Thomas Jefferson coined the word pedicure (at least in the sense “a person responsible for pedicure”).
His memorandum book for February 7, 1785, reads “P[ai]d La Forest, pedicure 12f.”
(Thanks, Joseph.)
Trivia
Misc
- It’s illegal to mispronounce Joliet.
- G.K. Chesterton left an unfinished poem titled Plakkopytrixphylisperadaulantiobatrix.
- Alms has no singular.
- The Spanish village Trasmoz has been cursed and excommunicated by the Catholic Church.
- “The wink was not our best invention.” — Ralph Hodgson
An Irish riddle: Yonder he is through the stream, a man without a coat, a man without a belt, a man of hard slender legs, it is my woe that I cannot run. Death.
Shipshape
These are the punts of Trinity College, Cambridge, moored on the River Cam. What is the significance of their names?
Misc
- Julius Caesar thought that elk have no knees.
- Duke Ellington’s first piano teacher was named Marietta Clinkscales.
- Orizabus subaziro, a rhinoceros beetle, has a palindromic species name.
- POSSESSIONLESSNESSES has 9 S’s.
- “Books are companions even if you don’t open them.” — Disraeli
Misc
- Dante’s 1305 essay “De vulgari eloquentia” contains a 27-letter word, sovramagnificentissimamente, “supermagnificently.”
- Life Savers candies were invented by Hart Crane’s father.
(Colin Rose)
- RETROSUSCEPTION is an anagram of COUNTERRIPOSTES.
- “Of all the reciprocals of integers, the one that I best like is 1/0 for it is a titan amongst midgets.” — Sam Linial
Lord David Cecil called Samuel Johnson “an outstanding example of the charm that comes from an unexpected combination of qualities. In general, odd people are not sensible and sensible people are not odd. Johnson was both and often both at the same time.”
Misc
- After a rain, the Bolivian salt flat Salar de Uyuni becomes the world’s largest mirror.
- The letter J appears nowhere in the periodic table of the elements.
- 9(9 – 6) yields same result upside down: (9 – 6)6 = 729. (Erich Friedman)
- Rearrange the letters in SUPRARATIONAL and you get PRO-AUSTRALIAN.
- “A good book praises itself.” — German proverb
Time and Chance
The number of seconds in a year is 365.2425 × 24 × 60 × 60 = 31,556,952.
By an unlikely coincidence, that value falls within 1 percent of π × 107.
Traffic
Remarked by Robert Southey in 1850:
“If you wait half an hour on the Pont Neuf, it was said, you were sure to see an Abbé, a Benedictin, a Genovesin, a Capuchin, a Knight of St. Louis, a French Guardsman, a woman of the town, and a white horse cross during that time. This has been often tried and verified.”
Misc
- NUTHATCH and UNTHATCH are nearly the same word.
- Vladivostok is farther south than Venice.
- Thackeray called George IV’s prose style “lax, maudlin slipslop.”
- dollop reads the same upside down.
- “I shall stipulate that I will only go into Heaven on condition that I am never in a room with more than ten people.” — Edward Lear
Noted
Sir,
The hymn ‘Onward Christian Soldiers’, sung to the right tune and in a not-too-brisk tempo, makes a very good egg timer. If you put the egg into boiling water and sing all five verses and chorus, the egg will be just right when you come to Amen.
— Mrs. G.H. Moore, letter to the Daily Telegraph, 1983