
There’s another one somewhere which is Hill Hill Hill Hill, but I can never remember it.
Torpenhow Hill, between Cockermouth and Carlisle. But don't ask a local where Tor-pen-how is, as they pronounce it Trepena.
The weight of sunlight beating down on earth every day ways about the same as an ocean going cruise ship.
Howe many yards in a mile? 1760.
Wow, strange number to choose and quite big
It's all to do with multiples, so many of this in a that, rods and chains and perches and poles and furlongs and suchlike.
The Shadows track, Apache, was the driving force behind the invention of break dancing.
Case in point, by any measure you’re closer geographically to the east coast than the west.
By the only measure that matters, which is this bridge, I very much live in the west....
Canada is approximately 42 times the size of the UK but only has around 1/2 the population.
90% of whom live within 200 miles of the Canada-USA border.
The Welsh word for school is the same as the Welsh word for ladder.
Yorkshire folk are really a lost tribe of Welsh folk.
(This may well be an exaggeration but the history of Elmet is interesting)
The Shadows track, Apache, was the driving force behind the invention of break dancing.
Not really, just has a solid breakbeat in it and was heavily sampled in early hip-hop
Howe many yards in a mile? 1760.
Wow, strange number to choose and quite big.
Not really. A mile is eight furlongs; a furlong is ten chains; a chain is 22 yards. So small handy numbers but yes the base changes weirdly.
The incredible bongo band covered it in '74-ish. NY sound system DJ cool Herc was the first to use two copies of the same track and mix to extend the track. This was at the request of some pals, who liked dancing to the cover. They were especially interested in the instrumental break (even though it's all instrumental! 🤣🤣🤣). They called themselves break dancers...
A shake is an unofficial measure of time that comes from the early days of the nuclear (bomb) industry.
It's 10 nanoseconds, and came from the phrase "two shakes of a lamb's tail".
I know the history of it and get where you’re coming from but breakdancing’s background has much more to it than that. Bit of an over simplification so not technically a fact. Existed before 1974 but gained popularity (and an official name) in the 70’s. I’d say helped to popularise or bring to the mainstream
Och, you're a big spoil sport 🤣🤣🤣
I was freestyling it 🤣🤣
But you are correct, I suppose 🤣🤣🤣
If you unravelled the DNA in the nucleus of one of your cells and stretched it out it would be 2-3 metres long. The total combined length of the DNA from all of your cells when stretched out would be more than 5000x the distance between the earth and the moon. 🧬 🌍 🌙
I’ll edit my post for a 5mm silver Hope headset spacer! 😀
