some trivial facts...
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Did You Know????
1. The first couple to be shown in bed together on prime time TV was Fred and Wilma Flintstone.
2. Coca Cola was originally green.
3. Every day more money is printed for Monopoly than the US Treasury.
4. Men can read smaller print than women; women can hear better.
5. The state with the highest percentage of people who walk to work? Alaska.
6. The percentage of Africa that is wilderness? 28% (now get this.....)
7. The percentage of America that is wilderness? 38%
8. The cost of raising a medium-size dog to the age of eleven: $6400.00
9. Intelligent people have more zinc and copper in their hair.
10. The world's youngest parents were eight and nine and lived in China in 1910.
11. The youngest pope was eleven years old.
12. The first novel ever written on a typewriter: Tom Sawyer.
13. The San Francisco cable cars are the only mobile National Monuments.
14. Each king in a deck of playing cards represents a great king from history: Spades: King David; Hearts: Charlemagne; Clubs: Alexander the Great; Diamonds: Julius Caesar.
15. 111,111,111 x 111,111,111 = 12,345,678,987,654,321
16. If a statue in the park of a person on a horse has both front legs in the air, the person died in battle. If the horse has one front leg in the air, the person died as a result of wounds received in battle. If the horse has all four legs on the ground, the person died of natural causes.
17. Only two people signed the Declaration of Independence on July 4th, John Hancock and Charles Thomson. Most of the rest signed on August 2nd, but the last signature wasn't added until five years later.
18. "I am." is the shortest complete sentence in the English language.
19. Hershey's Kisses are called that because the machine that makes them looks like it's kissing the conveyor belt.
20. No NFL team which plays its home games in a domed stadium has ever won a Super Bowl.
21. The only two days of the year in which there are no professional sports games are the day before and the day after the Major League Baseball All-Star Game.
22. The nursery rhyme "Ring Around the Rosy" is a rhyme about the plague. Infected people with the plague would get red circular sores (ring around the rosy), these sores would smell very bad, so common folks would put flowers on their bodies somewhere inconspicuously so that they would cover the smell of the sores (a pocket-full of posies). People who died from the plague would be burned so as to reduce the possible spread of the disease (ashes, ashes, we all fall down.)
Q. What occurs more often in December that any other month?
A. Conception.
Q. Most boat owners name their boat. What is the most popular boat name?
A. Obsession.
Q. If you were to spell out numbers, how far would you have to go until you would find the letter "A"?
A. One thousand.
Q. What do bullet-proof vests, fire escapes, windshield wipers and laser printers have in common?
A. They are all invented by women.
Q. What is the only food that doesn't spoil?
A. Honey.
Q. There are more collect calls on this day than any other day of the year:
A. Father's Day.
Q. What trivia fact about Mel Blanc (the voice of Bugs Bunny) is the most ironic?
A. He was allergic to carrots.
Q. What is an activity performed by 40% of all people at a party?
A. Snooping in your medicine cabinet.
In Shakespeare's time, mattresses were secured on bed frames by ropes. When one pulled on the ropes the mattress tightened, making the bed firmer to sleep on.....hence the phrase, "goodnight, sleep tight."
In olden times, it was an accepted practice that for a month after the wedding, the bride's father would supply his son-in-law all the mead he could drink. Mead is a honey wine and because old calendars were lunar-based, this period was called the "honey month" or what we know today as the "honeymoon."
In English pubs, ale is ordered by pints and quarts. So in old England, when someone got unruly, the bartender would yell at them to "mind their own pints and quarts and settle down!" It's where we get the phrase, "mind your P's and Q's."
Many years ago in England, pub frequenters had a whistle baked into the rim or handle of their ceramic mugs. When they needed a refill, they used the whistle to get some service. "Wet your whistle" is the phrase inspired by this practice.
In Scotland, a new game was invented. It was entitled, "Gentlemen Only, Ladies Forbidden"......and thus the word GOLF entered into the English language. -
one thousand? not 101? haha One Hundred and One
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[quote]Originally posted by lilogirl:
22. The nursery rhyme "Ring Around the Rosy" is a rhyme about the plague. Infected people with the plague would get red circular sores (ring around the rosy), these sores would smell very bad, so common folks would put flowers on their bodies somewhere inconspicuously so that they would cover the smell of the sores (a pocket-full of posies). People who died from the plague would be burned so as to reduce the possible spread of the disease (ashes, ashes, we all fall down.)
Origins: If
"few people realize" that "this seemingly happy little nursery rhyme actually refers" to the Black Plague, so much the better, because the explanation presented above is nonsense. "Ring Around the Rosie" is simply a nursery rhyme of indefinite origin and no specific meaning, and someone, long after the fact, concocted an inventive "explanation" for its creation.
The "Black Plague" was the disease we call bubonic plague, spread by a bacillus usually carried by rodents and transmitted to humans by fleas. The plague first hit western Europe in 1347, and by 1350 it had killed nearly a third of the population. Although some of the details of the plague offered in this putative "Ring Around the Rosie" explanation are reasonably accurate (sneezing was one of the symptoms of a form of the plague, for example, and some people did use flowers, incense, and perfumed oils to try to ward off the disease), the notion that they were behind the creation of this nursery rhyme is extremely implausible for a number of reasons:
["Ring Around the Rosie" is sometimes said to have originated with a later outbreak of the plague which occurred in London in 1665, to which all of the following reasoning applies as well.]
Although folklorists have been collecting and setting down in print bits of oral tradition such as nursery rhymes and fairy tales for hundreds of years, the earliest print appearance of "Ring Around the Rosie" did not occur until the publication of Kate Greenaway's Mother Goose or The Old Nursery Rhymes in 1881. For the "plague" explanation of "Ring Around the Rosie" to be true, we have to believe that children were reciting this nursery rhyme continuously for over five centuries, yet not one person in that five hundred year span found it popular enough to merit writing it down. (How anyone could credibly assert that a rhyme which didn't appear in print until 1881 actually "began about 1347" is a mystery. If the rhyme were really this old, then "Ring Around the Rosie" antedates even Chaucer's Canterbury Tales, and therefore we would have examples of this rhyme in Middle English as well as Modern English forms.)
"Ring Around the Rosie" has many different variant forms which omit some of the "plague" references or clearly have nothing whatsoever to do with death or disease. For example, versions published by William Wells Newell in 1883:
Ring a ring a rosie,
A bottle full of posie,
All the girls in our town,
Ring for little Josie.
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Round the ring of roses,
Pots full of posies,
The one stoops the last
Shall tell whom she loves the best.
Or this version from Charlotte Sophia Burne's 1883 Shropshire Folk-Lore:
Ring-a-ring o' roses,
A pocket full of posies,
One for Jack, and one for Jim,
And one for little Moses.
A-tischa! A-tischa! A-tischa!
Or this version collected by Alice Gomme and published in the Dictionary of British Folk-Lore in 1898:
Ring, a ring o' roses,
A pocket full o' posies,
Up-stairs and down-stairs,
In my lady's chamber --
Husher! Husher! Cuckoo!
Quite a fervent imagination is required to maintain that any of these variations has anything to do with a plague, and since they were all collected within a few years of each other, how could anyone determine that the "plague" version of "Ring Around the Rosie" was the original, and the other versions later corruptions of it? (And why is it that this rhyme supposedly remained intact for five centuries, then suddenly started sprouting all sorts of variations only in the late nineteenth century?) -
The explanations of the rhyme's "true" meaning are inconsistent, and they seem to be contrived to match whichever version of "Ring Around the Rosie" the teller is familar with. For example, the purpose of the "pocket full of posies" is said to by any one of the following:
Something carried to ward off the disease.
A way of masking the "stench of death."
An item the dead were commonly buried with.
Flowers to place "on a grave or funeral pyre."
A representation of the "pus or infection under the skin in the sores" of plague victims.
Likewise, multiple meanings are claimed for the repetition of "ashes" at the beginning of the last line:
A representation of the sneezing sounds of plague victims.
A reference to the practice of burning the bodies of those who succumbed to the plague.
A reference to the practice of burning the homes of plague sufferers to prevent spread of disease.
A reference to the blackish discoloration of victims' skin from which the term "Black Plague" was derived.
The word "ashes" cannot be "a corruption of the sneezing sounds made by the infected person" and a word used for its literal meaning. Either "ashes" was a corruption of an earlier form or a deliberate use; it can't be both. Moreover, the "ashes" ending of "Ring Around the Rosie" appears to be a fairly modern addition to the rhyme; earlier versions repeat other words or syllables instead (e.g., "Hush!", "A-tischa!", "Hasher", "Husher", "Hatch-u", "A-tishoo") or, as noted above, have completely different endings.
Children were apparently reciting this plague-inspired nursery rhyme for over six hundred years before someone finally figured out what they were talking about, as the first known mention of a plague interpretation of "Ring Around the Rosie" didn't show up until James Leasor published The Plague and the Fire in 1961. This sounds suspiciously like the "discovery," several decades after the fact, that L. Frank Baum's The Wonderful Wizard of Oz was written as a coded parable about Populism. How come no contemporaries of Baum -- those much closer in time and place to what he was writing about -- ever noticed this? The answer is that Baum merely authored a children's book, and it was only much later that someone invented a fanciful interpretation of it -- an interpretation that has become more and more layered and embellished over the years and has now become widely accepted as "fact" despite all evidence to the contrary. It isn't difficult to imagine that such a process has been applied to "Ring Around the Rosie" as well, especially since we humans have such a fondness for trying to make sense of the nonsensical, seeking to find order in randomness, and especially for discovering and sharing secrets. The older the secret, the better (because age demonstrates the secret has eluded so many others before us), and so we've read "hidden" meanings into all sorts of innocuous nursery rhymes: The cat who ran away with the spoon in "Hey Diddle, Diddle" is really Queen Elizabeth I (or Catherine of Aragon or Catherine the Great), or "Humpty Dumpty" and "The Old Woman Who Lived in a Shoe" describe the "spread and fragmentation of the British Empire." (The process is aided by a general consensus that some nursery rhymes, such as "Old King Cole," quite likely were actually based on real historical figures.)
So, what does "Ring Around the Rosie" mean, then? Folklorist Philip Hiscock suggests:
The more likely explanation is to be found in the religious ban on dancing among many Protestants in the nineteenth century, in Britain as well as here in North America. Adolescents found a way around the dancing ban with what was called in the United States the "play-party." Play-parties consisted of ring games which differed from square dances only in their name and their lack of musical accompaniment. They were hugely popular, and younger children got into the act, too. Some modern nursery games, particularly those which involve rings of children, derive from these play-party games. "Little Sally Saucer" (or "Sally Waters") is one of them, and "Ring Around the Rosie" seems to be another. The rings referred to in the rhymes are literally the rings formed by the playing children. "Ashes, ashes" probably comes from something like "Husha, husha" (another common variant) which refers to stopping the ring and falling silent. And the falling down refers to the jumble of bodies in that ring when they let go of each other and throw themselves into the circle.
Like "A Tisket, A Tasket" or "Hey Diddle Diddle" or even "I Am the Walrus," the rhyme we call "Ring Around the Rosie" has no particular meaning, regardless of our latter day efforts to create one for it. They're all simply collections of words and sounds that someone thought sounded good together. -
Originally posted by lilogirl:
Claim: Coca-Cola was originally green.
[b]Did You Know????
2. Coca Cola was originally green.
[/b]
Status: False.
Origins: Though this tidbit of knowledge has been widely distributed as part of an Internet "Did You Know?" list, at no time in Coca-Cola's history has that beverage been green. The original formula called for caramel to give Coca-Cola its rich brown color, and although the recipe has undergone some changes through the years, none of them affected the ultimate color of the product.
(Brown also hides impurities in any given batch, something the backroom chemist who invented Coca-Cola in 1886 kept well in mind as he proceeded with his formulation. These days syrup producers and bottlers have no impurities to hide, but back in the "three copper kettles in somebody's basement" days, covering up what might have inadvertently dropped into the mix was a concern, and brown hid indiscretions remarkably well.)
Coke has at times been bottled in green glass bottles, which perhaps explains the popularity of this particular rumor.