Interesting Facts about Culture & Language

The Cultural Sector in Canada employs more people than forestry and banking combined. In 2008, Canadians spent more than twice as much on live performing arts (theatre, music, dance) than on sporting events.

The average pre-schooler laughs or smiles 400 times a day, but that number drops to only 15 times a day by the time people reach the age of 35.

Famous fashion designer Balenciaga began his career early. At age six he made a coat for his cat.

The American Civil War was the beginning of left and right shoes, mass-produced clothing in small, medium and large, and home-delivered mail.

In 1895, the world’s first commercial movie screening took place at the Grand Cafe in Paris. The film was made by Louis and Auguste Lumiere, two French brothers who developed a camera-projector called the Cinematographe. The Lumiere brothers unveiled their invention to the public in March 1895 with a brief film showing workers leaving the Lumiere factory. On December 28, the entrepreneurial siblings screened a series of short scenes from everyday French life and charged admission for the first time.

Bob Hope and Bing Crosby met when they were booked together for a couple of weeks at the same theatre. They started to ad-lib, which was popular with audiences. Five years later, in 1939, Bob was signed by Paramount and moved to California. He was invited to one of Bing's parties and they got up and reprised their old act to entertain the guests. A couple of Paramount execs decided to hire them for the first of seven “Road” movies.

Scrabble was invented in 1931 and was originally called Criss Cross. For 17 years toy makers snubbed this game, saying it was too intellectual, so the inventor Alfred Botts decided to manufacture and sell it himself. It is the world's second best selling game.

The first permanent color photograph was taken by James Clerk Maxwell in 1861.

The Mona Lisa has no eyebrows. It was the fashion in Renaissance Florence to shave them off.

The earliest surviving opera (written by Jacopo Peri and Ottavio Rinuccini) is Euridice which was performed in Florence in 1600. Opera quickly spread from Florence to Rome, Venice, and all other major cities in Italy.

Tchaikovsky's Serenade for Strings begins in a minor key, which James Lipton describes as if the boat had left the dock without us, and we had no choice but to jump in and swim after it. A similar situation occurs in Irving Berlin's Let's Face the Music and Dance, which begins in a minor key and with the words: There may be trouble ahead...

In Zulu beadwork, the color or pattern of each bead has meaning. Women used these to send romantic messages, as red beads indicated longing, while blue meant fidelity and striped ones meant fickle.

A few language myths exposed by a new book, You Are What You Speak, by Robert Lane Greene:
The Chinese word for crisis is not composed of the characters for danger and opportunity.
and the book which claimed that women speak much more than men was wrong. Those figures were based on an unsourced claim in a self-help book. Actually, research shows both sexes using about the same number of words in a day.

Noah Webster published the first American Spelling Book in 1793, which eventually became the first American dictionary. In the same year, he founded the first daily newspaper in New York City. A strong nationalist, he promoted a unified American language independent from British English, and reformed many spellings, including dropping the u from words like colour and favour. Webster's dictionary soon became the established standard for American English.

Webster was also America's first freelance writer, started the book tour - traveling from city to city to sell his "spellers" - and counted the number of houses in each town to add to his compulsive information gathering. He also argued the importance of copyright protection, as each state set its own such laws in those early days.

Webster suffered from what we now know is obsessive-compulsive personality disorder, as was Peter Mark Roget, who's Thesaurus became a companion volume on most bookshelves.

English has mutated over time from a variety of parent languages, primarily Latin, French and Old English. These languages stretch even farther back to a language family called Proto-Indo-European (or PIE). The most significant transformation of English happened in the eleventh century. When the Normans invaded England in the 1066, they brought their words with them. For centuries, wealthier aristocrats spoke Old Norman (or Old French) and the peasantry spoke Middle English. Inevitably, the languages mixed, and English acquired the French words that now constitute about 30% of the English vocabulary.

With global colonization in the early 1500s, English continued to amalgamate with other languages. Individual words such as futon, pecan, coyote and vodka were imported directly from foreign languages like Japanese and Algonquin.

The first real novel was Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes, who was born into poverty in 1547 near Madrid. He became a soldier, was later kidnapped by pirates and sold into slavery in North Africa for 5 years. He may have begun Don Quixote while in prison for theft. Because of an unscrupulous publisher, he never earned a penny from the book. He then became a playwright without much success, and published the 2nd volume of Don Quixote in 1615, a decade after the first, in part to counter imitators. He was a contemporary of Shakespeare, and died in 1616, at the age of 69.

Beelzebub, another name for the devil, is Hebrew for Lord of the Flies, and this is where the book's title comes from.

The custom of family (surnames) names did not really arise until the 11th century in Europe. Prior to the 11th century a surname, if used at all, represented the name of a primitive clan or tribe.

The lead pencil contains no lead. It's actually a rod of graphite encased in wood, which first came into use in the 16th century. However, it was not until the 19th century that the eraser was added, an innovation that earned Hymen Lipman a patent in 1858. In 1862, he sold his patent to Joseph Reckendorfer for $100,000.

It took 38 years for radio to reach 50 million users, 13 years for TV, and only 5 years for the Internet.

TV belongs to the writers. Film belongs to the directors. Theatre belongs to the actors.

In non-fiction, the author tells the story;
in fiction, the characters reveal the story.

Georges Feydeau's formula for writing comedy: Decide which characters should, under no circumstances, meet, and then get them together as soon as possible.

The oldest free public school in the U.S. opened in 1635. The Boston Latin School in Massachusetts was originally a school for boys, but became coeducational in 1972. The oldest public school in the U.S. and a "feeder" school for Harvard, it maintains the same standards as elite New England prep schools while adopting the egalitarian attitude of a public school. More than 99% of Boston Latin's approximately 300 annual graduates are accepted by at least one four-year college. The school was modeled after Boston Grammar School in Lincolnshire, UK, from where many of Boston's original settlers derived. Its curriculum follows that of the 18th century Latin-school movement, which holds the classics to be the basis of an educated mind. Among its alumni are four Harvard University presidents, four Massachusetts governors, and five signers of the Declaration of Independence.

The Latin School of Chicago was founded in 1888 by a group of Chicago citizens interested in providing better education for their children. It was modeled after The Boston Latin School, but supported by parents rather than being part of the public system. Early classes of all boys were held in private homes on the Near North Side. The school gradually expanded, and, in 1899, the school moved to a brand new building and became the first Chicago Latin School. In 1913 a girls' section became the Chicago Latin School for Girls, and the two schools merged in 1953. Bobbi taught at The Latin School of Chicago in the 1960s.

The National University of Mexico was founded in 1551 by Charles V of Spain and is the oldest university in North America.

Vermont, Washington D.C., Rhode Island, Alabama, and New Hampshire have the highest concentrations of librarians in the U.S.

There are thousands of public libraries in the U.S. California and New York, for example, each have more than 1,000 libraries, while the smallest number, 27, are located in Washington, D.C.

On November 28, 1814, the Times in London was the first newspaper to be printed by automatic, steam owered presses built by the German inventors Friedrich Koenig and Andreas Friedrich Bauer. This was the beginning of newspapers being available to a mass audience.

Janice Kennedy, who writes with insight and grace in The Ottawa Citizen, described the current cultural climate as the ascendancy of the unelightened, which dismisses experience, education, and sophisticated thinking. Could that be a result of the dominance of television, where the inexperienced and uneducated are celebrated on reality shows?

Days after the release of the iPad, one of the world's biggest porn companies claimed it had created a way to stream its videos onto the device, skipping the Apple store and its restrictions on salacious content.

There's an adjective to describe those of us who are fond of writing: scribacious.

Robert Frost is considered the most popular of all 20th-century American poets. He was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for poetry four timesin 1924, 1931, 1937, and 1943.

Joseph Pulitzer was born in Hungary in 1847, immigrated to the US during the Civil War and served in the Union Army. He later became a reporter and purchased and founded several newspapers, establishing the pattern of the modern newspaper by combining investigative reporting with publicity stunts, self-advertising, and sensationalism. In his will, he established the Pulitzer Prizes, annual awards for achievements in American journalism, letters, and music.

In Douglas Coupland's new biography of Marshall McLuhan, he reveals that when McLuhan picked up a new book, he turned first to page 69, and if that page didn't impress him, he wouldn't read the book.

God Bless America is considered the semi-official national anthem of the United States, along with America the Beautiful and The Star Spangled Banner. Irving Berlin wrote it during World War I, but it was not sung in public until November 11, 1938, when Kate Smith introduced it on a radio broadcast.

Tony Bennett, an acclaimed jazz vocalist for close to five decades, also has one of his paintings hanging in the Smithsonian. When interviewed recently about why his music appeals to all ages, Bennett said he's "anti-demographic." Bennett has won fifteen Grammy Awards, two Emmy Awards, been named an NEA Jazz Master and a Kennedy Center Honoree. He has sold over 50 million records worldwide. On his 85th birthday, he released his second duets album, pairing with everyone from Lady Gaga to K.D. Lang.

Carnegie Hall opened in 1891. The Neo-Italian Renaissance building by architect William Burnet Tuthill was endowed by industrialist Andrew Carnegie at the insistence of conductor Walter Damrosch. Pyotr Tchaikovsky was the guest of honor at its opening. The New York city landmark was slated for demolition in the 1950s but was saved by a public outcry.

Arthur Rubinstein was was a Polish-American pianist whose enormous popularity spanned many decades. He debuted in 1900 and performed with moderate success until the 1930s, when he stopped performing for five years to improve his technique and reemerged as a giant of 20th-century music, active into his 80s.

In Dante's Inferno the hottest places in hell are reserved for those who, in time of great moral crisis, maintain their neutrality.

The world's top languages are:
             Mandarin Chinese -1 billion+
                 English - 508 million
                      Hindustani - 497 million
                          Spanish - 392 million
                              Russian - 277 million
                                   Arabic - 246 million
                                       Bengali - 211 million
                                             Portuguese - 191 million
                                                 Malay-Indonesian - 159 million
                                                     French - 129 million

English has become the world’s lingua franca or default tongue, “the worldwide dialect of the third millennium,” the language in which China trades with Zambia, the language in which a Greek watching CNN phones a friend from the Middle East to get him off the London bus he’s riding before it explodes, according to Roy Blount, Jr., in his NY Times review of GLOBISH: How the English Language Became the World’s Language, by Robert McCrum.

With that in mind, one wonders why Canada persists in teaching French to both children and adults, and why Quebec devotes manpower and budget to enforcing its silly language laws.

The English language has close to 540,000 words, about five times as many as existed in Shakespeare's time. But some of the words we use frequently today were invented by Shakespeare. According to the Oxford Dictionary of Quotations, Shakespeare wrote about one-tenth of the most quotable quotations ever written or spoken in English.

The Gullah/Geechee culture, a mix of African tribes that made up a large part of the population of slaves in the Carolina Low Country, brought many of their customs to the U.S. One was the superstition that the color blue warded off evil spirits. For that reason, they painted door and window frames blue, and eventually many homeowners began to paint porch ceilings blue, which came to be known as haint blue, for the haints or haunts they kept at bay.

Women use more pronouns and verbs than men when they write, while men use more articles, prepositions and numbers. That seems to indicate that women focus on the personal (I, you, we, he, she, they) and actions, while men need to define things precisely.

     Guy Deutscher, in his book, Through the Language Glass: Why the World Looks Different in Other Languages, points out how different languages treat common nouns and verbs. For example, French, German, Russian, and several other languages assign a gender to inanimate objects. This even extends to terms for people, so that "my neighbor" in English could be male or female, but in French or German you have to specify which.
     In German and Spanish, the same object has different genders. A German bridge is feminine, while a Spanish bridge is masculine. The same is the case for clocks, forks, chairs, tables, brooms, apartments, newspapers, pockets, shoulders, stamps, tickets, keys, violins, butterflies, mountains, wars, rain, garbage, the sun, the world and love. In English, tenses determine when an action occurred, but in Chinese, the same verb can be used for past, present or future actions.
    In some parts of the world, directions are given in relation to geography: north, south, east, west. In the western world we tend to relate space to ourselves: left, right, front, back. Among the countries who use geographic coordinates are Polynesia, Bali, Mexico, and Namibia. Their speakers tend to have a much better sense of orientation in situations where there are few landmarks. Some have a keen awareness of location from infancy, similar to perfect pitch. Some research that we perceive colors depending on language. In English, green and blue are distinct colors, whereas in other languages they are only shades of the same color. Our brains seem to be trained to exaggerate the distance between shades if these colors have different names

In English, a clock runs, but in Spanish, the clock walks. In English, I missed the bus, but in Spanish, the bus left me. In English, I am hungry, in French, I have hunger, but in Spanish, I hold hunger.

The only 15 letter word that can be spelled without repeating a letter is uncopyrightable.

There are two words in the English language that have all five vowels in order: abstemious and facetious.

Typewriter is the longest word that can be made using the letters only on one row of the keyboard.

Stewardesses is the longest word that can be typed with only the left hand, and lollipop only with the right.

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

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

The English words ballot and bullet share an ancient source, but eventually came to mean completely different things. Officer has the word office in it, just as sweetbread is not sweet and it's not bread. The word demand in French confuses English speakers because it means just to ask, not to demand. In Spanish, embarazada, does not mean embarrassed but rather pregnant. These kinds of related words (known as cognates) are common in various languages. It stands to reason that if the words are related they ought to mean the same thing, but it's not true. Cognates, like etymology and internal structure, are unreliable.

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

There are 10 human body parts that are only 3 letters long. Among them are ear, eye, arm, leg, hip, toe, jaw, lip, gum, rib.

Funk (of Funk & Wagnalls Dictionary) claimed that the 10 most beautiful words in the English language are: moist, hush, luminous, murmuring, dawn, chimes, lullaby, melody, tranquil and golden.

Robert Fulford points out that there are quite a few English words which have only a negative meaning, with no positive counterpart, such as: unruly, disgruntled, unkempt, disconsolate, uncouth, dishevelled, nonchalant, inept.

Q is the only letter in the alphabet that does not appear in the name of any of the United States.

The Scandinavian word skot passed into English usage from Viking settlements to mean a tax based on your land holdings. Certain exemptions were made for the poor, the clerical and the rich and powerful who were allowed to go scot free, which is how that phrase became common usage. Hopscotch and butterscotch have no relation to the country of Scotland. Rather, one of the origins of the word scotch comes from the Anglo-French word scocchen which meant to cut, gouge or mark with a notch. Butterscotch was a form of candy which was notched into segments that could be broken off easily, and hopscotch was first played where the stepping squares could be gouged into the ground with a sharp stick. It can also mean to figuratively to scratch or erase something.

The word katzenjammer stems from American English, a combination of the German Katze (cat) and jammer (distress). The word was popularized by the early comic The Katzenjammer Kids. The dictionary definition is uproar or clamor. Windjammer comes from the same source. Although we now use it to refer to a large sailing ship, originally the word meant someone who talked a lot (possibly a sailor). A secondary meaning of the German word jammer meant talking incessantly, and we use the word yammer to mean the same thing.

The phrase the cat's pajamas has nothing to do with cats. In the late 1700s a tailor made pajamas for the British elite made from rare silk, newly imported from the far east. The tailor's name was E.B. Katz, hence the Katz pajamas, which became the cat's pajamas.

Letting the cat out of the bag came from medieval markets where piglets were sold in bags, otherwise known as a pig in a poke. When a stray cat was substituted for the valuable piglet, the buyer discovered the switch by letting the cat out of the bag.

Flea market comes directly from the French marché aux puces which literally means market of fleas.

Long ago, dishes and cookware in Europe were made of a dense orange clay called pygg. When people saved coins in jars made of this clay, the jars became known as pygg banks. When an English potter misunderstood the word, he made a container that resembled a pig. Hence, the piggy bank.

When Mary Queen of Scots went to France as a young girl, Louis, King of France, learned that she loved the Scots game golf. So he had the first course outside of Scotland built for her enjoyment. To make sure she was properly chaperoned (and guarded) while she played, Louis hired cadets from a military school to accompany her. Mary liked this a lot and when she returned to Scotland, she took the practice with her. In French, the word cadet is pronounced ca-day and the Scots changed it into caddie.

Invented in 1825, limelight was used in lighthouses and theatres by burning a cylinder of lime which produced a brilliant light. In the theatre, a performer in the limelight was the centre of attention.

The expression to wing it. meaning to improvise a speech instead of learning it beforehand, came from the theatre, where actors sometimes did a quick memorization of lines in the wings.

Many phrases come from references to the lower classes. A meal made from deer innards, only eaten by the servants, became humble pie, and unwelcome house guests were served unheated leftover mutton, or the cold shoulder.

Bizarre comes from the Basque word for beard, applied to Spanish soldiers who arrived wearing beards to villages where people considered facial hair odd.

There are several expressions using the word buck. A buck is a slang word for a dollar, and pass the buck also refers to deerskin, because the leather was used as currency by native people in the New World, and poker players in the 19th century used to stick their buckskin-covered knives into the table to indicate the dealer.

Samuel Johnson's famous dictionary was published in 1755, 150 years before the Oxford English Dictionary. The legendary scholar, who was born 300 years ago, suffered from Tourette's syndrome, physical pain and insomnia, was blind in one eye and deaf in one ear, had battled tuberculosis and smallpox. Yet he is the second-most quoted writer in the English language, surpassed only by Shakespeare.

From Dictionary.com: Why does the single letter C represent so many different sounds?
          The third letter of the alphabet is somewhat of a chameleon; one might even question its usefulness. The letter /c/ can represent the “hard C” (carrot,) the “soft C” (nice,) or even “silent C” (indict,). Why does our alphabet have more than one letter to represent the same sound, as in K and C, or S and the “soft C?” To understand the reasons C plays so many roles, let’s dig into its long and messy linguistic history.
          The letter /c/ is of Semitic descent and shares the exact same origin as the letter /g/ – the Semitic letter called “gimel.” The original glyph for /g/ was most likely adapted around the Middle Bronze Age (2200-1550 BC) from a hieroglyph for a gimel or its namesake, the staff sling – a weapon consisting of a long piece of wood with a short strap for launching rocks at the end. The symbol denotes a line with a bend at the top. The gimel influenced the symbol for the third letter in the Greek alphabet, “gamma.” Later, the Etruscan alphabet, used by the people who inhabited what is now Italy, adopted the Greek “gamma” to represent the /k/ or hard /c/ sound but used a different character, ), which eventually turned from facing left to right and became the letter C in Classical Latin.
          This long journey to existence may explain how the letter /c/ came to be, but the question still remains – why does /c/ possess so many phonetic values? In a nutshell it comes down to something called palatalization, or simply “sound change” – the tempering of a letter’s pronunciation from its original form. Another important factor, in the case of the letter /c/, is its corresponding vowel. For instance, the sound of the hard C, which exhibits the [k] sound, often precedes the vowels /a/, /o/ and /u/ while the soft c, taking on the /s/ sound, precedes the vowels /e/, /i/ and /y/.
          The soft C is also placed before different combinations primarily in relation to certain Latin loanwords such as “Caesar” and “caecum.” Add to this the use of the silent C, which always corresponds with the letter /t/ as in the word “indict.”
          Product naming is infamous for replacing the letter /c/ with the letter /k/ – as in Kool-Aid and Nesquik. The choice to use the letter /k/ may simply come down to a fun play on words.

The Apostrophe Protection Society was started in 2001 by John Richards, now its Chairman, with the specific aim of preserving the correct use of this currently much abused punctuation mark in all forms of text written in the English language.

The Gettysburg Address, one of the most compelling speeches in history, contains just 267 words.

          In True Stories Behind Car Company Logos, in Road&Track, Nick Kurczewski reveals that the Mercedes-Benz three-pointed star first appeared on a personal note written in 1872 from company founder, Gottlieb Daimler, to his wife. Mr. Daimler used a three-pointed star to mark the location of his family’s new home in the town of Deutz, Germany. His sons adapted the emblem as the Mercedes-Benz logo from 1910 onward.
         The Cadillac crest is the coat of arms of French military commander and explorer, Antoine de la Mothe Cadillac, who founded Detroit in 1701.
         In 1909, having left the company bearing his name, August Horch established a second automobile company in Zwickau, Germany. He couldn’t legally name his new company after himself, so he translated it into Latin, coming up with Audi. The four interlinked Audi rings came about in 1932, when four struggling automakers joined together under the corporate banner of Auto Union. These companies included Audi, DKW, Wanderer and, ironically, the original Horch.
        The Subaru name comes from the Japanese name of a star cluster in the Taurus constellation. Six of the stars are visible to the naked eye and—in keeping with corporate identity—this matches the six companies which combined to form Fuji Heavy Industries, Subaru’s parent company.

Many years ago in England, a whistle was baked into the handle of ceramic cups used in pubs. When patrons wanted a refill, they used the whistle to get some service. Hence the phrase, Wet your whistle.

Also in old England, when customers got unruly, the bartender would yell at them Mind your pints and quarts, and settle down. Hence the phrase, Mind your P's and Q's.

Bakers used to be fined if their loaves were under weight, so they added an extra loaf to every dozen, just in case -- hence, the expression baker's dozen.

Hands Down, meaning an easy win, comes from horse-racing. When a jockey is close to the finish line, he relaxes his grip on the reins and drops his hands to his sides.

The word queue comes from the Latin cauda, which means tail. In French it became queue, which the English borrowed and added the word cue for the long stick (or tail) used in billiards, and the verb to cue.

Ancient tribes of long ago that wanted to banish people without killing them would burn their houses down -- hence the expression to get fired.

The Inuit have as many as 252 inflections for simple nouns, 63 forms of the present tense and a minimum vocabulary of 12,500 words. Chippewa has 6,000 verb forms, and the Oregon Indian language of Tillamook has 30 prefixes. ln one Inuit language, the word for tomorrow translates, If it gets light. The Nipmuc Indians were responsible for the lake with the world’s longest name: Lake Chargoggagoggmanchauggauggagoggchaubunagungaillau, in Webster, Massachusetts. It translates: I fish on my side, you fish on your side and no one fishes in the middle.

Many basic English words come from the same Teutonic roots as German, Dutch, Flemish, Danish, Swedish and Norwegian, producing remarkable similarities in, for example: best, blind, break, come, dance, find, finger, good, hair, hand, help, here, ice, lamp, man, mouse, rat, ring, sand, send, sing, storm, wild and young.

The Dictionary of Newfoundland English devotes three pages to the word ice, while most languages spoken north of the 60th parallel have dozens of synonyms for snow.

North American Indian, Japanese, and some Polynesian dialects contain no swear words.

English utilizes many words which have come directly from other languages: molasses (Portuguese), magazine (Arabic), pepper (Sanskrit), bungalow (Hindi), scarlet (Persian), horde (Turkish), tea (Chinese), pendant (Italian), gravel (Celtic), mammoth (Slavonic), boss (Dutch), tycoon (Japanese), skill (Old Norse), flannel (Welsh), cork (Spanish). For common English words that derive from Yiddish, click HERE.

In some American Indian and native Australian languages the grammatical distinction between singular and plural does not exist.

Eggcorns is the term coined by Mark Liberman, Univ. of Pennsylvania linguist. He describes this as the confluence of creativity or logic with misunderstanding the meaning of the words in the phrase. Chris Waigi's Eggcorn Database, www.eggcorns.lascribe.net includes such gems as: without further adieu, wet your appetite, stark raven mad, girdle one's loins, insectuous, flaw in the ointment, spurt of the moment, financial heartship, zero-sum gain, works like a champ, gorilla marketing, and take with a grain assault.

Using Xs at the end of a letter for kisses started in the Middle Ages when people couldn't write and used crosses as signatures.

Conservative people in the Middle East only look directly into the eyes of a social equal of the same sex. It's a cultural difference that can make Westerners feel someone from the Middle East can't be trusted, as Westerners are used to looking directly at anyone they meet.

The word sneaker was coined by Henry McKinney, an advertising agent for N.W. Ayer & Son.

The first use of OK in print, in The Boston Morning Post of March 23, 1839, was a joke: o.k. — all correct. Such misspelling-based abbreviations were a fad. But it soon caught on. A book review in the NYTimes quotes from OK - The Improbable Story of America’s Greatest Word, by Allan Metcalf: O is a satisfying oval, all curves; K is all straight lines, a collection of sticks. The combination is stark and striking. And: Feminine O, masculine K. That’s the look of OK. Reviewer Ray Blount points out: The sounds are clear and simple: two long vowels, O and A, separated in the middle by a quick K. Nearly every language in the world not only has these three sounds but allows them to be combined in that sequence, which accounts both for the spread of OK throughout the world.

EPONYMS are words originating from the names of people. Some examples include:
bougainvillea - Louis Bougainville;     dunce - John Duns Scotus;     guppy - Robert Guppy;
hooligan - Patrick Hooligan;     jacuzzi - Candido Jacuzzi;     praline - Count Plessis-Praslin;
melba toast - soprano Nellie Melba;     peach melba - Nellie Melba

Sir Walter Scott coined a number of phrases in common use today. Among these are:
caught red-handed ("redhand" was an existing Scottish legal term meaning "in the act of crime")
cold shoulder; blood is thicker than water; flotsam and jetsam; go berserk; infra dig; lock stock and barrel, nail your colours to the mast; savoir faire; strain at the leash; apple of my eye; the back of beyond; tongue in cheek; wide berth

Shakespeare loved symmetry. Romeo & Juliet contains balance between night and day, the nightingale and the lark, to echo the two feuding families, Capulets and Montagues. Every character in the play has his or her counterpart in the other family.

There are seven soliloquies in Hamlet, which has seven main characters: Hamlet, Ophelia, Gertrude, Claudius, Polonius, Laertes, and Horatio.

The Drama Teachers Association of Southern California holds an annual Shakespeare competition, which launched the careers of Kevin Spacey, Mare Winningham and Val Kilmer. Lori Miller has made a documentary film, Shakespeare High, about this program. It premiered at the 2011 Tribeca Film Festival. Miller says: theatre education is a way of increasing literacy, communication skills, and complex thought.

Sir Ian McKellen cites the frequently gender-bending plot devices of Shakespeare’s plays as evidence that the playwright himself was gay, or at the very least bisexual. I’d say Shakespeare slept with men, McKellen, 72, is quoted as saying. The Merchant of Venice, centering on how the world treats gays as well as Jews, has a love triangle between an older man, younger man and a woman.

Your kids probably know Curious George, but you may not know about its origins. According to Jon Meacham (Editor of Newsweek and author of American Lion - Andrew Jackson in the White House): In 1940, after a tense border inspection of their manuscript and draft illustrations of Curious George stuffed in their suitcase, Margret and H. A. Rey fled Paris, eventually settling in the U.S. An exhibit for kids and adults at The Jewish Museum in New York explores the symbolism of the series’ illustrations and the parallels between the little simian that could always “save the day” and the way his own creators evaded the dangers of Nazi-occupied Europe. The museum show closes in August 2010, but there’s a terrific interactive timeline, videos, and also a book on the topic.

On May 26, 1913, Actors’ Equity Association was organized in New York City.

During his entire lifetime, Herman Melville's timeless classic, Moby Dick, sold only 3,715 copies.

Dr. Seuss wrote Green Eggs and Ham because the editor bet him he could not write a book with fewer than fifty words.

Mary Had a Little Lamb was written by Sarah Josepha Hale, who turned to writing in 1822 as a widow trying to support her family and who eventually became an influential editor and arbiter of American taste.

Charles Dickens was able to work on two serialized novels simultaneously while also editing a monthly magazine.

Ronald B. Tobias claims there are only 20 master plots in fiction. These include: Quest, Riddle, Temptation, Rivalry, Revenge, Maturation, Love, Forbidden Love, Escape, etc. His book is available at Amazon, and you can read a talk he gave to Denver writers at: www.hodrw.com/ronaldtobias.htm.

Karen Blixen, the Danish author who wrote under the pen name Isak Dinesen, published her first book at age 50, and her blockbuster, Out of Africa, at 52.

Laura Ingalls Wilder, author of the Little House on the Prairie series, didn’t have her first book published until she was well into her 60s.

Richard Adams, author of the children’s classic Watership Down, remained unpublished until he was in his 50s.

Bangladeshi writer Nirad Chaudhuri's first book, The Autobiography of an Unknown Indian, was published in 1951, when he was 54 years old. Its sequel hit the market in 1988, when he was 90. And his final book, Three Horsemen of the New Apocalypse, was published in 1997—when he was 100.

Stephen Vizinczey's best-seller, In Praise of Older Women, was self-published, but after he sold world rights to someone else, he didn't see a penny for two years. I was starving in Montreal, all the money went to New York. Seeing headlines in the paper about being a worldwide bestseller when you're having to borrow money to eat, that's a soul-destroying experience. The court case took seven years to settle.

A 1784 satire written by Benjamin Franklin proposed taxing shutters, rationing candles, and waking the public by ringing church bells and firing cannons at sunrise. But he didn't actually suggest Daylight Savings Time. That didn't come until William Willett conceived DST in 1905, and it wasn't widely accepted until 1916.

"Beat" poet Lawrence Ferlinghetti commented that the slogan from 1960s, Be Here Now has evolved to Be Somewhere Else Now.

Swiss biologists determined that stupid flies live longer than smart flies because intelligence wears out flies' brains. Canadian researchers claim that straining to recall information which seems to be “on the tip of my tongue” makes us learn mistaken guesses instead of the correct answers we may (or may not) eventually remember. (source: Harper's)

The first email was sent out by Ray Tomlinson in 1971, 127 years after Samuel Morse sent the world's first telegraph message.

In 1894, the first women's pages in newspapers were created, to court female consumers.

The first permanent color photograph was taken by James Clerk Maxwell in 1861.

Warren Buffett, John Kerry, Ted Turner, Tom Brokaw, New Yorker Editor (and Pulitzer Prize-winner) David Remnick, Art Garfunkel, Jann Wenner, Meredith Vieira, Columbia University President Lee Bollinger, Sun Microsystems co-founder Scott McNealy and Memorial Sloan-Kettering President Harold Varmus were all rejected by Harvard.

Of the 43 men to have served as president, eight never went to college: George Washington, Andrew Jackson, Martin Van Buren, Zachary Taylor, Millard Fillmore, Abraham Lincoln, Andrew Johnson, and Grover Cleveland (who was both the 22nd and 24th president).

The largest academic library in the United States is at Harvard, which contains 13.6 million volumes. Second largest, at 9.5 million volumes, is Yale.

William James Sidis was an American child prodigy who could read The New York Times by the time he was 18 months old. By age eight, he had taught himself eight languages and had invented one of his own. It is said that in his adult years he could speak more than 40 languages and learn a new one in a single day. In 1909, he became the youngest person ever to enroll at Harvard College and began lecturing on higher mathematics the following year.

American book packager Edward Stratemeyer created three popular series of children's books, Nancy Drew, The Bobbsey Twins, and The Hardy Boys. Although Carolyn Keene was credited as the author of Nancy Drew, there was no author by that name. All three series were written by a syndicate of anonymous authors.

Each king in a deck of playing cards represents a great king:
          Spades - King David
          Hearts - Charlemagne
          Clubs -Alexander the Great
          Diamonds - Julius Caesar

1,400 actresses were interviewed for the part of Scarlett O'Hara in Gone with the Wind.

Who are the stars who have won the most awards?
      Barbra Streisand - Total 17 = 4 Emmys, 10 Grammys, 2 Oscars, 1 Tony
      Mike Nichols - Total 13 = 4 Emmys, 1 Grammy, 1 Oscar, 7 Tonys
      Marvin Hamlisch - Total 12 = 4 Emmys, 4 Grammys, 3 Oscars, 1 Tony
      Mel Brooks - Total 11 = 4 Emmys, 3 Grammys, 1 Oscar, 3 Tonys
      Liza Minnelli - Total 6 = 1 Emmy, 1 Grammy, 1 Oscar, 3 Tonys
      Whoopi Goldberg - Total 5 = 2 Emmys, 1 Grammy, 1 Oscar, 1 Tony
      Rita Moreno - Total 5 = 2 Emmys, 1 Grammy, 1 Oscar, 1 Tony

When an orange is shown in any of the Godfather movies, this means that someone is about to die or a close call is to occur.

Alfred Hitchcock filmed the shower scene in Psycho in black and white, using 78 pieces of film perfectly edited into a 45-second sequence featuring the piercing shriek of Bernard Herrmann’s violin. The attacker was actually an extra, as Anthony Perkins was in New York that week, appearing in a play!

Rin Tin Tin was smuggled into the U.S. from France, and starred initially in silent films written by his owner. He turned out to be one of Warner Brothers' most profitable commodities.

Marcel Marceau was a French actor and mime who gained renown in 1947 with the creation of Bip, a sad, white-faced clown with a tall, battered hatreminiscent of Charlie Chaplin’s Tramp. Noted for his eloquent, deceptively simple portrayals, he earned worldwide acclaim in the 1950s with his production of the “mimodrama” of Nikolai Gogol’s Overcoat. During that time, he visited New York, and was a guest in the drama workshop at Barnard where Bobbi met him as a student.

28% of all primetime TV shows are now "reality" shows. Do viewers realize that most of these are scripted and even rehearsed? that most of the contestants are using this exposure as a short-cut to a career in film or broadcasting. What the audience thinks is sincerity is all artifice, all acting. Just like the make-up on these supposedly scrubbed faces.

The first ever television broadcast occurred at Alexandra Palace, London in 1936.

Mick Jagger also sang backup for Carly Simon's hit You're So Vain, the song supposedly written about Warren Beatty.

The popular song, We've Only Just Begun, which was a best-seller by The Carpenters, was written by Paul Williams, contracted by an ad agency to write a song for an ad campaign for a bank in Los Angeles.

Warner Communications paid $28 million for the copyright to the song Happy Birthday.

Originally a jazz pianist, Nat King Cole performed in Los Angeles nightclubs with his trio in the 1930s but did not achieve commercial success until he began singing. His warm, velvety voice brought a personal touch to his ballads, and he became internationally popular for his broodingly romantic hits, such as Unforgettable. He went on to become one of the first African-American artists to star in a radio show and to host a network television show.

Sidney Poitier, called Hollywood's first black leading man, was born in the Bahamas, moved to Miami when he was 15, and was living in New York, working as a dishwasher, when he first auditioned for the American Negro Theatre. Semi-literate, he taught himself to read and comprehend by studying newspapers, and learned to speak properly by listening to the radio.

John Wagner, a Hallmark artist, is the creator of the popular cartoon, Maxine. She was modeled on a combination of his mother, his maiden aunts and his grandmother. Hired for Hallmark's new Shoebox Greetings in 1986 led to the creation of Maxine. People at Shoebox started referring to the character as John Wagner's old lady, said the artist in an interview, so he instigated a contest among the Shoebox group to name the character. Three entries suggested Maxine, which John agreed is perfect.

Walt Disney got his idea for Mickey Mouse while he worked in a garage. He was watching the mice play one night and got the inspiration for Mortimer Mouse. He didn’t change the name until shortly before he finished the first Mickey Mouse cartoon – the 1928 Steamboat Willie, Disney’s first attempt to use sound and the first fully synchronized sound cartoon. He named Mickey Mouse after Mickey Rooney, whose mother he dated for some time. Mickey was created in 1928, making his debut in the silent film Plane Crazy.

Peter Pan is the only Disney cartoon movie that features both parent characters alive and present throughout the entire film.

On December 21st, 1937, Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs premiered. It was the first full-length animated feature film in history. It was animated entirely by hand and took Walt Disney and his studio three years to complete. It was exponentially more expensive than the animated shorts the studio had produced until that time and met with considerable opposition. Disney eventually had to mortgage his house to help finance the project, which was derisively nicknamed Disney’s Folly by those in the film industry.

The longest Hollywood kiss was from the 1941 film, You're in the Army Now. It lasted for three minutes and three seconds, between Regis Toomey and Jane Wyman (first wife of former President Ronald Reagan). Stars of the film were Jimmy Durante and Phil Silvers.

Peter Falk, who died in 2011 at the age of 84, made 65 episodes of Columbo over a period of 32 years. The show and subsequent movies are still broadcast all over the world, translated into many languages. Bobbi's article about buying Peter Falk a jockstrap for a play she stage-managed in New York in 1955 has been sold to many magazines and newspapers over the years, and now appears in Prose to Go. Falk, an Oscar and Emmy winner, wrote an autobiography, Just One More Thing, in 2006, in which he recounts many episodes in his life as an actor, but not the jockstrap incident!

How different The Music Man might have been with someone other than Robert Preston in the role. A new book (I'm the Greatest Star, by Robert Viagas) reveals that Danny Kaye, Milton Berle, and Art Carney all turned down the role.

Music likely preceded language in evolution. Singing was used to communicate friendship, joy, comfort, knowledge, religion and love, the “six songs” Daniel Levitin describes in his book, The World in Six Songs: How the Musical Brain Created Human Nature.

Showing off at a party one evening, Chopin played the entire Minute Waltz in less than 10 seconds.

On December 22, 1808, Beethoven rented a hall in Vienna and promoted the concert to end all concerts: the debut, over four hours, of three of the greatest works in the history of music.

Franz Schubert, one of the most gifted musicians of the 19th century, was an Austrian who wrote his first of nine symphonies in 1813 at the age of 16. He wrote more than 600 songs, many to the lyrics of German poets, and also composed music for the stage, overtures, choral music, masses, and piano music. He died at 31, having produced more masterpieces by that age than almost any other composer in history.

Francis Scott Key was a young lawyer who wrote the poem, The Star Spangled Banner, after being inspired by watching the Americans fight off the British attack of Baltimore during the War of 1812. The poem became the words to the national anthem.

Andre Segovia, acknowledged to be one of the world's greatest guitarist, was primarily self-taught.

Les Paul invented the 8-track, the modified electric guitar, and over-dubbing. As a kid, he punched extra holes in his mother's piano rolls and covered existing holes, just to see how it would sound. Like many geniuses, he dropped out of high school. Always open to new ideas, was playing in a country band on the radio in Chicago while spending evenings at jazz clubs. He was the first to play the guitar beyond the third fret. Other guitar players thought he was crazy until they heard the sound he was able to produce. His use of a tape recorder was the result of an auto accident which damaged his right arm. Invention often comes out of adversity.

Arnold Jacobs, a tuba player with the Chicago Symphony and a professor at Northwestern University, says there are two cranial nerves that allow a musician to communicate when he or she is playing. Jacobs explains that thinking is as important as technique in creating music, and urges musicians to practising as if you're performing, listening to the sound in your head rather than just going through the motions of rehearsing.

The S-shaped hole in the body of the violin, which permits the sound to escape, is the same as the mathematical symbol for integral, one of the basic tools of calculus, with numerous applications in science and engineering.

There are 600 violins and cellos built by Antonio Stradivari still in existence today.

Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, and Jim Morrison were all 27 years old when they died.

The American Library Association maintains a long list of books banned by schools and libraries. It includes such classics as All Quiet on the Western Front, A Farewell to Arms, The Grapes of Wrath, For Whom the Bell Tolls, Animal Farm, 1984, Doctor Zhivago, Harry Potter, The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin, Huckelberry Finn, Gone With the Wind, To Kill a Mockingbird, and Anne Frank: The Diary of a Young Girl.

Hugo Boss, founder of the popular clothing company, designed some of the Nazi SS uniforms. Boss joined the Nazi Party in 1931 after being bankrupt and coming to an agreement with his creditors. He later stated that he joined the party because of their promise to end unemployment and because he felt “temporarily” withdrawn from the Lutheran Church.

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