Posted on 07/26/2003 10:38:39 PM PDT by Hildy
1. A rat can last longer without water than a camel.
2. Your stomach has to produce a new layer of mucus every two weeks or it will digest itself.
3. The dot over the letter "i" is called a tittle.
4. A raisin dropped in a glass of fresh champagne will bounce up and down continuously from the bottom of the glass to the top.
5. A female ferret will die if it goes into heat and cannot find a mate.
6. A duck's quack doesn't echo. No one knows why.
7. A 2 X 4 is really 1-1/2" by 3-1/2".
8. During the chariot scene in "Ben Hur," a small red car can be seen in the distance (and Heston's wearing a watch).
9. On average, 12 newborns will be given to the wrong parents daily! (That explains a few mysteries....)
10. Donald Duck comics were banned from Finland because he doesn't wear pants.
11. Because metal was scarce, the Oscars given out during World War II were made of wood.
12. The number of possible ways of playing the first four moves per side in a game of chess is 318,979,564,000.
13. There are no words in the dictionary that rhyme with orange, purple and silver.
14. The name Wendy was made up for the book Peter Pan. There was never a recorded Wendy before.
15. The very first bomb dropped by the Allies on Berlin in World War II killed the only elephant in the Berlin Zoo.
16. If one places a tiny amount of liquor on a scorpion, it will instantly go mad and sting itself to death. (Who was the sadist who discovered this??)
17. Bruce Lee was so fast that they actually had to s-l-o-w film down so you could see his moves. That's the opposite of the norm.
18. The first CD pressed in the US was Bruce Springsteen's "Born in the USA."
19. The original name for butterfly was flutterby.
20. The phrase "rule of thumb" is derived from an old English law which stated that you couldn't beat your wife with anything wider than your thumb.
21. The first product Motorola started to develop was a record player for automobiles. At that time, the most known player on the market was Victrola, so the called themselves Motorola.
22. Roses may be red, but violets are indeed violet.
23. By raising your legs slowly and lying on your back, you cannot sink into quicksand.
24. Celery has negative calories. It takes more calories to eat a piece of celery than the celery has in it to begin with.
25. Charlie Chaplin once won third prize in a Charlie Chaplin look-alike contest.
26. Chewing gum while peeling onions will keep you from crying.
27. Sherlock Holmes NEVER said, "Elementary, my dear Watson."
28. An old law in Bellingham, Washington, made it illegal for a woman to take more than three steps backwards while dancing!
29. The glue on Israeli postage is certified kosher.
30. The Guinness Book of Records holds the record for being the book most often stolen from public libraries.
31. Astronauts are not allowed to eat beans before they go into space because passing wind in a spacesuit damages them.
32. Bats always turn left when exiting a cave!
Then don't ask about Alice Liddell and Lewis Carroll... you don't want to know.
Unfortunately, I do know. PLEASE don't put Carroll in the same class as Barrie. Barrie wrote a wonderful tale of fun and adventure, childhood innocence and trust. Carroll wrote of a nightmare world where nothing was what it seemed and everything was senseless insanity. Barrie was a gentleman and a gentle man; Carroll a pervert, a pedophile and a pederast.
If your Mrs. Harvey's quaint malapropistic derivation of "flutterby" is true, then why didn't the name of the insects stay flutterby instead of it being being changed to the less appealing name of "butterfly."
You left out "likely drug addict..."
Good question. I really don't know! But you know, I don't think her use of the word was a malapropism, she would laugh and quite explicitly tell us how times had changed and that "flutterby" was the original word. I mean she was aware that folks don't use that word anymore, but was quite clear that they used to.
I like her outlook on life... but I have researched the origins of the word "butterfly" and do not find "flutterby" as an original. The Encyclopedia Brittanica which lead me to
Butterfly Etymology
by Matthew Rabuzzi Cupertino, CA. U.S.A.
Here's a little bagatelle (or, very imprecisely, a bugatelle!) of entomology etymology. I've long been fascinated by the large variety of distinct words for "butterfly" in various Indo-European languages. Here is my butterfly collection, which I hope will be of more than "e-vanessa-nt" interest.
"Butterfly" in English
Middle English buterflie, Old English buttorfleoge (written citation 1000 C.E.)
The Oxford English Dictionary notes some old Dutch words "botervlieg" and "boterschijte", and conjectures that butterflies' excrement may have been thought to resemble butter, hence giving the name "butter-sh_t", then "butter-fly".
Webster's Third New International Dictionary says perhaps the word comes from the notion that butterflies, or witches in that form, stole milk and butter (see German "Schmetterling" below).
. . .
"Schmetterling" in German
From "Schmetten", an Upper Saxon dialect loan-word first used 16 & 17th C, from Czech "smetana", both meaning "cream", referring to butterflies' proclivity to hover around milkpails, butterchurns, etc. Folk belief had it that the butterflies were really witches out to steal the cream.
(As an aside, "schmettern", among other things, means "to ring out, to warble, to twitter" -- an aural analogue of how butterflies look in flight? Latin "pipilo/are" means "to twitter, to chirp", after all. But the German, to my ears, sounds more like the sound a butterfly makes as a Prussian sort accelerates down the autobahn mashing it into a smear on the windshield.)
"Tagfalter" is another name for butterfly, perhaps meaning "day-hinge" or "day-folder", and "Nachtfalter" is a moth. These make semantic sense, or the "falter" part may instead reflect the Old High German "fifaltra" derived from the Latin.
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So. Given the choices of believing your Mrs. Harvey or the Oxford English Dictionary and an expert entomology etymologist I am afraid I have to choose the OED and the expert. Sorry, Mrs. Harvey.
I don't doubt that an allied bomb killed an animal at the zoo, but I wonder how they are sure it was the first bomb.
The earliest date for an allied raid on Berlin I could find is August 25th 1940. The Berlin zoo's history page says the zoo was first bombed in 1941 and doesn't mention any casualties. So it's probably untrue.
Which Edgar Bergen christened Candace. It was later given its own television series entitled "Murphy Brown".
In addition, it is true that Bill Lear was one of Paul Galvin's early associates, and helped to develop the practical car radio at the beginning of the 1930's.
In the 70's or 80's, Lear publicly claimed credit for inventing the term "Motorola;" however this was refuted by Bob Galvin, the founder's son, shortly thereafter. His father, who died around 1960, had told him the story of his coining the term while shaving one morning as the product was nearing its introduction.
That's true... There was a documentary on the life of Bruce Lee a while back, and they showed a number of his original screen tests. In once, he kicked a suspended ceiling light, breaking it. The light was at least 6" above his head, and about all you saw was the broken light coming down. In another of his screen tests, he is talking about different types of hits and kicks that he was able to do, and was demonstrating them (not actually making contact) on a studio flunky... In every case, they guy was flinching well after the blow was completed and Bruce was back at a relaxed standing position.
Mark
Only the "induced" quacks of ducks echo... Naturally occuring quacks do not echo, although some ducks do unexpectedly make the sound AFLAC rather than quack, especially is Yogi Berra is around!
Mark
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