December 7, 2003

  • Okay, kiddies, since I’m nearly blog-dead (stillborn with words that find not time to burst into bloom and infuse the internet with their linguistic effervescence), I’ll just zoom-zoom-zoom and pass a long a few of my favorite fun facts:



    The "y" in signs reading "ye olde.." is properly pronounced with a "th" sound, not "y". The "th" sound does not exist in Latin, so ancient Roman occupied (present day) England used the rune "thorn" to represent "th" sounds. With the advent of the printing press the character from the Roman alphabet which closest resembled thorn was the lower case "y".


    (As in: "There's too much theast in this bread!")


    The correct response to the Irish greeting, "Top of the morning to you," is "and the rest of the day to yourself."


     


    (So greet your boss with "Top of the morning to you,"  and correct him/her if she/he fails to give you the rest of the day off.)



    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.


     


    (Something tells me that astronavigators had to be good swimmers, too.)



    The last thing to happen is the ultimate. The next-to-last is the penultimate, and the second-to-last is the antepenultimate.

    (As with good sex, the antepenultimate: consumate intent; the penultimate: irrepressible orgasm; the ultimate: embracing, timeless contentment)

    Greenland: The largest island in the world, got its name not because it has lush green fields which the name implies, but rather because people were purposely misled to believe that it had greenery, or good place to grow crop to make a good living. Viking explorers called the frozen island in the Arctic Circle Greenland to attract settlers, who otherwise might have been scared off. However, only the coastal area turns green and even this greening occurs solely during Greenland’s brief summer. But long after the Vikings had passed and their subterfuge had been discovered, the erroneous label remained as the island’s official name.


     


    (This makes me wonder if "The Enchanted Kingdom" is truly enchanted. )



    Oh, yes, and one scary fact:Many of today’s automobiles and trucks are already equipped with retrievable ‘black boxes’ that record the last seconds prior to a catastrophic accident.IBM and others are envisioning a scenario that will automatically transmit such crash data instantaneously via satellite to an online Global Data Safety Vault for analysis by intelligent Data Miner software.


     


    (Ponder the acronym P.E.T. : personal e-tracking.)

Comments (444)

Comments are closed.

Post a Comment

notforprophet

Recent Posts

Categories

The End of Days

December 2003
M T W T F S S
« Nov   Jan »
1234567
891011121314
15161718192021
22232425262728
293031