This is it my friends! We have reached the end of Doug Lennox's The Little Book of Answers. It's been a great year or two...pretty sure it's been more than a year! Lol. I've got another little book of nonsense that I will share with you next week! But for now let's read up on the last chapter in Trivia!
Do you know what the words algebra, sofa, sash, and sequin have in common? These English words are among the hundreds that originated with the Arabic languages. Some others include: magazine, alcohol, jar, cotton, and mattress. Racquet comes from the Arabic word for hand, which is how tennis was played originally. A few other Arabic words that enhanced our vocabulary are: alcove, chemist, coffee, and chess.
Wow. That's a lot of words I always thought to just to be English in nature.
The "lb" abbreviation for pound comes from ancient Rome and derives from the Latin "libra pondo" or "pound of weight." The "oz" for ounce came from medieval Italy and is from "onza", meaning a 12th of a part because at the time the English ounce was one-twelfth of the Roman pound of 330 grams. Though an ounce is 1/16th of a pound, it's still abbreviated as "oz."
Never gave much thought to that!
In the 1600s, sailors would measure the speed of their ships bu tying knots in the rope at sixty-foot intervals then further divided and marked the space between the knots into ten equal parts that would each be one fathom in length. A heavy floating log was tied to the rope's end and thrown into the ocean. The rope was let out through a reel, and the speed was measured by the knots that passed through the reel in thirty seconds of an hourglass.
That's an interesting way of measuring speed. Quite detailed and busy too!
Ticker tape was a thin paper ribbon of information fed mechanically to brokers on Wall Street. At the end of the day, the floors were ankle deep with ticker tape. On October 28, 1886, the dedication of the Statue of Liberty was visible from the brokers' windows, which caused such excitement that the brokers began tossing ticker tape out the windows. This is how the ticker tape parade became a New York tradition!
That's rather interesting! I never gave much thought to it as I just though the ticker tape was streamers!
Early news sheets were headed with the letters N-E-W-S, leaving some to wonder if it was meant to be a head nod to the compass points. This was simply a gimmick. The word "news" predates these publications and came about with its current meaning within a letter from King James of Scotland in 1423. In 1616, his descendant James I of England wrote another letter, that included the first recorded use of "no news is good news."
You know, I don't think I ever paid attention to see that NEWS was the compass points! I was always seeing it as Never Eat Soggy Waffles! LOL!
In the 13th century, the Chinese invented dark glasses to be worn by judges so that no one in the courtroom could read their eyes. The narrowly slit Eskimo goggles are per-historic and are a protection against snow blindness, not the direct sunlight. Sunglasses today were a consequence of 20th century flight designed by the American Army Air Corps in 1932 to keep the glare out of the pilot's eyes.
And to make Danny look cool! ;)
