Language Bizarre Facts Page 1

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Bizarre Fact #1:
Did you know...
The @ symbol has become an important part of e-mail culture. It separates the User Name from the Domain Name. All countries throughout the world use the same symbol but it obviously has a different name in other tongues. In English it is simply the 'at' sign.
Here are just a few of the more endearing terms:
Italy: 'chiocciolina' - which, in Italian, means 'little snail'
France: 'petit escargot' - also 'little snail'
Germany: 'klammeraffe' - which means 'spider monkey'.
Dutch: 'api' - a shortened version of 'apestaart' or 'monkey's tail'.
Finland: 'miau' or 'cat's tail'.
Norway: 'kanel-bolle', a spiral shaped cinnamon cake
Israel: 'shtrudel' - following the pastry concept
Denmark: 'snabel', an 'A' with a trunk.
Spain: 'arroba'. the Spanish symbol for a unit of weight of about 25 pounds.

Bizarre Fact #2:
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April Fools' Day has always been celebrated in Australia and it's easy to see why when you look at the list of Aussie words which mean 'fool', amongst their other amusing meanings:
Boofhead: an idiot or a fool, sometimes with a big, ugly head too.
Burke and Wills: rhyming slang - dills, as in, "They'd be Burke and Wills." - idiots or fools. From the surnames of two famous but ultimately doomed explorers of outback Australia.
Dag: an amusing type of idiot or fool, usually a well intentioned jibe, "a bit of a dag".
Dill: an idiot or a fool.
Dip Stick: an idiot, a fool.
Droob: slow witted or slow moving person, not too bright, a fool.
Duffer: a silly or foolish person, also refers to one who steals sheep.
Goose: a 'dead set' (real) fool.
Nong: idiot, fool.
Ratbag: a foolish type of eccentric.

Bizarre Fact #3:
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The English-language alphabet originally had only 24 letters. One missing letter was J, which was the last letter to be added to the alphabet. The other latecomer to the alphabet was U.

Bizarre Fact #4:
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Fan is an abbreviation for the word "fanatic." Toward the turn of the 19th century, various media referred to football enthusiasts first as "football fanatics," and later as a "football fan."

Bizarre Fact #5:
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The proper name of our sole natural satellite is "the Moon" and therefore...it should be capitalized. The 60-odd natural satellites of other planets, however are called "moons" (in lower case) because each has been given a proper name, such as Deimos, Amalthea, Hyperion, Miranda, Larissa, or Charon.

Bizarre Fact #6:
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The word "snorkel" comes from the German word "schnoerkel", which was a tube used by German submarine crews in WW2. The subs used an electric battery when traveling underwater, which had to be recharged using diesel engines, which needed air to run. To avoid the hazard of surfacing to run the engines, the Germans used the schnoerkel to feed air from the surface into the engines.

Bizarre Fact #7:
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The name "fez" is Turkish for "Hat".

Bizarre Fact #8:
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The combination "ough" can be pronounced in nine different ways. The following sentence contains them all: "A rough-coated, dough-faced, thoughtful plough man strode through the streets of Scarborough; after falling into a slough, he coughed and hiccoughed."

Bizarre Fact #9:
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The verb cleave" is the only English word with two synonyms which are antonyms of each other: adhere and separate.

Bizarre Fact #10:
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Jerkwater is a railroad term. Until about fifty years ago, most trains were pulled by thirsty steam engines that needed to refill their boilers from water towers next to the tracks. But some towns were so small and inconsequential that they lacked a water tower. When trains stopped in those places, the crew had to find a nearby stream or well and, bucket-brigade style, "jerk" the water to the train. Those little dots on the map became known as jerkwater towns.

Bizarre Fact #11:
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Malcolm Lowry had pnigophobia—the fear of choking on fish bones.

Bizarre Fact #12:
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Augustus Caesar had achluophobia—the fear of sitting in the dark.

Bizarre Fact #13:
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Androphobia is a fear of men.

Bizarre Fact #14:
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Caligynephobia is a fear of beautiful women.

Bizarre Fact #15:
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Pentheraphobia is a fear of a mother-in-law.

Bizarre Fact #16:
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Scopophobia is a fear of being looked at.

Bizarre Fact #17:
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Phobophobia is a fear of fearing.

Bizarre Fact #18:
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Mageiricophobia is the intense fear of having to cook.

Bizarre Fact #19:
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Papaphobia is the fear of Popes.

Bizarre Fact #20:
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Taphephobia is the fear of being buried alive.

Bizarre Fact #21:
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Clinophobia is the fear of beds.

Bizarre Fact #22:
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Incredible means not believable. Incredulous means not believing. When someone's story is truly incredible, you ought to be incredulous.

Bizarre Fact #23:
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The terms "prime minister," "premier" and "chancellor" all refer to the leading minister of a government, and any differences from nation to nation stem from different systems of government, not from title definitions.

Bizarre Fact #24:
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Tennis pro Evonne Goolagong's last name means "kangaroo's nose" in Australia's aboriginal language.

Bizarre Fact #25:
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A "sysygy" occurs when all the planets of the our Solar System line up.

Bizarre Fact #26:
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The most common letters in the English language are R S T L N E. Sound familiar? Watch an episode of "Wheel of Fortune"...

Bizarre Fact #27:
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A "necropsy" is an autopsy on animals.

Bizarre Fact #28:
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EEG stands for Electroencephalogram.

Bizarre Fact #29:
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The English word pajamas has it's origin in Persian. It is a combination of the Persian words pa (leg) and jamah (garment).

Bizarre Fact #30:
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The ZIP in zip code stands for "Zone Improvement Plan."

Bizarre Fact #31:
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Yucatan, as in the peninsula, is from Maya "u" + "u" + "uthaan" meaning "listen how they speak," and is what the Maya said when they first heard the Spaniards.

Bizarre Fact #32:
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Punctuation was not invented until the 1500's.

Bizarre Fact #33:
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Catch 22 has come to mean a problematic situation for which the only solution is denied by a circumstance inherent in the problem. The original "Catch-22," in Joseph Heller's 1961 novel of the same name, is the catch that prevents a US Air Force pilot in World War II from asking to be grounded on the basis of insanity. The pilot knows that military regulations permit insane pilots to be grounded and not forced to fly further dangerous bombing missions. However, the regulation prevents airmen from escaping bombing missions by pleading insanity by stating that any airman rational enough to WANT to be grounded cannot possibly be insane and therefore is fit to fly. From the novel: a man "would be crazy to fly more missions and sane if he didn't, but if he was sane, he had to fly them. If he flew them he was crazy and didn't have to: but if he didn't he was sane and had to."

Bizarre Fact #34:
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The custom of saying "Bless you" when someone sneezes was first used by ancients when they believed that breath was the essence of life, and when you sneeze a part of you life is escaping. Evil spirits rush into your body and occupy the empty space. By saying "God bless you" the speaker is protecting the sneezer from that spirits.

Bizarre Fact #35:
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Lycanthropy is a disease in which a man thinks he's a wolf. It is the scientific name for "wolf man" or, werewolf.

Bizarre Fact #36:
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Evian spelled backwards is naive.

Bizarre Fact #37:
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Author Margaret Wolfe Hungerford, who sometimes wrote under the name "The Duchess," observed in her novel "Molly Bawn" that "beauty is in the eye of the beholder." The phrase has passed into the English language.

Bizarre Fact #38:
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The "glair" is the white or clear part of an egg. The word glair comes from the Latin clarus, meaning "clear."

Bizarre Fact #39:
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The longest word used by Shakespeare in any of his works is "honorificabilitudinitatibus," found in "Love's Labors Lost." Unfortunately he's no longer around to tell us what it means.

Bizarre Fact #40:
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Colgate faced a big obstacle marketing toothpaste in Spanish speaking countries. Colgate translates into the command "go hang yourself."

Bizarre Fact #41:
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The right side of a boat was called the starboard side due to the fact that the astronavigators used to stand out on the plank (which was on the right side) to get an unobstructed view of the stars. The left side was called the port side because that was the side that you put in on at the port. This was so that they didn't knock off the starboard.

Bizarre Fact #42:
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Ever wonder where the phrase "two bits" came from? Some coins used in the American colonies before the Revolutionary War were Spanish dollars, which could be cut into pieces, or bits. Since two pieces equaled one-fourth dollar, the expression "two bits" came into being as a name for 25 cents.

Bizarre Fact #43:
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Montgomery Ward was the first to advertise "Satisfaction guaranteed or your money back" in 1874 — two years after Aaron Montgomery Ward, launched his first mail-order catalog.

Bizarre Fact #44:
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OK is the most successful of all Americanisms. It has invaded hundreds of other languages and been adopted by them as a word. Mencken claims that US troops deployed overseas during WWII found it already in use by Bedouins in the Sahara to the Japanese in the Pacific. It was also the fourth word spoken on the surface of the moon. It stands for oll korrect, a misspelling of all correct.

Bizarre Fact #45:
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When Coca-Cola began to be sold in China, they used characters that would sound like "Coca-Cola" when spoken. Unfortunately, what they turned out to mean was "Bite the wax tadpole".

Bizarre Fact #46:
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Clans of long ago that wanted to get rid of their unwanted people without killing them used to burn their houses down - hence the expression "to get fired."

Bizarre Fact #47:
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Pokemon stands for "pocket monster."

Bizarre Fact #48:
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The name Ethiopia mean "land of sunburned faces" in Greek.

Bizarre Fact #49:
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A coward was originally a boy who took care of cows.

Bizarre Fact #50:
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MAFIA is an acronym for Morte Alla Francia Italia Anela, or "Death to the French is Italy's Cry"