Showing posts with label useless. Show all posts
Showing posts with label useless. Show all posts

Thursday 15 January 2009

THINGS YOU DIDN’T KNOW YOU DIDN’T KNOW


And probably don’t want to know.

Odd facts have always been interesting to me, so I thought I would ruin your day and share some.


Early in the twentieth century the total world market for cars was estimated at four million, because the manufacturers thought that the world would run out of chauffeurs.

In 1945 Henry Ford ll was offered the Volkswagon factory and patents for nothing. He refused because he thought the design of the Beetle was bad.

In 1954 a concert manager told Elvis Presley that he should “go back to driving a truck”.

In 1692 Decca records rejected the Beatles saying, “We don't like their sound, and guitar music is on the way out."

Sound travels three times faster through water than air.

Air becomes liquid at minus 190 degrees Celsius.

Jean-Baptiste Lamarck coined the word “biology” in 1805.

The male versions of midwives (mid-men) are called accouchers.

The plastic things on the end of shoelaces are called aglets.

A specific length of thread or yarn according to the type of fibre is called a hank. For linen, a hank is 274 metres (300 yards); for cotton, it is 768 metres (840 yards).

The back of the human hand is the opisthenar.

The white part of your fingernail is called the lunula.

Someone who uses as few words as possible when speaking is called pauciloquent. (Not me then)

The small cup in which an espresso is served is called a demitasse.

Phobias.

We are all frightened of something.

The fear of accidents is dystychiphobia

The fear of becoming angry is angrophobia

The fear of Garlic is alliumphobia

The fear of goblins or demons is bogyphobia

The fear of dancing is chorophobia

The fear of doctors is iatrophobia

The fear of parents-in-law is soceraphobia

And finally.

The fear of fear is phobophobia

There are hundreds more of course but I am saving them for a rainy day, or when my bain cell flickers out.


“Nothing in education is so astonishing as the amount of ignorance it accumulates in the form of inert facts.”-Henry Adams- The Education of Henry Adams (1907


Angus