by John Lloyd
smugairle róin,
which literally translates as
‘seal’s snot’.
The French
for a walkie-talkie is
un talkie walkie.
The Eiffel Tower
has the same nickname
as Margaret Thatcher.
It’s known as La Dame de Fer
(‘The Iron Lady’).
Crime, disease and average
walking speed increase by 15%
as a city doubles in size.
People all over the world
are walking 10% faster
than they did a decade ago.
Airlines all over the world are flying
10% slower than they did in 1960
(to save on fuel costs).
As an apple falls to Earth,
the Earth falls very, very slightly
towards the apple.
Isaac Newton served as MP for Cambridge
but spoke in the House only once.
He asked for a window to be closed
because it was draughty.
Bram Stoker,
the author of Dracula,
married Oscar Wilde’s
first girlfriend.
Arthur Ransome,
author of Swallows and Amazons,
married Trotsky’s secretary.
Two-thirds of all the poetry
sold in the UK by living poets
is by Seamus Heaney.
The Slavonic name
for God is
Bog.
In 1568, the Catholic Church
condemned the entire population of
the Netherlands to death for heresy.
In the 1930s, the Rev. Frederick Densham
of Warleggan in Cornwall
alienated his flock by painting the church
blue and red, surrounding his rectory
with barbed wire and replacing
the congregation with
cardboard cut-outs.
Stalin had shamans
thrown out of helicopters
to give them a chance to
prove that they could fly.
It is most likely to be raining
at 7 a.m.
and least likely
at 3 a.m.
In Maori,
the word Maori
means ‘normal’.
Princess Anne
was the only woman
not to be gender-tested
at the 1976 Montreal Olympics.
Anne, Duc de Montmorency (1493–1567),
was a French general and politician.
He was named after his mother,
Anne Pot.
Pol Pot,
the Cambodian dictator
responsible for the deaths
of 21% of his country’s people,
was a former
geography teacher.
The Swahili word
for a coconut is
nazi.
‘Mother-in-law’
is an anagram of
‘Hitler woman’.
Both Stalin and Hans Christian Anderson
were the sons of a cobbler and a
washerwoman.
In 1187, as a symbol of unity
between their two countries,
Richard I of England
spent a night in the same bed
as Philip II of France.
In 1381, Richard II made Chelmsford
the capital of England
for one week.
In 1517, Richard Foxe,
the blind bishop of Winchester,
founded Corpus Christi College, Oxford.
On his first visit to the new college,
he was led twice round the main quad
to make it seem bigger than it really was.
In 1953, Keith Richards’ musical career
began as a choirboy
singing at the Queen’s coronation.
No male jaguar
has ever successfully mated
with a female tiger:
if it were to happen, the resulting animal
would be known as
a ‘jagger’.
Early draft names for
Walt Disney’s seven dwarfs included
Flabby, Dirty, Shifty,
Lazy, Burpy, Baldy
and Biggo-Ego.
Strictly speaking,
the plural of dwarf
is dwarrows.
In 2011, Toyota announced that
the official plural of Prius was
Prii.
Research using rabbits
has led to 26 Nobel Prizes
for Physiology or Medicine.
To process their food
with maximum efficiency,
rabbits swallow up to
80% of their own faeces.
The Sumatran rabbit
is so rare and shy
that the nearest humans
have no word for it in their language.
Bugs Bunny
is not a rabbit
but a hare.
The sloth is the only animal
named after one of the Seven Deadly Sins.
During the rainy season,
its metabolism slows down so much
that it can starve to death
on a full stomach.
Dolphins shed
the top layer of their skin
every two hours.
Paper can only be recycled six times.
After that, the fibres
are too weak to hold together.
A 2011 study by Nobel Economics laureate
Daniel Kahneman of 25 top Wall Street
traders found that they were
no more consistently successful
than a chimpanzee tossing a coin.
A 2011 study in the journal Psychology,
Crime and Law tested 39 British senior
managers and CEOs and found that they
had more psychopathic tendencies
than patients in Broadmoor.
Since 1980, the salaries of executives in
FTSE 100 companies have risen by 4,000%
compared to 300% for their employees.
An average pay rise of 50% in 2010
took the annual earnings of the directors
of Britain’s FTSE 100 companies
to £2.7 million each: over 100 times
the national average.
At the end of 2011,
the FTSE index stood at 5572:
1358 points lower
than it was at the end of 1999.
Google
was originally called
Back-Rub.
The acnestis
is the part of the back
that is impossible to scratch.
The most common treatment
for angina is
nitroglycerin.
It comes in pills, sprays or patches.
All Bran
is only
87% bran.
Malo kingi is a jellyfish
named after Robert King,
an American tourist
who died in Australia
after being stung by one.
The man after whom
Parkinson’s disease is named
was once arrested for plotting
to assassinate George III
with a poisoned dart.
The man after whom
Tourette’s Syndrome is named
was shot in the head
by one of his patients.
Spix’s macaw
is named after
the first man to shoot one.
Until 1857, it was legal for
British husbands to sell their wives.
The going rate was £3,000
(£23,000 in today’s money).
The most common reaction
from men confronted by
TV Licensing Enforcement Officers is,
‘I thought my wife
was dealing with it.’
King Herod’s first wife
was called Doris.
Thomas Edison
proposed to his second wife
in Morse code.
The first escalator was for fun,
rather than for practical purposes.
It was installed at Coney Island
in New York and ridden by 75,000 people
in its first two weeks.
Attendants bearing brandy and
smelling salts stood at the top of the first
escalator in Harrods, to revive shoppers
who became light-headed on the ride.
At least one person a week in the UK
changes their middle name
to ‘Danger’ by deed poll.
If all the British Empire’s dead of the
First World War were to march
four abreast down Whitehall, it would
take them almost four days and nights
to pass the Cenotaph.
At the age of 19, J. S. Bach
walked 420 miles to see
a performance by the composer
Buxtehude.
To chork
is to make a noise like feet
walking in waterlogged shoes.
J’ai des rossignols
(‘I’ve got nightingales’)
is French for
unexplained noises
coming from a car.
250,000 birds were killed
by the Exxon Valdez oil spill in 1989.
About the same number die
from crashing into window glass
in the US every day.
Only half the passengers and crew
who reached America on the Mayflower
in November 1621
survived until the following spring.
Two-thirds of the world’s caviar
is eaten aboard
the QE2.
There are 35,112 golf courses
in the world,
half of them in the USA.
All the world’s golf courses put together
cover more land area
than the Bahamas.
The land around the Iron Curtain
lay untouched for decades. In 1989,
it was turned into a nature reserve
1,400 kilometres long, but less than
200 metres wide.
Victorian guidebooks advised women
to put pins in their mouths
to avoid being kissed in the dark
when trains went through tunnels.
Beekeeping is illegal under the
New York City Health Code,
because bees are
‘naturally inclined to do harm’.
Herring talk out of their arses,
communicating by firing bubbles from
their backsides that sound like
high-pitched raspberries.
The filament of the first
commercial light bulb,
patented by Thomas Edison in 1880,
was made of bamboo.
The tall chef ’s hat or toque blanche
traditionally had a hundred pleats
to represent the number of ways
an egg could be cooked.
It was once suggested that
New York should be called Brimaquonx,
combining the names
of all the city’s boroughs –
Brooklyn, Staten Island, Manhattan,
Queens and Bronx –
into one.
Tibet has a smaller GDP than Malta,
but is 4,000 times its size.
Hamesucken
is the crime of assaulting someone
in their own home.
Hapax legomenon
describes a word or phrase
that has only been used once.
Haptodysphoria
is the feeling you get from
running your nails
down a blackboard.
Hydrophobophobia
is the fear of
hydrophobia.
Women buy
85% of the world’s Valentine cards and
96% of all the candles
in America.
Einstein
gave his $32,000 Nobel Prize money to
his first wife, Mileva,
as part of their divorce settlement.
The best-selling work of fiction
of the 15th century was
The Tale of the Two Lovers,
an erotic novel by the man who later
became Pope Pius II.
Tiramisu
means ‘pick me up’
in Italian.
The names of the English rivers
Amber, Avon, Axe, Esk, Exe, Ouse,
Humber, Irwell, Thames and Tyne
all mean ‘river’ or ‘water’
in various ancient languages.
There are no rivers
in Saudi Arabia.
The Onyx River
is the only river in Antarctica.
It flows for just 60 days a year
in high summer.
The river with the largest
discharge volume
in Albania is the Seman.
About 100 miles north of the Seman
is the small town of
Puke.
The gold medals at London 2012
were the largest and heaviest
ever awarded at a Summer Olympics,
but are only 1.34% gold.
In 1979, the Uruguayan footballer
Daniel Allende transferred
from Central Español to Rentistas
for a fee of 550 beefsteaks,
to be paid in instalments
of 25 steaks a week.
In 1937, Gillingham FC
sold one of their players to Aston Villa for
three second-hand turnstiles,
two goalkeepers’ sweaters, three cans of
weed-killer and an old typewriter.
Typewriters used to be known as
‘literary pianos’.
The raw materials needed to make a
desktop computer, including
530 lb of fossil fuels,
50 lb of chemicals and
3,330 lb of water,
weigh two tons:
about the same as a rhinoceros.
Exocet is French for
‘flying fish’.
Ancient Scandinavians
believed that the Aurora Borealis was
the result of huge shoals of herring
reflecting light into the sky.
The word ‘döner’
in döner kebab
is Turkish for
‘rotating’.
Woodrow Wilson
kept a flock of sheep
on the White House lawn.
He sold the wool and gave the money
to the Red Cross.
Bill Clinton
was mauled by a sheep
at the age of eight and didn’t learn
to ride a bicycle till he was 22.
Before signing the trade embargo
against Cuba, John F. Kennedy
got his press secretary to buy him
1,000 Cuban cigars.
Ronald Reagan’s pet name for
Nancy Reagan was
‘Mommy Poo Pants’.
After George W. Bush
was re-elected president in 2004,
the number of calls from US citizens
to the Canadian Immigration authorities
jumped from 20,000 to 115,000 a day.
One of the main contributors
to the original Oxford English Dictionary
cut off his penis in a fit of madness.
The longest palindrome in the
Oxford English Dictionary is ‘tattarrattat’.
James Joyce used it in Ulysses
:
‘I knew his tattarrattat at the door.’
The longest palindrome written by one
poet about another is W. H. Auden’s:
‘T. Eliot, top bard, notes putrid tang
emanating, is sad. I’d assign it a name:
Gnat dirt upset on drab pot toilet.’
