Interesting Facts about Culture & Language
Six      fundamental ideas that commonly undergird moral systems: 
care,      fairness, liberty, loyalty, authority and sanctity.  
The     Cultural Sector in Canada employs more people than forestry and     banking combined. In 2008, Canadians spent more than twice as much on     live performing arts (theatre, music, dance) than on sporting events.
There     are currently 40 theatres that     make up the area generally considered as "Broadway." Broadway     brings 14 times more revenue to NY than all sports teams combined.
Michael     Jackson did not invent the moon-walk. Bill Bailey, a     tap dancer and brother of singer Pearl Bailey, invented a step     called the "back slide," which Jackson then adapted.
The "high five" originated with two baseball players for the     L.A. Dodgers, who congratulated each other that way in 1977. The     gesture soon made its way into popular culture.
In     2005, Canada's Rideau Canal skateway in Ottawa was added to the     Guinness Book of World Records as the largest, naturally-frozen ice     rink in the world. It also earned it a UNESCO World Hertage Site     designation in 2007.  
In     an article in American     Scholar, Ralph     Keyes says, Soon     after they arrived in America, British settlers got busy with an     important task: reinventing their language. This called for     repurposing old words and coining new ones. Colonists called the     plump, smelly rodents they encountered in swamps muske rats. Other     forms of wildlife were named katydids, bobcats, catfish, and     whippoorwills. To these settlers, sleigh improved on sledge, and the     help reflected their values better than servants.
A     contronym is a word that can be its own opposite, for example, left can mean both to depart and to remain.
The     plural of octopus     is octopuses, because     you can't put a Latin ending ( i) on a word derived from Greek.
The     English language has a mysterious rule of adjective order, seldom     taught in schools. According to linguist Mark Forsyth, the order goes     opinion-size-age-shape-color-origin-material-purpose Noun. Read the     larger explanation at: http://tinyurl.com/h7qzwep
Habeas corpus is a writ ordering that a person be brought     before a judge, especially to decide whether a prisoners     detention is lawful.
Defenestrate was coined in 1618 from the Latin prefix de     (down or away from) and fenestra, which means window. It originates     from two incidents in Prague, known as the Defenestrations of Prague.     In 1419 several town officials were thrown from the windows of the     town hall. Then, in 1618, two imperial governors and their     secretaries were tossed from Prague Castle. This event began the 30     Years War.
Wreckage that sinks to the ocean floor and has no hope of recovery     is called derelict; this word     traces its origins in English to the 1640s and is derived from the     Latin derelictus for solitary and deserted. Its meaning of an     abandoned vessel may be traced back to the 1660s. Flotsam denotes that wreckage from a ship that is later found floating on the     seas surface. The word traces its roots to the early 1600s and     the Anglo-French floteson, which derived from the Old French     flotaison (meaning a floating.) The word in English was     spelled flotsen until the mid-1800s, when it took on its modern     variant. Jetsam, first seen in the     mid-1500s, is the stuff that was purposely thrown off a ship by its     crew to lighten its load (usually during troubling times), and is     washed ashore. The word is a modification and contraction of the     Middle English jetteson, itself from the Anglo-French getteson     and Old French getaison (meaning a throwing.)
When a plane or ship captain uses the word Mayday, he's     following a procedure which originated in 1923. Frederick Stanley     Mockford, a senior radio officer at Croydon Airport in London, was     asked to think of a word that would indicate distress and would     easily be understood by all pilots and ground staff in an emergency.     Since much of the traffic at the time was between Croydon and Le     Bourget Airport in Paris, he proposed the word Mayday from the     French m'aider, a shortened version of venez m'aider (meaning come and help me).
Umpire is from the Old French word nompair, meaning     'not paired.' The umpire is the third, or 'not paired' person called     upon to decide between two contestants.
Milton Sirotta, the nephew of American mathematician Edward     Kasner, was walking with his uncle one day in  1920 when  Kasner wondered out loud what one might call 10 to the 100th power     (the number 10 followed by 100 zeroes). A googol, suggested     Milton, and the word google ended up as the name for today's     famous company.
The word computer was coined in 1613 to describe any person     who did math calculations.
The suffix ish, as in British, comes from the     Proto-Germanic suffix -iska which meant country of. It morphed into the Old English isc before becoming the     modern English, Irish, Spanish, etc. The addition of stan to the name of their cultural or ethnic group identifies that a     certain place belongs to them. In English, we often use land to identify a nation or place, and familiar words include England,     Finland, Greenland, Iceland, Ireland, Netherlands, New Zealand,     Poland, and Thailand, as well as Maryland and Newfoundland. Other     languages use the convention as well, such as the German Deutschland.
A study in the Proceedings of the     National Academy of Sciences reveals that many of the worlds     languages use similar sounds for the same things. For example, the R     sound often shows up in words for red, a nasal n in referring to the     nose,  use hard K sounds for spiky things and B for round items.     Comparing common words from 4,298 languages around the world, they     discovered similarities in the sounds of
different classes of words, from body     parts to adjectives to pronouns to verbs to objects in nature.  The T sound was often used in words for stone, and the S sound was     often used in words for sand.
The word sugar originates from     the Sanskrit word sharkara, which means material in a granule     form. In Arabic, it is sakkar; Turkish is sheker; Italian is     zucchero; and Yoruba speakers in Nigeria call it suga.
The only taste humans are born craving is sugar.
The English word girl was initially used to describe a     young person of either sex. It was not until the beginning of the     sixteenth century that the term was used specifically to describe a     female child.
The     average pre-schooler laughs or smiles 400 times a day, but that     number drops to only 15 times a day by the time people reach the age     of 35.
Mensa     is a non-profit organization open to people who score at the 98th     percentile or higher on a standardised, supervised IQ test. Because     different tests are scaled differently, they compare     percentiles rather than raw scores. Most IQ tests are designed to     yield a mean score of 100 with a standard deviation of 15; the     98th-percentile score under these conditions is 130.82.
There     are more than 110,000 members of Mensa in 50 national groups, and the     youngest is Oscar     Wrigley, who joined with an IQ of 160 in 2009.     He was just 2     1/2. Mensa has just admitted Heidi Hankins, a 4-year-old British     girl who taught herself to read. She has an IQ 59 points higher than     the average score.
Bingo     has had many names and variations. The earliest name, lotto (or     loto), a childrens game, was first recorded in 1778. The     original American form, called keno, kino, or po-keno, dates from the     early 19th century. The only form of gambling permitted in the     British armed services, the game is called in the Royal Navy tombola     (1880) and in the Army, house (1900), or housy-housy. Other American     names are beano, lucky, radio, and fortune.
Monopoly     has had more than 20 regular tokens and 1,100 specialty tokens in     its 78-year history, but this was the first time Hasbro crowd-sourced     the choice. Fans on Twitter and Facebook selected the cat.
Famous     fashion designer Balenciaga began his career early. At age six he     made a coat for his cat.
Big     Ben doesnt refer to a clock; it's actually the name for the     bell inside that famous clock tower.
Some     popular hats include the Derby, which is known in England as a Bowler.     This dome-shaped rigid hat with a curled small brim was created for     an Englishman, James Coke in 1850s, and made stiff to protect the     head. Peaking in popularity towards the end of the 19th century, it     offered a midway between the formality of the top hat associated with     the upper classes and the casual nature of soft felt hats worn by the     lower middle classes.
Founded     in 1865, John B. Stetson Company began when the founder headed west     and created the original hat of the West, the Boss of the Plains.     This Western hat would become the cornerstone of Stetsons hat     business and is still in production today. Stetson eventually became     the worlds largest hat maker, producing more than 3.3 million     hats a year in its Philadelphia factory.
The     word Fedora comes from the title of an 1882 play by dramatist     Victorien Sardou, Fédora, written for Sarah Bernhardt. The     play was first performed in the United States in 1889. Bernhardt     played Princess Fédora, the heroine of the play, and she wore     a hat similar to what is now considered a fedora. The hat's     popularity soared when it was adopted by men, and eventually eclipsed     the similar-looking Homburg.
Canadian     ceremonial guards who perform every summer on Parliament Hill wear     real bearskin hats. They're made from the skin of brown bears, dyed     black, and date back many years. A local furrier stores the hats and     keeps them in good repair. 
The     two women behind Ask Ann Landers and Dear     Abby were feuding twin sisters, Esther Lederer and Pauline     Phillips. After Esther took over the Ann Landers column in 1955 (the     original writer being Ruth Crowley from 1943-1955), Pauline decided     to start up her own competing column with the same theme, Dear     Abby. However, they supposedly settled their differences     shortly before Esther died in 2002.
Due to     the naughty dancing of the can-can girls and the scantily     clad models on 1800s French postcards, the British equated anything     risqué with France. In fact, that's how the phrase pardon     my French entered the vernacular.
The American Civil War was the beginning of     left and right shoes, mass-produced clothing in small, medium and     large, and home-delivered mail.
Charlie     Chaplin once came in third in a Charlie Chaplin look-alike contest.
Lon     Chaney's parents were both deaf and mute. He learned to express     himself through pantomime at an early age, moved to Hollywood in 1912     and became one of the biggest stars of the time, appearing in more     than 150 silent films. Known as the man of a thousand     faces, he masterfully used makeup to play tortured, grotesque     characters in horror films such as The Phantom of the Opera.
Mary     Pickford, one of the first film stars, was also a shrewd     businesswoman. After cofounding United Artists, she came to exert a     profound influence on the film industry as one of the most powerful     figures in Hollywood. In 1927, she became one of the original     founders of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences.
Freddie     Bartholomew was abandoned by his parents as a baby and raised by a     British aunt whose last name he took. A successful child actor in     Hollywood during the 1930s, he appeared in such films as David Copperfield,     which propelled him to fame at the age of 10; Little Lord Fauntleroy;     and Captains Courageous. After he became successful, his     biological parents launched a protracted and expensive court battle     to regain custody of the child star.
In     1895, the worlds first commercial movie screening took place at     the Grand Cafe in Paris. The film was made by Louis and Auguste     Lumiere, two French brothers who developed a camera-projector called     the Cinematographe. The Lumiere brothers unveiled their invention to     the public in March 1895 with a brief film showing workers leaving     the Lumiere factory. On December 28, the entrepreneurial siblings     screened a series of short scenes from everyday French life and     charged admission for the first time.
The     Hollywood star who played the most leading roles in feature films was     John Wayne (1907-1979), who appeared in 153 movies. The star with the     most screen credits is John Carradine (1906-1988), who has been in     over 230 movies.
Bob     Hope and Bing Crosby met when they were booked together for a couple     of weeks at the same theatre. They started to ad-lib, which was     popular with audiences. Five years later, in 1939, Bob was signed by     Paramount and moved to California. He was invited to one of Bing's     parties and they got up and reprised their old act to entertain the     guests. A couple of Paramount execs decided to hire them for the     first of seven Road movies.
Lou     Costello of Abbott & Costello signed an unknown Dean     Martin to a personal contract, discovering him in a second-rate night     club. The wiley Costello who introduced The Andrews Sisters hit Boogie     Woogie Bugle Boy to the world in the first A&C film Buck Privates,     quickly signed Martin to a personal contract. Unlike the idiot child     he played onscreen, Costello was a shrewd businessman and he saw that     with a nose job, Dino would have the looks of a matinee idol and paid     for his novices rhinoplasty. Unfortunately,     Martin dumped Costello for Jerry Lewis.
The     first feature film created solely with Computer Generated Imagery     (CGI) was Toy Story (1995). Over 800,000 hours of mathematical     equations went into the film, which works out to more than a week of     computer time for every second on the screen.
Variety     was founded in 1905, initially a weekly newspaper     for the entertainment industry in New York. It later became a daily     with a Hollywood edition. It is credited with creating many new     words, including payola,     boffo, biz, nix, sit-com, punchline, strip-tease and legit.
In     1923, Mark Sennett, Harry Chandler, and the Los Angeles Times put up     the Hollywoodland (later shortened to Hollywood) sign to publicize a real estate development.     The sign cost $21,000.
To     Have and Have Not (1945) is the only instance when a Nobel     prize-winning author (Ernest Hemingway) was adapted for the screen by     another Nobel-winning author (William Faulkner).
Tivoli     Gardens, the famous amusement park in Copenhagen, Denmark, opened on     August 15, 1843. It's the second oldest amusement park in the world,     and the second most popular seasonal theme park in the world.
Another     one of the oldest parks is the Prater, in Vienna. It's famous     Riesenrad (Giant Ferris wheel) was built in 1897 to celebrate the     Golden Jubilee of Emperor Franz Josef I.
Edwards     Air Force Base was the site of the birth of Murphy's Law. (If     anything can go wrong, it will.) In 1949, Capt. Edward A. Murphy     was a project engineer who discovered a transducer wrongly wired. He     said of the technician who was responsible for the goof, If there     is any way to do it wrong, he'll find it. Murphy's comment was     noted and he became world famous
Scrabble     was invented in 1931 and was originally called Criss Cross. For 17     years toy makers snubbed this game, saying it was too intellectual,     so the inventor Alfred Botts decided to manufacture and sell it     himself. It is the world's second best selling game. The highest     scoring word in Scrabble is quartzy.
The     first permanent color photograph was taken by James Clerk Maxwell in 1861.
                           In 1900, the standard billboard was created in America.
Paul     Friedreichsen reveals     some fascinating information about popular logos. For example, the     FedEx logo design introduced in 2000 has a hidden arrow in the word Ex. Art Paul, Hugh Heffner's first art director at Playboy, took     30 minutes to design the now classic bunny icon in 1954. It hasn't changed in almost 60 years. And Frank Mason Robinson, bookkeeper for     John Pemberton, created the original script Coca-Cola logo in the     late 1880s.  (thanks     to Marsha Friedman for these)
The     Mona Lisa has no eyebrows.  It was the fashion in Renaissance     Florence to shave them off. 
   Van Gogh sold only one painting in his lifetime. 
        In the early 18th century watercolors had been sold in dry lumps     that had to be grated. But William Reeves found that honey mixed with     gum arabic would not only stop the cakes from drying out, but also     allow them to be molded into regular shapes. His brother, who was a     metalworker, made the molds, and in 1766 Reeves & Son opened near     St. Paul's, supplying the army and the East India Company with the     first watercolor paintboxes. It would take the collaboration of     artist Henry Newton with chemist William Winsor in 1832 before anyone     would think to add glycerine -- meaning that watercolors no longer     had to be rubbed and could be used straight from the pan. Suddenly it     was easy -- in terms of materials at least -- to become an artist,     and many en­thusiastic amateurs followed Queen Victoria's lead in     ordering the new paintboxes and using them out of doors to sketch landscapes.
        In 1841 a fash­ionable American portrait painter called John     Goffe Rand devised the first collapsible tube -- which he made of tin     and sealed with pli­ers. After he had improved it the following     year and patented it, artists in both Europe and America really began     to appreciate the wonder of the portable paintbox. Jean Renoir once     told his son that without oil paints in tubes: There would have     been no Cezanne, no Monet, no Sisley or Pissarro: nothing of what the     journalists were later to call Impressionism.
Michelangelo     did not finish his painting called The Entombment because the only     blue paint that was deemed worthy for the robe of the Virgin Mary was     ultramarine, the most expensive of colors except for gold. That     corner was probably blank because the paint had not arrived from the     patron -- and the twenty-five-year-old artist could never have     afforded to pay for it himself. The only true ultra­marine paint     in the world came from one mine in the heart of Asia. Oltramarino was a technical term meaning from beyond the seas. The paint     is made of the semi-precious stone lapis lazuli, found only in Chile,     Zambia, a few small mines in Siberia, and  Afghanistan.
Sculptor     Henry Moore said that creating sculpture is chipping away at what     isnt an elephant.  Miles Davis said something similar: Dont     play whats there, play whats not there.
                         Leonardo De Vinci invented the scissors.
The     earliest surviving opera (written by Jacopo Peri and Ottavio     Rinuccini) is Euridice which was performed in Florence in 1600. Opera quickly spread from     Florence to Rome, Venice, and all other major cities in Italy.
Giacomo     Puccini decided to dedicate his life to opera after seeing a     performance of Giuseppe Verdis Aida in 1876. In his later life,     he would write some of the best-loved operas of all time: La Boheme     (1896), Tosca (1900), Madame Butterfly (1904) and Turandot (left     unfinished when he died in 1906).
Opera     has been incorporated into many movies and commercials. For example,     Delibes The Flower Duet from Lakme can be heard in The     American President, Tomb Raider: Cradle of Life, Superman Returns,     Meet the Parents, and many TV shows and commercials.     Rossinis The Barber of Seville is featured in Babe:     Pig in the City, Deep Impact, Space Jam, Under the Tuscan Sun,     and an award-winning Nike commercial.
The     shortest opera is only seven minutes long and is Darius     Milhauds The Deliverance of Theseus.
After     the French revolution, the Paris Opera was literally a brothel. The     bourgeoisie lacked the sense of noblesse oblige that led royalty to     protect the dancers, and wealthy industrialists who patronized the     Paris Opera recruited poverty-stricken children to train as     dancer-whores. For a fee, rich men were free to roam backstage and     prey on desperate teenagers whose wages didn't cover the cost of     their practise clothes, let alone the cost of living. Admission to     the ranks of les petits rats -- as dance students at the Paris Opera     are still known -- was attractive particularly because it gave girls     who would inevitably end up as prostitutes access to richer men.
The     Nutcracker ballet premiered at the Mariinsky Theatre in St.     Petersburg, Russia, to mostly negative reviews.
Tchaikovsky's Serenade for Strings begins in a minor key, which James Lipton     describes as if the boat had left the dock without us, and we had     no choice but to jump in and swim after it. A similar situation     occurs in Irving Berlin's Let's Face the Music and Dance,     which begins in a minor key and with the words: There may be     trouble ahead...
Johann     Strauss I was orphaned at the age of 12. Apprenticed to a bookbinder,     he studied violin on the side and performed in string quartets around     Vienna before deciding to start his own band and write his own music.     He enjoyed much professional success, but his family life was     tempestuous. He forbade his children to study music, but they did     anyway, with Johann II (The Waltz King) eventually overshadowing him.
By the     age of 3, Mozart had learned to play a clavier, which was an     old-fashioned stringed instrument that had a keyboard. By the age of     5, he was playing the harpsichord and violin as well as a     professional. He was playing in front of royalty when he was just 6     years old. Mozart was a rare musical genius, who could compose music     before he could write words.
Musical memory     consists of aural     and tactile recall, plus a deep level of knowledge and understanding     of the piece, including its structure, other patterns, and specific     notes in sequence.
Harpsichord     craftsman Bartolomeo Cristofori invented a new keyboard instrument     which had the ability to produce both soft and loud, with two sets of     strings at unison pitch and a soundboard of cypress.  It became     known as the pianoforte after the Italian for soft and strong (piano-forte), and was revealed to the public in 1709.
Piano     keys were originally made of ivory because that natural substance     absorbs moisture, and kept the keys from becoming slippery. For that     reason, a piano with ivory keys is easier to play.
The     Hammond organ was invented by Laurens Hammond and John M. Hanert and     first manufactured in 1935. It was originally designed as a     lower-cost alternative to the wind-driven pipe organ, or instead of a     piano in smaller churches. It quickly became popular with     professional jazz musicians, who found it a cheaper alternative to     the big band.
Warner     Communications paid 28 million for the copyright to the  song Happy     Birthday. But an old songbook might put Happy Birthday in     the Public Domain. A ruling is near in a lawsuit that claims the     copyright on the much-sung song is not valid. That would be an     unhappy day for Warner Music Group, which could lose millions in     licensing fees.
In     1875, an American songwriter named Henry Clay Work was visiting     England. While there, he checked in to the George Hotel in North     Yorkshire. In the hotels lobby was a large pendulum clock. The     clock had stopped long ago and just sat in the lobby, serving no     apparent purpose. When he asked about its history, he was told that     the clock had belonged to the inns previous two owners, the     Jenkins brothers, both deceased. It seems the clock had kept perfect     time during their lives, but when the first Jenkins brother died, the     clock started becoming less accurate. After this, the story went that     the clock stopped completely dead- to the minute and second Jenkins     brother had died.  Despite the best efforts of a host of     repairmen hired by the new owners of the inn, they couldnt get     the clock going again.  Work thought it was a great story.  and wrote a song about the incident. My Grandfathers Clock was released in 1876.
The     Boston Pops began in 1885, but became popular in 1930, thanks to     Arthur Fiedler, who created special arrangements that the orchestra     continues to perform. Fiedler reigned over the Pops for 50 years.
In     Zulu beadwork, the color or pattern of each bead has meaning. Women used these to send romantic     messages, as red beads indicated longing, while blue meant fidelity     and striped ones meant fickle.
A few language myths exposed by a new book, You     Are What You Speak, by Robert     Lane Greene:
           The Chinese word for crisis is     not composed of the characters for danger and opportunity, and     the book which claimed that women speak much more than men was     wrong. Those figures were based on an unsourced claim in a self-help     book. Actually, research shows both sexes using about the same number     of words in a day.
The word influenza comes from the Italian influentia because people used to     believe that the influence of the planets, stars, and moon caused the     flu. The thought only such universal influence could explain such     sudden and widespread sickness.
In the 16th century, goods were transported in     packs that people carried on theirs or animals backs. The term used     to describe this was pick pack because you would pick up a     pack in order to carry it on your back. That  eventually became pick-a-pack which then became pick-a-back.     However, the insertion of the a caused a problem and due     to the pronunciation of the term as a whole, pick-a-pack often     sounded like pick -i-back which sounded like picky back.     That made no sense at all to those who didnt understand the     progression of the phrase, so ultimately the term piggyback began to be used for people carrying a pack on their back. By  the 1930s, the definition further progressed to describe riding on     someones back and shoulders.
The term stat means immediately.  It     comes from the Latin statim. The     first references of the practice of shortening statim to stat came to us from physicians in the nineteenth century, with the first     known documented instance of this appearing in Lessons on     Prescriptions by W.H. Griffith (1875).
Writer and politician     Horace Walpole invented the word serendipity in 1754 as an allusion to Serendip, an old name for Sri Lanka.     Walpole was a prolific letter writer, and he explained to one of his     main correspondents that he had based the word on the title of a     fairy tale, The Three Princes of Serendip. The three princes were     always making discoveries, by accidents and sagacity, of things they     were not looking for.
In the Middle Ages the word spinster was a     compliment. A spinster was someone, usually a woman, who could spin     well. That allowed her to be financially self-sufficient, as spinning     was one of the very few ways that mediaeval women could achieve     economic independence. The word was generously applied to all women     at the point of marriage as a way of saying they came into the     relationship freely, from personal choice, not financial desperation.
Rapunzel was based on     a real person, who was later venerated as Saint Barbara. This is just     one of the fairy tales created by Charles     Perrault.  Thought to be the father of fairy tales, his stories     were intended for adults, because no children's literature existed at     the time. Many were based on true historical events. Valerie Ogden relates     these in a book which reveals the stories behind Cinderella, Snow     White, Bluebeard, Little Jack Horner, The Pied Piper, and Hansel & Gretel.
Hans     Christian Andersen, the Danish writer best known for his many     collections of fairy tales, broke with literary tradition and     employed the idioms and constructions of spoken language. His stories     are imaginative combinations of universal elements from folk legend     and include such favorites as The Ugly Duckling and The     Emperor's New Clothes. While some reveal an optimistic belief in     the ultimate triumph of goodness and beauty, others are deeply pessimistic.
Colonel ultimately derives from the Latin columna, meaning pillar.     This gave rise to the Old Italian compagna colonnella,     meaning little-column company.  This, in turn, gave us     the rank of colonnello - the leader of a column. Other nations     adopted this ranking giving us the Middle French Coronel. This     was pronounced pretty much like it looks at first, then later slurred     down to Kernel by the English, but using the same spelling.     However, starting with the French around the 1540s, the spelling was     changed back closer to the Italian spelling, which gave us Colonel in French. Within a few decades, the English also followed suit and     by the mid-seventeenth century, colonel was the most common     way to spell the word in English. At that time, the common     pronunciation was mixed between the older kernel and the new colonel,     with the former winning out in the end, despite the way its spelled.
Isabella Poggi, a professor of psychology at Roma     Tre University, has identified around 250 gestures that Italians use     in everyday conversation. There are gestures expressing a     threat or a wish or desperation or shame or pride, she said.     The only thing differentiating them from sign language is that they     are used individually and lack a full syntax.  One theory holds     that Italians developed them as an alternative form of communication     during the centuries when they lived under foreign occupation  by Austria, France and Spain in the 14th through 19th centuries  as a way of communicating without their overlords understanding.
Cursive writing     encourages  writers to compose sentences in their heads, before     committing them to paper. It engages the right brain more than using     a keyboard. That requires the left brain to remember where the     letters are located.
The Egyptian word for cat      is meow.
Noah Webster published the first American Spelling     Book in 1793, which eventually became the first American dictionary.     In the same year, he founded the first daily newspaper in New York     City. A strong nationalist, he promoted a unified American language     independent from British English, and reformed many spellings,     including dropping the u from words like colour and favour. Webster's     1928 dictionary soon became the established standard for American     English. It contained 70,000 words.
Webster was also America's first freelance writer,     started the book tour - traveling from city to city to sell his "spellers" - and counted the number of houses in each town     to add to his compulsive information gathering. He also argued the     importance of copyright protection, as each state set its own such     laws in those early days.
Webster suffered from what we now know is     obsessive-compulsive personality disorder, as was Peter Mark Roget,     who's Thesaurus became a companion volume on most bookshelves.
English has mutated over time     from a variety of parent languages, primarily Latin, French and Old     English. These languages stretch even farther back to a language     family called Proto-Indo-European (or PIE). The most significant     transformation of English happened in the eleventh century. When the     Normans invaded England in the 1066, they brought their words with     them. For centuries, wealthier aristocrats spoke Old Norman (or Old     French) and the peasantry spoke Middle English. Inevitably, the     languages mixed, and English acquired the French words that now     constitute about 30% of the English vocabulary.
English is the only language     with Latin derivations that has no actual future tense. Plans to     undertake an action have to be framed as an act of will ("I'll     be going later").
With global colonization in the     early 1500s, English continued to amalgamate with other languages.     Individual words such as futon, pecan, coyote and vodka were imported     directly from foreign languages like Japanese and Algonquin. Some     uniquely American words include chowder, applesauce skunk, and demoralize.
China has more English speakers     than the United States. 
Linguists have     identified  two dozen ultraconserved words that have     survived 150 centuries. It includes some predictable entries: mother, not, what, to     hear and man. It also contains surprises: to     flow, ashes and worm. The existence of     the long-lived words suggests there was a proto-Eurasiatic language that was the common ancestor to about 700 contemporary     languages that are the native tongues of more than half the     worlds people.
The ancient Greeks and Romans first put forward the     idea that there are parts of speech, and in the 18th     century, British grammarians arrived at our slate of eight: nouns,     pronouns, verbs, adjectives, adverbs, conjunctions, prepositions and interjections.
In the first century, Roman scribes wrote in     cursive, so when they wrote the Latin word et which means and they linked the e and t. Over time the combined     letters came to signify the word and in English as well.     Certain versions of the ampersand, like that in the font Caslon,     clearly reveal the origin of the shape. The word ampersand came many years later when & was actually part of     the English alphabet. In the early 1800s, school children reciting     their ABCs concluded the alphabet with the &. It would have been     confusing to say X, Y, Z, and. Rather, the students said, and per se and. Per se means by     itself, so the students were essentially saying, X, Y, Z,     and by itself, and. Over time, and per se and was     slurred together into the word we use today: ampersand.
In Old English, a letter called thorn represented the th sound (as in that) in     Modern English. In the Latin alphabet, the y was the     symbol that most closely resembled the character that represented     thorn. So, thorn was dropped and y took its place. That     is why the word ye, as in Ye Olde Booke     Shoppe, is an archaic spelling of the.
The Old English letter wynn was     replaced by uu, which eventually developed into the     modern w. (It really is a double u.) The letters u and j didnt join what we know as the alphabet until the     sixteenth century.
The Phoenician alphabet and the Hebrew alphabet are     the same. 
Before the Normans invaded England in 1066, there     was no letter q in the English language. Words like queen and quick were spelled cwin and cwic respectively. It was the French-speaking Normans who     began the practice of using qu to represent the /kw/ sound. The     Normans themselves had copied the use of qu from Latin,     which used it for the /k/ sound if it appeared before w. If it did     not appear before w, they used c instead.
J started off as a design of I, and it was also     used to show the end of a Roman numeralXIII, for     instance, was written XIIJ. In 1524, Italian grammarian     Gian Giorgio Trissino differentiated between sounds /i/ and /j/, but     the two were still used interchangeably in the 18th century.
H, I, O, and X are the four letters that look the     same if they are flipped upside down or viewed from the back. 
Q is the only letter that does not appear in any of     the names of the 50 states.\
The Latin and Greek alphabets initially had only     capital letters. Small letters were formed when scribes, who had to     copy and recopy text, began adding upward or downward strokes to make     writing faster. The change in writing surfaces from rough rock to     smooth parchment or vellum also led scribes to write in small     letters, as they were now able to make single round strokes instead     of multiple strokes.
Rhythms is the longest English word     without the normal vowels, a, e, i, o, or u
Excluding derivatives, there are only two words in     English that end -shion and (though many words end in this sound).     These are cushion and fashion.
THEREIN is a seven-letter word that     contains thirteen words spelled using consecutive letters: the, he,     her, er, here, I, there, ere, rein, re, in, therein, and herein.
There is only one common word in English that has     five vowels in a row: queueing.
Soupspoons is the longest word that consists     entirely of letters from the second half of the alphabet.
"Almost is the longest commonly used     word in the English language with all the letters in alphabetical order.
The longest common single-word palindromes are     deified, racecar, repaper, reviver, and rotator.
"One thousand contains the letter A, but     none of the words from one to nine hundred ninety-nine has an A.
The nine-word sequence I, in, sin, sing, sting,     string, staring, starting (or starling), startling can be formed by     successively adding one letter to the previous word.
Stewardesses is the longest word that     can be typed with only the left hand.
There are many words that feature all five regular vowels in alphabetical order, the commonest being abstemious,     adventitious, facetious.
Fickleheaded and fiddledeedee are     the longest words consisting only of letters in the first half of the alphabet.
Forty is the only number which has its     letters in alphabetical order. One is the only number     with its letters in reverse alphabetical order.
Bookkeeper is the only word that has three     consecutive doubled letters.
One two words ending in -gry: angry and hungry.
Indivisibility contains only one vowel, but     it is used six times.
The letter combination ough can be     pronounced in nine different ways. Examples of each sound: rough,     dough, thought, plough, through, Scarborough, slough, cough, hiccoughed.
There are 6000 actively spoken     languages in the world today. 
English speakers produce an     average of five consonants and five vowels per second. 
The first real novel was Don     Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes, who was born into poverty in     1547 near Madrid. He became a soldier, was later kidnapped by pirates     and sold into slavery in North Africa for 5 years. He may have begun Don Quixote while in prison for theft. Because of an unscrupulous     publisher, he never earned a penny from the book. He then became a     playwright without much success, and published the 2nd volume of Don     Quixote in 1615, a decade after the first, in part to counter     imitators. He was a contemporary of Shakespeare, and died in 1616, at     the age of 69.
European chivalry has     its roots in feudalism in France and Spain, a continuation of     al-furusiyya al-arabia, or Arabian chivalry, which was imported to     Europe during the early Crusades. The knight-errantry, the riding on     horseback to find adventure, the rescue of a maiden in need, the     nobility of women, and the connection of honorable conduct with the     horse rider are all traceable to Arabia. Reaching its highest     development in Europe during the 12th and 13th century, chivalry     represents a fusion of Christianity and military concepts of the     early medieval warrior class. It encompasses such ideas as morality,     religion, and social codes such as courage, honor, and service.
Gone with the Wind sold one million copies     in six months. It was Margaret Mitchell's first and only book, and     won a Pulitzer Prize. Hattie Macdaniel was the first black woman to     win an Oscar for her role in that film.
Sigmund Freuds landmark     work, The Interpretation of Dreams (1900), which became a milestone     in dream interpretation, sold only 415 copies in the first two years.
Theodor Seuss Geisel     's books have sold 600 million copies worldwide since his first     book, And to Think That I Saw It on Mulberry Street, was     published in 1937. And as inevitable as Dr. Seuss's appeal seems now, Mulberry     Street was rejected by twenty-seven publishers before being     accepted by Vanguard Press.
Horatio Alger, Jr. was an American author who wrote     more than 100 childrens books. Highly formulaic, each taught     that through honesty, perseverance, and hard work, poor but virtuous     lads could prevail in life. Published in 1868, the first of those     books, Ragged Dick, was an immediate success. Despite the     weaknesses of Algers writing, his books ultimately sold more     than 20 million copies, making him one of the most popular writers of     the 19th century.
David John Moore Cornwell worked     for the British intelligence services MI5 and MI6, when he began     writing novels under the pen name, John LeCarre.  Another person     with British gov't spy experience was Ian Fleming, who was a British     intelligence officer and journalist. He came up with the name James     Bond while visiting a Canadian     training facility outside Toronto. He stayed in a small town whose     prominent church was St. James Bond. After Fleming's death, several     authors were commissioned to carry on the Bond legacy.
J.K. Rowling, author of the     Harry Potter series, is the first person to become a billionaire     (U.S. dollars) by writing books.
Many successful novelists began their careers     working in advertising.  Among these are Dr. Seuss, Salman     Rushdie, Helen Gurley Brown, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and James     Patterson.  Walt Disney was an illustrator for an ad agency, and     others who wrote copy before forging stellar careers in TV or     performance arts include Bob Barker, Grant Tinker, Lawrence Kasden,     Dick Wolf (Law & Order), Phyllis Diller, Bob Newhart and Sir Alec Guinness.
The now-familiar phrase But wait! Theres more! first accompanied infomercials for the amazing Ginsu knife in     the 1970s. These ads also urged viewers to Call now! Operators are     standing by! By bringing the direct-marketing techniques of     door-to-door sales and print advertising to television, the Ginsu ads     established the formula for the modern infomercial. Ginsu was     actually a word that executives made up to evoke images of Japanese     samurai swords.
Credit for the first     commercial jingle usually goes to a Wheaties spot in 1926. Washburn     Crosby (the predecessor of General Mills) tried to resurrect the     flagging cereal on the radio with a song from a local barbershop     quartet. Jingles soon developed into a distinctive musical genre. If you heard a jingle, you wouldnt mistake it for any     other kind of music, says Timothy Taylor, an ethnomusicologist     at the University of California, Los Angeles, and the author of The Sounds of Capitalism: Advertising, Music, and the Conquest of Culture.     Barry Manilow, for one, is to thank for Like a good neighbor,     State Farm is there, and I am stuck on Band-Aid Brand, cause Band-Aids stuck on me!
In 1900, the standard     billboard was created in America.
Beelzebub, another name for     the devil, is Hebrew for Lord     of the Flies,     and this is where the book's title comes from.
Finches are known for their     fine singing voices. German criminals called snitches "finks" because they were prone to "singing like a     bird" to police. The word followed German and German Jewish     immigrants to America where it became part of our everyday     vocabulary, primarily through films, tv and radio.
Neither     John Lennon nor Paul McCartney could read or write music. That led     them to finish a song by the end of the day, so they didn't have to     try to remember it the next day.
The custom of family (surnames) names did not     really arise until the 11th century in Europe. Prior to the 11th     century a surname, if used at all, represented the name of a     primitive clan or tribe.
It's a popular myth that a Mac name denotes     Scottish heritage while a Mc name denotes Irish heritage, and     that Mac names are Protestant while Mc names are Catholic. They both     just mean son of and can be used by anyone of either descent     or religion. Some Mc and Mac names dont include the name of the     father, but the fathers profession, such as Macmaster. Since     master is not a proper noun and does not need to be capitalized, some     surnames drop the extra capital.  Other Mc and Mac surnames come     from some physical feature of the person, such as Mackenzie, which     means son of the fair one.
The lead pencil contains no     lead. It's actually a rod of graphite encased in wood, which first     came into use in the 16th century. However, it was not until the 19th     century that the eraser was added, an innovation that earned Hymen     Lipman a patent in 1858. In 1862, he sold his patent to Joseph     Reckendorfer for $100,000.
In 1954, a few years after     identical twins Norris and Ross McWhirter founded a London     fact-finding agency, they met a director of the Guinness brewing     company, Sir Hugh Beaver, who commissioned a compilation of world     records that was intended to settle bar-room disputes. The first     edition of the McWhirters Guinness Book of Records was given to     bars for free as a marketing gimmick, but the book quickly became a     phenomenal success.
It took 38 years for the radio to reach 50 million     people but it only took 13 years for television to do it. The     Internet did it in four years. IPod did it in 3 years, Facebook     reached it in 2 years. It took Twitter only six months.
The Twitter Birds first     name is Larry, as in Larry Bird. Hes named after the hall of     fame Basketball player Larry Bird, who played for Biz Stones     (the founder of Twitter) home team, the Boston Celtics.
YouTube was founded by Chad Hurley, Steve Chen, and     Jawed Karim in 2005. The next year, it was acquired by Google for     $1.65 billion. Within a few years, more than 25 quadrillion bytes of     videos were being streamed from the site each month from myriad     sources, amateur and professional alike.
In 1922, the first radio commercial was broadcast     on WEAF in New York. It cost $100 for 10 minutes.
In 1926, the two-man comedy     series Sam n Henry debuted on Chicagos WGN     radio station. Two years later, after changing its name to Amos n Andy, the show became one of the most popular radio     programs in American history.
TV belongs to the writers. Film      belongs to the directors. Theatre belongs to the actors.
Acclaimed actor Sir Ian McKellen     says the difference between stage and film is that in film, the     camera tends to focus on the face, whereas in the theatre, the     audience sees your entire body. He thinks the best actresses of all     time are Judi Dench, Meryl Streep, Cate Blanchett and Laura Linney.
Luc Godard said Film is the        truth 24 times a second.
In non-fiction, the author tells      the story; 
in fiction, the characters      reveal the story. 
There are some "rules" about film and television:
Sight triumphs hearing (if      someone's hair is a mess, you don't hear what they're saying)
Music enhances speech (an      appropriate background score can make what's being said more memorable)
Film editors often "cut on      the blink" - cutting the scene when the actor blinks
Darren Aronofsky, director of Noah,     The Wrestler,     The Black Swan,     says, The best invention of the 20th century     was the closeup. That you could put a camera right in front of Paul     Newman's eyes and look into his soul changed storytelling.
Georges Feydeau's formula for     writing comedy: Decide which     characters should, under no circumstances, meet, and then get them     together as soon as possible.
In Jim Henson: The Biography, Brian Jay     Jones explains how Henson created Kermit the Frog.
         In     1955, television was still in its infancy when a small, Washington,     D.C. station added a short puppet show called Sam and Friends created     by nineteen-year-old Jim Henson with a cast of characters he had come     to call the Muppets. Unlike most puppets that had preceded them,     Henson's creations had flexible rather than wooden faces -- and thus     could make expressions easily picked up by the new, more intimate     medium of television. A minor character in the ensemble was Kermit,     who was light blue and not yet a frog.
        There     most abstract Muppet in Sam's cast was given mostly small parts, but     had a special place in Jim's heart. Jim had built Kermit while     passing several long sad days tending to his grandfather as he died     slowly of heart failure. Foraging for any suitable materials, Jim     settled on his mother's old felt coat, and as he leaned over the     table in the Hensons' living room he sewed a simple puppet body, with     a slightly pointed face, out of the faded turquoise mate­rial.     For eyes, he simply glued two halves of a Ping-Pong ball -- with     slashed circles carefully inked in black on each -- to the top of the head.
        Kermit     was very flexible, which gave him a range of expression. "I     didn't call him a frog," Jim said. All the characters in those     days were abstract, which was a way of challenging his audience -- of     making them an active part of the performance.
One of Americas greatest     playwrights, Eugene ONeill spent his youth as a heavy-drinking,     itinerant seaman, then began writing plays while recovering from     tuberculosis in 1912. Within a decade, he had won his first of four     Pulitzer Prizes.
The oldest free public school in the U.S. opened     in  1635. The Boston Latin School in Massachusetts was     originally a school for boys, but became coeducational in 1972. The     oldest public school in the U.S. and a "feeder" school for     Harvard, it maintains the same standards as elite New England prep     schools while adopting the egalitarian attitude of a public school.     More than 99% of Boston Latin's approximately 300 annual graduates     are accepted by at least one four-year college. The school was     modeled after Boston Grammar School in Lincolnshire, UK, from where     many of Boston's original settlers derived. Its curriculum follows     that of the 18th century Latin-school movement, which holds the     classics to be the basis of an educated mind. Among its alumni are     four Harvard University presidents, four Massachusetts governors, and     five signers of the Declaration of Independence.
The Latin     School of Chicago was founded in     1888 by a group of Chicago citizens interested in providing better     education for their children. It was modeled after The Boston Latin     School, but supported by parents rather than being part of the public     system. Early classes of all boys were held in private homes on the     Near North Side. The school gradually expanded, and, in 1899, the     school moved to a brand new building and became the first Chicago     Latin School. In 1913 a girls' section became the Chicago Latin     School for Girls, and the two schools merged in 1953. Bobbi taught at     The Latin School of Chicago in the 1960s.
The National University of     Mexico was founded in 1551 by Charles V of Spain and is the oldest     university in North America.
Oberlin College was the first college to grant     degrees to women, in 1841. It was also the first college to grant a     bachelors degree to an African-American woman, in 1862.
Elena Lucrezia Cornaro     Piscopia (5 June 1646  26 July 1684) was a Venetian philosopher     of noble descent, and the first woman to receive a Doctor of     Philosophy degree.
The SATs were administered for the first time on     June 23, 1926. The were invented by Princeton professor Carl Campbell     Brigham, who had worked on the Army's IQ test. In 1933, James Bryant     Conant became president of Harvard, and decided to offer scholarships     to public school students in the Midwest. Not long after, Princeton,     Columbia and Yale followed suit. By the 1950s, most colleges used the     tests for all admissions. The College Board in 1994 changed the name     of the SATs from Standard Aptitude to Standard Assessment.
Vermont, Washington D.C.,     Rhode Island, Alabama, and New Hampshire have the highest     concentrations of librarians in the U.S. 
There are thousands of     public libraries in the U.S.  California and New York, for     example, each have more than 1,000 libraries, while the smallest     number, 27, are located in Washington, D.C. 
On November 28, 1814, the     Times in London was the first     newspaper to be printed by automatic, steam owered presses built by     the German inventors Friedrich Koenig and Andreas Friedrich Bauer.     This was the beginning of newspapers being available to a mass audience.
On September 4, 1833, Benjamin Day sent little     urchins onto the crowded, bustling streets of New York City, into     coffee houses and taverns shouting and waving his new production, the     Sun newspaper. For one cent men read the news sold to them on the     spot. Mr. Day's successful paper spawned more penny newspaper     businesses, until every crowded city teemed with hustling ragamuffms     eager to earn a few coins selling sheets of news. Publishers could     depend on an abundant supply of little merchants to call out the     latest edition. The 'newsey' became a common American icon. By 1962,     there were 600,000 "paperboys," thanks in part to     exemptions from Depression-era child labor laws for youths involved     in distributing newspapers if they were at least twelve years of age.     The labor laws also exempted youths involved in acting, baby sitting,     farm work, a family business, and making Christmas wreaths. (from Little     Merchants by Sandra Walker)
The average child sees 30,000     television commercials every year.
Janice Kennedy, who writes with insight and grace     in The Ottawa Citizen, described the current cultural climate as the ascendancy of the unelightened,     which dismisses experience,     education, and sophisticated thinking.  Could     that be a result of the dominance of television, where the     inexperienced and uneducated are celebrated on reality shows?
Days after the release of     the iPad, one of the world's biggest porn companies claimed it had     created a way to stream its videos onto the device, skipping the     Apple store and its restrictions on salacious content.
There's an adjective to     describe those of us who are fond of writing: scribacious. There's     also an obscure word for continual writing: scriptitation.
Robert Frost is     considered the     most popular of all 20th-century American poets. He was awarded the     Pulitzer Prize for poetry four times­in 1924, 1931, 1937, and 1943.
Joseph Pulitzer was born in Hungary in     1847, immigrated to the US during the Civil War and served in the     Union Army. He later became a reporter and purchased and founded     several newspapers, establishing the pattern of the modern newspaper     by combining investigative reporting with publicity stunts,     self-advertising, and sensationalism. In his will, he established the     Pulitzer Prizes, annual awards for achievements in American     journalism, letters, and music.
The tabloid National Enquirer was founded in     1926 by William Griffin, a protege of William Randolph Hearst. During     the 1930s and 1940s, it became a voice for isolationism and     pro-fascist propaganda. The paper was indicted along with Griffin     under the Smith Act for sedition by a grand jury in 1942 for     subverting the morale of US troops due to Griffin's editorials     against US military involvement in World War II. By 1952 the     papers circulation had fallen to 17,000 copies a week and it     was purchased by Generoso Pope Jr., the son of the founder of Il Progresso,     New York's Italian language daily newspaper. It has been alleged     that Mafia boss Frank Costello provided Pope the money for the     purchase in exchange for the Enquirer's promise to list lottery     numbers and to refrain from all mention of Mafia activities. In 1953,     Pope revamped the format from a broadsheet to a sensationalist     tabloid focusing on sex and violence.
In Douglas Coupland's new     biography of Marshall McLuhan, he reveals that when McLuhan picked up     a new book, he turned first to page 69, and if that page didn't     impress him, he wouldn't read the book.
God Bless America is considered the semi-official national anthem of the United States,     along with America     the Beautiful and The     Star Spangled Banner.  Irving Berlin wrote it during World War I, but it was not sung in     public until     November 11, 1938, when Kate Smith introduced it on a radio broadcast.
Tony Bennett, an acclaimed jazz vocalist for close     to five decades, also has one of his paintings hanging in the     Smithsonian. When interviewed recently about why his music appeals to     all ages, Bennett said he's "anti-demographic." Bennett has     won fifteen Grammy Awards, two Emmy Awards, been named an NEA Jazz     Master and a Kennedy Center Honoree. He has sold over 50 million     records worldwide. On his 85th birthday,     he released his second duets album, pairing with everyone from Lady     Gaga to K.D. Lang.
Carnegie Hall opened in     1891. The Neo-Italian     Renaissance building by     architect William Burnet Tuthill was  endowed by industrialist     Andrew Carnegie at the insistence of conductor Walter Damrosch. Pyotr     Tchaikovsky was the guest of honor at its opening. The New     York city landmark was     slated for demolition in the 1950s but was saved by a public outcry.
Frank Lloyd Wright     worked as a draftsman for architect Louis Sullivan before going on     to build some of the most iconic buildings in the U.S. He explained     his attitude as "honest arrogance instead of hypocritical humility."
Arthur Rubinstein was was a Polish-American pianist     whose enormous popularity spanned many decades. He debuted in 1900     and performed with moderate success until the 1930s, when he stopped     performing for five years to improve his technique and reemerged as a     giant of 20th-century music, active into his 80s.
In Dante's Inferno the hottest     places in hell are reserved for those who, in time of great moral     crisis, maintain their neutrality.
More than 2,700 different     languages are spoken around the world.
The world's top languages are:
             Mandarin Chinese -1 billion+
                                                 Malay-Indonesian - 159 million
                                                     French - 129 million
English has become the     worlds lingua franca or default tongue, the worldwide     dialect of the third millennium, the language in which China     trades with Zambia, the language in which a Greek watching CNN phones     a friend from the Middle East to get him off the London bus hes     riding before it explodes, according to Roy Blount, Jr., in his NY     Times review of GLOBISH:     How the English Language Became the Worlds Language, by     Robert McCrum.
With that in mind, one wonders why Canada persists     in teaching French to both children and adults, and why Quebec     devotes manpower and budget to enforcing its silly language laws.
Someone who is able to speak six or     more languages is called a HyperPolygot. These     individuals are mostly     male,  left-handed, have enhanced ability in music and  math, and often suffer auto-immune diseases. Native     and acquired language is processed in different     areas of the brain.
Mandarin is the oldest and most      widely-spoken language in the world.
China has 200 million students.       Most of them are learning English. There are actually more English       speakers in China       than in the U.S.
The Hawaiian alphabet only        contains 12 letters.
The Chinese ideogram for trouble symbolizes two women living under one roof
The Chinese were using     the decimal system as early as the fourteenth century B.C., nearly     2,300 years before the first known use of the system in European     mathematics. The Chinese were also the first to use a place for zero.
The English language has close to 540,000 words,     about five times as many as existed in Shakespeare's time. But some     of the words we use frequently today were invented by     Shakespeare. According to the Oxford Dictionary of Quotations,     Shakespeare wrote about one-tenth of the most quotable quotations     ever written or spoken in English. Among these are: one fell     swoop, vanish into thin air, play fast and loose, be in a pickle,     foul play, tower of strength, flesh and blood, be cruel to be kind, and with bated breath.
Tell a performer to "break a leg" came about     in Shakespeare's day, when actors would     bend or "break" one the leg to bow if the audience applauded. So the     saying is a wish that the performance merit sufficient applause so     the actors can bow/break a leg.
Shakespeares works contain first-ever     recordings of 2,035 English words, including critical, frugal,     excellent, barefaced, assassination, and countless.
There are two surviving copies of King Lear.     The quarto edition includes 300 lines and a whole scene that do not     appear in the First Folio. The two versions give important speeches     to different characters, altering the nature of three key characters.     The endings are also significantly different.
Shakespeare was born under the old Julian calendar,     not the current Gregorian calendar that was created in 1582 and     adopted in England in 1751. What was April 23 during     Shakespeares life would be May 3 on todays calendar. He     was baptized on April 26, 1564, in Stratford-upon-Avon, just three     days before the Stratford parish register recorded an outbreak of the     plague. His father, John Shakespeare, was accused four times for such     illegal activities of trading in wool and money-lending.
Bobbi is a huge Shakespeare fan, and has seen all     37 plays in live performance (including Anthony Hopkins and Judi     Dench in Antony & Cleopatra, Bill Hutt in Timon of     Athens, Orson Welles as King Lear, and Robert Ryan as Coriolanus.
The oldest word in the English        language is town. 
Apple is one of the oldest      English words and first referred to all fruit in general. 
The Gullah/Geechee culture, a mix of African tribes     that made up a large part of the population of slaves in the Carolina     Low Country, brought many of their customs to the U.S. One was the     superstition that the color blue warded off evil spirits. For that     reason, they painted door and window frames blue, and eventually many     homeowners began to paint porch ceilings blue, which came to be known     as haint blue,     for the haints or haunts they kept at bay.
Women use more pronouns and     verbs than men when they write, while men use more articles,     prepositions and numbers. That seems to indicate that women focus on     the personal (I, you, we, he, she, they) and actions, while men need     to define things precisely.
The French language has seventeen different words       for surrender.
     Guy Deutscher, in his     book, Through the Language Glass: Why     the World Looks Different in Other Languages,     points out how different languages treat common nouns and     verbs.  For example, French, German, Russian, and several other     languages assign a gender to inanimate objects. This even extends to     terms for people, so that "my neighbor" in English could be     male or female, but in French or German you have to specify which.
     In German and Spanish, the     same object has different genders. A German bridge is feminine, while     a Spanish bridge is masculine. The same is the case for clocks,     forks, chairs, tables, brooms, apartments, newspapers, pockets,     shoulders, stamps, tickets, keys, violins, butterflies,  mountains, wars, rain, garbage, the sun, the world and love. In     English, tenses determine when an action occurred, but in Chinese,     the same verb can be used for past, present or future actions.
    In some parts of the world,     directions are given in relation to geography: north, south, east,     west. In the western world we tend to relate space to ourselves:     left, right, front, back. Among the countries who use geographic     coordinates are Polynesia, Bali, Mexico, and Namibia. Their speakers     tend to have a much better sense of orientation in situations where     there are few landmarks.  Some have a keen awareness of location     from infancy, similar to perfect pitch. Some research that we     perceive colors depending on language. In English, green and blue are     distinct colors, whereas in other languages they are only shades of     the same color. Our brains seem to be trained to exaggerate the     distance between shades if these colors have different names
In English, a clock runs, but in Spanish, the clock     walks. In English, I missed the bus, but in Spanish, the bus left me.     In English, I am hungry, in French, I have hunger, but in Spanish, I     hold hunger.
The term office-worker entered the language in 1856. Office clerks wore white collars and      cuffs to distinguish them from laborers. Upton Sinclair popularized      the use of the phrase white-collar in 1919.
The dot over the letter "i" is called a tittle.
The only 15 letter word that     can be spelled without repeating a letter is uncopyrightable.
There are two words in the     English language that have all five vowels in order: abstemious and facetious. 
Typewriter is the longest word that can be made using the letters only on one     row of the keyboard.
The longest one-syllable word     in the English language is screeched.
Stewardesses is the longest word that can be typed with only the left hand, and     lollipop only with the right.
Only four words in the English     language end in "dous": tremendous,     horrendous, stupendous,     and hazardous.
The combination ough can be pronounced     in nine different ways. The following sentence contains them all: A rough-coated, dough-faced, thoughtful ploughman strode     through the streets of Scarborough; after falling into a slough, he     coughed and hiccoughed.
The English words ballot and bullet share     an ancient source, but eventually came to mean completely different     things. Officer has the word office in it, just as sweetbread is not sweet and it's not bread. The word demand in French     confuses English speakers because it means just  to ask, not to demand. In Spanish, embarazada, does not mean embarrassed but rather pregnant. These kinds of related words (known     as cognates) are common in various languages. It stands to reason     that if the words are related they ought to mean the same thing, but     it's not true. Cognates, like etymology and internal structure, are unreliable.
No word in the English language     rhymes with month, orange, silver,     or purple.
Dreamt is the only English word that ends in the letters mt.
Only two words in English end in "gry" - hungry and angry. 
Only four words in the English     language end with -dous: horrendous, tremendous, stupendous, and hazardous. 
Six words in the English     language contain a double u: vacuum, muumuu, continuum, duumvirate,     duumvir, and residuum.
Some words have no singular     form: glasses, binoculars, scissors, tongs, jeans, pants, pajamas.     Articles of clothing become singular when used as adjectives: pajama     party, jean jacket)
There are 10 human body parts     that are only 3 letters long. Among them are ear,     eye, arm, leg,  hip, toe, jaw, lip, gum, rib.
E is most common letter in the     English language, with A the second most common vowel. R is the most     common consonant in English, followed by T. The most common first     letter of a word is S.
The toughest tongue twister in     the English language is "The sixth sick sheiks sixth     sheeps sick."
Maine is the only state whose     name consists of only one syllable. 
Funk (of Funk & Wagnalls Dictionary) claimed     that the 10 most beautiful words in the English language are: moist,     hush, luminous, murmuring, dawn, chimes, lullaby, melody, tranquil and golden.
The word nerd was first coined by Dr. Seuss in If      I Ran the Zoo.
Robert Fulford points out that     there are quite a few English words which have only a negative     meaning, with no positive counterpart, such as: unruly,     disgruntled, unkempt, disconsolate, uncouth, dishevelled,     nonchalant, inept.
Q is the only letter in the     alphabet that does not appear in the name of any of the United States.
Maine is the only state whose      name is just one syllable.
The names of all the       continents start and end with the same letter
A jiffy is an actual unit of time for 1/100th of a second.
Crayola is a French word that         means oily chalk.
Many common products are actually     brand names which should not be used     for generic copies: Band-Aids,     Bubble Wrap, Chapstick, Crockpot, Dumpster, Frisbee, Hula Hoop,  Jacuzzi, Jell-O, Jet-Ski,  Kleenex, Novocaine, Onesies, Ouija     board, Ping-Pong, Plexiglas, Popsicle,  Post-its, PowerPoint,     Q-tips, Rollerbl,ade, Scotch tape, Sharpie,  Styrofoam, TASER,     Thermos, Vaseline, Velcro, Weed Eater, Wite-out, X-acto, Zamboni
Barack Hussein Obama is     named after his father, Barack Hussein Obama, Sr. (1936-1982). Barack means blessing/blessed/to bless in Swahili and Semitic     languages, and Hussein is a Semitic word meaning good or beautiful. Swahili was Obama Sr.s native language.
The Scandinavian word skot passed into English usage from Viking settlements to mean a tax based     on your land holdings. Certain exemptions were made for the poor, the     clerical and the rich and powerful who were allowed to go scot free, which is how that phrase     became common usage. Hopscotch and butterscotch have     no relation to the country of Scotland. Rather, one of the origins     of the word scotch comes from the Anglo-French word scocchen which meant to cut, gouge or mark     with a notch. Butterscotch was a form of candy which was notched into     segments that could be broken off easily, and hopscotch was first     played where the stepping squares could be gouged into the ground     with a sharp stick. It can also mean to figuratively to scratch or     erase something. 
The word katzenjammer stems from American English, a combination of the German Katze     (cat) and jammer     (distress). The word was     popularized by the early comic The     Katzenjammer Kids. The dictionary     definition is uproar or clamor. Windjammer comes from the same source. Although we now use it to refer to a     large sailing ship, originally the word meant someone who talked a     lot (possibly a sailor). A secondary meaning of the German word jammer meant talking incessantly,     and we use the word yammer to mean the same thing.
The phrase the     cat's pajamas has nothing to do with     cats. In the late 1700s a tailor made  pajamas for the British     elite made from rare silk, newly imported from the far east. The     tailor's name was E.B. Katz, hence the     Katz pajamas, which became the     cat's pajamas.
Letting the cat out of the bag came from     medieval markets where piglets were sold in bags, otherwise known as a     pig in a poke. When a stray cat was substituted for the valuable     piglet, the buyer discovered the switch by letting the cat out of     the bag.  
Flea market comes directly from the French marché aux puces which literally means market of fleas.
Long ago, dishes and cookware in Europe were made     of a dense orange clay called pygg. When people saved coins in     jars made of this clay, the jars became known as pygg banks.  When an English potter misunderstood the word, he made a container     that resembled a pig. Hence, the piggy     bank.
When Mary Queen of Scots went to France as a young     girl, Louis, King of France, learned that she loved the Scots game     golf. So he had the first course outside of Scotland built for her     enjoyment. To make sure she was properly chaperoned (and guarded)     while she played, Louis hired cadets from a military school to     accompany her. Mary liked this a lot and when she returned to     Scotland, she took the practice with her. In French, the word cadet     is pronounced ca-day and the Scots changed it into caddie.
Invented in 1825, limelight was     used in lighthouses and theatres by burning a cylinder of lime which     produced a brilliant light. In the theatre, a performer in     the limelight was the centre of attention.
Carbon black is nearly pure elemental carbon in     colloidal particle form, made by charring any organic material.  Examples of this are Ivory Black, made by charring ivory or bones,     and Lamp Black, made from the soot of oil lamps. Carbon black for     industrial use today is typically produced as Furnace Black, produced     using heavy aromatic oils, and Thermal Black, produced using natural     gas, generally methane, injected into a very hot furnace where, in     the absence of much air, carbon black and hydrogen are produced.
In the early 1900s, Binney & Smith (who would     later switch to selling school products and rename their company     after their most popular product, Crayola Crayons) began selling     their carbon black chemicals to Goodrich Tire Company, as it was     found that the use of carbon black in rubber manufacturing     significantly increased certain desirable qualities for rubber meant     to be turned into tires, working as a reinforcing filler in rubber,     which increases its durability and strength.
The expression to wing it.     meaning to improvise a speech instead of learning it beforehand, came     from the theatre, where actors sometimes did a quick memorization of     lines in the wings.
In the U.S. theatre folk say Break     a leg to wish actors a successful performance. In France, they     say Merde, which means excrement. That came about because in     the days when theatre-goers arrived by horse and carriage, lots of     excrement in the street meant the show was a hit!
Many phrases come from references to the lower     classes. A meal made from deer innards, only eaten by the servants,     became humble pie, and unwelcome house guests were served     unheated leftover mutton, or the cold shoulder.
Bizarre comes from the Basque word for     beard, applied to Spanish soldiers who arrived wearing beards to     villages where people considered facial hair odd. 
There are several expressions using the word buck. A buck is a slang word for a dollar, and pass the buck also refers to deerskin, because the leather was used as currency by     native people in the New World, and poker players in the 19th century     used to stick their buckskin-covered knives into the table to     indicate the dealer.
The word yoga is     derived from the Sanskrit root yuj meaning to yoke or join together.     It most often refers to the yoking of a conscious subject     (jiva-atman) with a Supreme Spirit (parama ta man) in order to reach     an ecstatic condition (Samadhi, a placing or putting     together). It is derived from the Proto-Indo-European base     *yeug-, meaning to join as in jugular.  A 2008     market study in Yoga Journal reports that some 16 million Americans     practice yoga and spend $5.7 billion a year on gear.
Doga is a type of     yoga in which people use yoga to achieve harmony with their pets.     Dogs can either be used as props for their owners or they can do the     stretches themselves. It reportedly started in New York in 2002 when     Suzi Teitelman started Yoga for Dogs.
The swastika is a yoga symbol     that comes from the Sanskrit term Svastik, meaning that which     is associated with well-being.
The yoga symbol Om is found in Hindu and Tibetan philosophy. It is said to be the     primordial sound of the universe and is connected to the Ajna Chakra     (the conscience) or third eye region.
Samuel Johnson's famous     dictionary was published in 1755, 150 years before the Oxford English     Dictionary. The legendary scholar, who was born 300 years ago,     suffered from Tourette's syndrome, physical pain and insomnia, was     blind in one eye and deaf in one ear, had battled tuberculosis and     smallpox. Yet he is the second-most quoted writer in the English     language, surpassed only by Shakespeare.
From Dictionary.com :     Why does the single letter C represent so many different sounds?
          The third letter of the alphabet is somewhat of a chameleon; one     might even question its usefulness. The letter /c/ can represent the hard C (carrot,) the soft C (nice,) or even silent C (indict,). Why does our alphabet have more than     one letter to represent the same sound, as in K and C, or S and the soft C? To understand the reasons C plays so many roles,     lets dig into its long and messy linguistic history.
          The letter /c/ is of Semitic descent and shares the exact same     origin as the letter /g/  the Semitic letter called gimel.  The original glyph for /g/ was most likely     adapted around the Middle Bronze Age (2200-1550 BC) from a hieroglyph     for a gimel or its namesake, the staff sling  a weapon     consisting of a long piece of wood with a short strap for launching     rocks at the end. The symbol denotes a line with a bend at the top.     The gimel influenced the symbol for the third letter in the Greek     alphabet, gamma. Later, the Etruscan alphabet, used by     the people who inhabited what is now Italy, adopted the Greek gamma to represent the /k/ or hard /c/ sound but used a     different character, ), which eventually turned from facing left to     right and became the letter C in Classical Latin.
          This long journey to existence may explain how the letter /c/ came     to be, but the question still remains  why does /c/ possess so     many phonetic values? In a nutshell it comes down to something called     palatalization, or simply sound change  the     tempering of a letters pronunciation from its original form.     Another important factor, in the case of the letter /c/, is its     corresponding vowel. For instance, the sound of the hard C, which     exhibits the [k] sound, often precedes the vowels /a/, /o/ and /u/     while the soft c, taking on the /s/ sound, precedes the vowels /e/,     /i/ and /y/.
          The soft C is also placed before different combinations primarily in     relation to certain Latin loanwords such as Caesar and caecum. Add to this the use of the silent C, which always     corresponds with the letter /t/ as in the word indict.
          Product naming is infamous for replacing the letter /c/ with the     letter /k/  as in Kool-Aid and Nesquik. The choice to use the     letter /k/ may simply come down to a fun play on words.
The     Apostrophe Protection Society was started in 2001 by John     Richards, now its Chairman, with the specific aim of preserving the     correct use of this currently much abused punctuation mark in all     forms of text written in the English language. 
The Gettysburg     Address , one of the most compelling     speeches in history, contains just 267 words. 
          In True Stories Behind Car Company Logos,  in Road&Track,  Nick Kurczewski reveals that the Mercedes-Benz three-pointed star     first appeared on a personal note written in 1872 from company     founder, Gottlieb Daimler, to his wife. Mr. Daimler used a     three-pointed star to mark the location of his familys new home     in the town of Deutz, Germany. His sons adapted the emblem as the     Mercedes-Benz logo from 1910 onward.
         The Cadillac crest is the coat of arms of French military commander     and explorer, Antoine de la Mothe Cadillac, who founded Detroit in 1701.
         In     1909, having left the company bearing his name, August Horch     established a second automobile company in Zwickau, Germany. He     couldnt legally name his new company after himself, so he     translated it into Latin, coming up with Audi. The four interlinked     Audi rings came about in 1932, when four struggling automakers joined     together under the corporate banner of Auto Union. These companies     included Audi, DKW, Wanderer and, ironically, the original Horch.
        The     Subaru name comes from the Japanese name of a star cluster in the     Taurus constellation.  Six of the stars are visible to the naked     eye andin keeping with corporate identitythis matches the     six companies which combined to form Fuji Heavy Industries,     Subarus parent company.
Many years ago in England, a whistle was baked into     the handle of ceramic cups used in pubs. When patrons wanted a     refill, they used the whistle to get some service. Hence the phrase, Wet     your whistle.
Also in old England, when customers got unruly, the     bartender would yell at them Mind     your pints and quarts, and     settle down. Hence the phrase, Mind     your P's and Q's.
Bakers used to be fined if their loaves were under     weight, so they added an extra loaf to every dozen, just in case --     hence, the expression baker's dozen. 
Hands Down, meaning an easy win, comes from horse-racing. When a jockey is close     to the finish line, he relaxes his grip on the reins and drops his     hands to his sides.
The word queue comes from the Latin cauda, which means tail. In French it became queue, which     the English borrowed and added the word cue for the long stick (or tail) used in billiards, and the verb to     cue.
Ancient tribes of long ago that     wanted to banish people without killing them would burn their houses     down -- hence the expression to     get fired.
The Inuit have as many as 252 inflections for     simple nouns, 63 forms of the present tense and a minimum vocabulary     of 12,500 words. Chippewa has 6,000 verb forms, and the Oregon Indian     language of Tillamook has 30 prefixes. ln one Inuit language, the     word for tomorrow translates, If it     gets light. The Nipmuc Indians were     responsible for the lake with the worlds longest name: Lake     Chargoggagoggmanchauggauggagoggchaubunagungaillau,  in Webster,     Massachusetts. It translates: I fish     on my side, you fish on your side and no one fishes in the middle.
Many basic English words come from the same     Teutonic roots as German, Dutch, Flemish, Danish, Swedish and     Norwegian, producing remarkable similarities in, for example: best,     blind, break, come, dance, find, finger, good, hair, hand, help,     here, ice, lamp, man, mouse, rat, ring, sand, send, sing, storm, wild and young.
There is only one word spoken the same way in     nearly every language known to humankind. That word, of course, is mama.     Almost every language has a form     of it. While its true that most languages vary when it comes     to the formal word mother, the intimate mama stays the same in     each language. Russian linguist Roman Jakobson has explained that the easiest     vocalizations for a human to make are open-mouth vowel sounds.  As they begin to experiment with making other noises, babies will     test some of the easier consonant sounds. Usually they start with the     sounds made with closed lips, and the consonant sound MMMM is     easy to relax into an open mouth vowel, usually ah, which is the     easiest. The m sound is the easiest for a baby mouth at     the breast. So  even as adults, we still associate mmm with something being yummy and good.
The word Papa is present in several     languages including Russian, Hindi, Spanish and English, while slight     variations on it appear in German (Papi), Icelandic (Pabbi), Swedish     (Pappa) and a number of other languages across the globe. Likewise in     Turkish, Greek, Swahili, Malay and several other languages the word     for dad is Baba or a variation of it.
The Dictionary of     Newfoundland English devotes three pages to the word ice,     while most languages spoken north of the 60th parallel have dozens     of synonyms for snow.
North American Indian,     Japanese, and some Polynesian dialects contain no swear words.
The Japanese have nineteen     different ways of saying no.
English utilizes many words which have come     directly from other languages: molasses (Portuguese), magazine (Arabic), pepper (Sanskrit), bungalow (Hindi), scarlet (Persian), horde (Turkish), tea (Chinese), pendant (Italian), gravel (Celtic), mammoth (Slavonic), boss (Dutch), tycoon (Japanese), skill (Old     Norse), flannel (Welsh), cork (Spanish). For common English words that     derive from Yiddish, click HERE .
In 1980, the five most common     non-English languages spoken in the United States were (in order):     Spanish, Italian, German, French and Polish. Thirty years later, the     top five are (in order): Spanish, Chinese, French, Tagalog and Vietnamese.
The onion is named after a Latin word meaning large pearl.
English is the only language to capitalize the       first person pronoun, I.
In some American Indian and     native Australian languages the grammatical distinction between     singular and plural does not exist.
In Hungarian (Magyar) the same word means he,      she, and it.
Eggcorns is the     term coined by Mark Liberman, Univ. of Pennsylvania linguist. He     describes this as the confluence of creativity or logic with     misunderstanding the meaning of the words in the phrase. Chris     Waigi's Eggcorn Database, www.eggcorns.lascribe.net includes such     gems as: without further adieu, wet your appetite, stark raven mad,     girdle one's loins, insectuous, flaw in the ointment, spurt of the     moment, financial heartship, zero-sum gain, works like a champ,     gorilla marketing, and take with a grain assault.
The term golf came from Gentlemen Only...Ladies Forbidden.
Using Xs at the end of a     letter for kisses started in the Middle Ages when people couldn't     write and used crosses as signatures.
Conservative people in the     Middle East only look directly into the eyes of a social equal of the     same sex. It's a cultural difference that can make Westerners feel     someone from the Middle East can't be trusted, as Westerners are used     to looking directly at anyone they meet.
The word sneaker was coined by Henry McKinney, an advertising agent for N.W. Ayer & Son.
Joe Sugarman  introduced the concept of using     toll-free numbers to take credit card orders over the phone.
The phrase raining cats and dogs originated in seventeenth-century England. During heavy rainstorms,     many homeless animals would drown and float down the streets, giving     the appearance that it had actually rained cats and dogs.
The first use of OK in print, in The Boston Morning Post of March 23, 1839, was a joke: o.k.  all correct. Such     misspelling-based abbreviations were a fad. But it soon caught on. A     book review in the NYTimes quotes from OK     - The Improbable Story of Americas Greatest Word,     by Allan Metcalf:  O is a     satisfying oval, all curves; K is all straight lines, a collection of     sticks. The combination is stark and striking.     And: Feminine O, masculine K.     Thats the look of OK. Reviewer     Ray Blount points out: The sounds are     clear and simple: two long vowels, O and A, separated in the middle     by a quick K. Nearly every language in the world not only has these     three sounds but allows them to be combined in that sequence, which     accounts both for the spread of OK throughout the world.
Using Xs at the end of a     letter for kisses started in the Middle Ages when people couldn't     write and used crosses as signatures.
EPONYMS are words originating from the names of     people. Some examples include:  
bougainvillea -     Louis Bougainville;     dunce - John Duns Scotus;     guppy - Robert Guppy;  
hooligan -     Patrick Hooligan;     jacuzzi - Candido Jacuzzi;     praline - Count Plessis-Praslin;
melba toast -     soprano Nellie Melba;     peach     melba - Nellie Melba
CONTRANYMS are words     which can have two opposite meanings. Examples include sanction,     oversight, left, trim, resign, screen.
The Pintupi tribe of     Western Australia have 15 words for different types of fear; the     Japanese use amae to describe the feeling of being able to     depend on someone unconditionally.
Sir Walter Scott coined a number     of phrases in common use today. Among these are:
caught red-handed  ("redhand" was an existing Scottish legal term meaning "in the act of crime")
cold shoulder; blood is     thicker than water; flotsam and jetsam; go berserk; infra dig; lock     stock and barrel, nail your colours to the mast; savoir faire; strain     at the leash; apple of my eye; the back of beyond; tongue in cheek;     wide berth 
Several common American words,     like boss and stoop, are Dutch in origin. Their     influence lingers in place names like Brooklyn and Kinderhook, and in     family names like Roosevelt and Vanderbilt. The Dutch also     contributed three all-American foods: doughnuts, waffles, and cookies.
The habit of saying Please and Thank You became common during the 16th and 17th     centuries, when the growing middle class used these terms to     facilitate commerce. Please is short for if you please,     and Thank You comes from the word think, and means I'll     remember what you did.
Shakespeare loved symmetry. Romeo & Juliet     contains balance between night and day, the nightingale and the lark,     to echo the two feuding families, Capulets and Montagues. Every     character in the play has his or her counterpart in the other family.
There are seven soliloquies in Hamlet, which has     seven main characters: Hamlet, Ophelia, Gertrude, Claudius, Polonius,     Laertes, and Horatio. 
The Drama Teachers Association of Southern     California holds an annual Shakespeare competition, which launched     the careers of Kevin Spacey, Mare Winningham and Val Kilmer.  Lori Miller has made a documentary film, Shakespeare High,     about this program. It premiered at the 2011 Tribeca Film Festival.     Miller says: theatre education is a way of increasing literacy,     communication skills, and complex thought.
Sir Ian McKellen cites the frequently     gender-bending plot devices of Shakespeares plays as evidence     that the playwright himself was gay, or at the very least bisexual. Id     say Shakespeare slept with men, McKellen, 72, is quoted as     saying. The Merchant of Venice, centering on how the world treats gays as well as Jews, has a love triangle     between an older man, younger man and a woman.
Your kids probably know Curious     George, but you may not know about     its origins. According to Jon Meacham (Editor of Newsweek and author of American Lion - Andrew     Jackson in the White House): In     1940, after a tense border inspection of their manuscript and draft     illustrations of Curious George stuffed in their suitcase, Margret and H. A. Rey fled Paris,     eventually settling in the U.S. An exhibit for kids and adults at The     Jewish Museum in New York explores the symbolism of the series illustrations and the parallels between the little simian that could     always save the day and the way his own creators evaded     the dangers of Nazi-occupied Europe. The museum show closes in August     2010, but theres a terrific interactive timeline, videos, and     also a book on the topic.
In January of 1951, as he was setting out to write     East of Eden  a book he considered the most difficult he ever     attempted, the ultimate test of his talent and discipline as a writer  John Steinbeck decided to loosen his creative ligaments by     writing a daily letter to his dear friend and editor,     Pascal Covici. An ardent believer in the spiritual rewards of     handwriting with the perfect writing instrument, Steinbeck began     pouring his compact longhand into the large-format ruled notebook     Covici had given him. He wrote a letter a day, each over a thousand     words on average, until the first draft of the novel was finished 276     days later. A hobbyist woodworker, Steinbeck delivered the manuscript     to Covici in a special wooden box he lovingly carved to hold the     masterwork his wife considered his magnum opus.
On May 26, 1913, Actors Equity Association was organized in New York City.
The Playbill for I Can Get It For You Wholesale,     the 1962 hit that made Barbra Streisand a star, states that the     19-year-old was born in Madagascar and raised in Rangoon. Actually     Streisand was born in Brooklyn, New York, the daughter of a school     secretary and a high school teacher. Her paternal grandparents     immigrated from Galicia (PolandUkraine) and her maternal     grandparents from Russia.
It was Coleridge      who first coined the term "the      willing suspension of disbelief, " to describe the experience      of going to the theatre.
Georges Feydeau offered a theory     on writing funny     plays: Decide which characters should, under no circumstances,     meet, and then get them together as soon as possible.
The first novel ever written on      a typewriter was Tom      Sawyer.
During his entire lifetime,     Herman Melville's timeless classic, Moby     Dick,     sold only 3,715 copies.
Isaac Asimov is the only author to have a book in      every Dewey-decimal category.
Dr. Seuss wrote Green     Eggs and Ham because the editor bet     him he could not write a book with fewer than fifty words.
Mary Had a Little Lamb was written by Sarah     Josepha Hale, who turned to writing in 1822 as a widow trying to     support her family and who eventually became an influential editor     and arbiter of American taste.
Charles Dickens was     able to work     on two serialized novels simultaneously while also editing a monthly     magazine. No other writer has had more movie, TV and cartoon versions     of his works, and all of his work was     adapted for the stage during his lifetime. He often appeared in     these productions.
Dickens was also one of the     first authors to campaign for international copyright laws.
Ronald B. Tobias claims there     are only 20 master plots in fiction. These include: Quest, Riddle,     Temptation, Rivalry, Revenge, Maturation, Love, Forbidden Love,     Escape, etc. His book is available at Amazon, and you can read a talk     he gave to Denver writers at: www.hodrw.com/ronaldtobias.htm.
Anna Sewell sold Black      Beauty when she was 57.
Karen Blixen, the Danish author     who wrote under the pen name Isak Dinesen, published her first book     at age 50, and her blockbuster, Out     of Africa,     at 52.
Laura Ingalls Wilder, author of     the Little     House on the Prairie series,     didnt have her first book published until she was well into     her 60s.
Richard Adams, author of the     childrens classic Watership     Down,     remained unpublished until he was in his 50s.
Bangladeshi writer Nirad     Chaudhuri's first book, The     Autobiography of an Unknown Indian,     was published in 1951, when he was 54 years old. Its sequel hit the     market in 1988, when he was 90. And his final book, Three     Horsemen of the New Apocalypse,     was published in 1997when he was 100.
Stephen Vizinczey's best-seller, In Praise of Older Women, was     self-published, but after he sold world rights to someone else, he     didn't see a penny for two years. I     was starving in Montreal, all the money went to New York. Seeing     headlines in the paper about being a worldwide bestseller when you're     having to borrow money to eat, that's a soul-destroying experience.     The court case took seven years to settle.
A 1784 satire written by     Benjamin Franklin proposed taxing shutters, rationing candles, and     waking the public by ringing church bells and firing cannons at     sunrise. But he didn't actually suggest Daylight Savings Time. That     didn't come until William Willett conceived DST in 1905, and it     wasn't widely accepted until 1916.    
"Beat" poet Lawrence Ferlinghetti     commented that the slogan from 1960s, Be     Here Now has evolved to Be Somewhere Else Now.
Swiss biologists determined that stupid flies live     longer than smart flies because intelligence wears out flies' brains.     Canadian researchers claim that straining to recall information which     seems to be on the tip of my tongue makes us learn     mistaken guesses instead of the correct answers we may (or may not)     eventually remember.  (source: Harper's)
The first email was sent out by     Ray Tomlinson in 1971, 127 years after Samuel Morse sent the world's     first telegraph message.
Of the 160 billion emails that      are sent each day, 97% are spam. 
The Nigerian email scam is     called 419. It dates back to the Spanish Armada in the 1500s, when     wealthy landowners would receive letters saying My father is     being held in a Spanish prison. He has millions in gold that he's     hidden away, so if you help me free him (by sending xx amount of     gold) I will reward you handsomely. When the economy of Nigeria     collapsed, they updated this Spanish scam for the Internet.
The word "spam" came from the     1970 Monty Python sketch where SPAM singing was drowning out     conversation and SPAM itself was unwanted and popping up all over the menu.
Facebook has 900 million users     (so far) - one out of every eight people in the world.
In 1894, the first women's pages in newspapers were     created, to court female consumers.
The first permanent color photograph was taken by     James Clerk Maxwell in 1861.
Warren Buffett, John Kerry, Ted     Turner, Tom Brokaw, New Yorker Editor (and Pulitzer Prize-winner)     David Remnick, Art Garfunkel, Jann Wenner, Meredith Vieira, Columbia     University President Lee Bollinger, Sun Microsystems co-founder Scott     McNealy and Memorial Sloan-Kettering President Harold Varmus were all     rejected by Harvard.
Of the 43 men to have served as     president, eight never went to college: George Washington, Andrew     Jackson, Martin Van Buren, Zachary Taylor, Millard Fillmore, Abraham     Lincoln, Andrew Johnson, and Grover Cleveland (who was both the 22nd     and 24th president).
The largest academic library in the United States     is at Harvard, which contains 13.6     million volumes. Second largest, at 9.5 million volumes, is Yale.
Michaelangelo's last name was Buonarroti.
Chaucer, widely     considered the greatest English poet of the Middle Ages, was the     first poet to be buried in Poet's Corner of Westminster Abbey. While     he achieved fame during his lifetime as an author, philosopher,     alchemist and astronomer, he spent much of his early career working for the King. He     became a member of the royal court of Edward III as a varlet de     chambre, yeoman, or esquire, and travelled abroad many times, at     least some of them in his role as a valet.  These travels may     have inspired     his most famous work: Canterbury Tales.
William James Sidis was an American child prodigy     who could read The New York Times by the time he was 18 months old. By age eight, he had taught himself     eight languages and had invented one of his own. It is said that in     his adult years he could speak more than 40 languages and learn a new     one in a single day. In 1909, he became the youngest person ever to     enroll at Harvard College and began lecturing on higher mathematics     the following year.
American book packager Edward     Stratemeyer created three popular series of children's books, Nancy     Drew, The Bobbsey Twins,     and The     Hardy Boys.     Although Carolyn Keene was credited as the author of Nancy     Drew,     there was no author by that name. All three series were written by a     syndicate of anonymous authors.
Crosswords began with a word-cross puzzle in the New York World on Dec. 21, 1913. Its creator was Arthur     Wynne, the Fun Page editor. What he developed was actually an     adaptation of a puzzle that first surfaced more than two millenniums     earlier. The puzzle was called a word square, and its distinguishing     mark was that the same words read both across and down. Creating word     squares became popular in 19th-century England.
It occurred to Wynne that the horizontal words     didnt have to be the same as the vertical ones, and he arranged     his puzzle in a diamond-shaped grid and inserted numbers in some of     the squares. The puzzler was given clues that indicated the start and     position of each word. Before long, crossword mania had swept the continent.
Kathleen Hamilton created the Toronto Star's     first Canadian crossword puzzles     in 1999. The initial set of books from that series, called O     Canada Crosswords, have all been Canadian bestsellers, and were     the first books of Canadian crosswords in bookstores. Hamilton went     on to produce many other books, including the current set, True     North Crosswords , and her puzzles are still carried in many     Canadian newspapers.
Each king in a deck of playing     cards represents a great king: 
          Spades - King David
          Clubs -Alexander the Great
          Diamonds - Julius Caesar
Birthstones arose from     the Breastplate of Aaron: a ceremonial religious garment set with     twelve gemstones that represented the twelve tribes of Israel and     also corresponded with the twelve signs of the zodiac and the twelve     months of the year. Because ancient people did not always classify     gemstones by mineral species, no one is sure  which gemstones     were set in the breastplate and why. Because of this, different     cultures around the world have developed different birthstone lists.     The custom of wearing birthstones probably first became popular in     Poland in the fifteenth or sixteenth century. Birthstones originally     may have been worn each month by everyone, since the powers of the     gemstone were heightened during its month.    Reference: http://tinyurl.com/bunn5e6
Engagement rings are often worn on the fourth     finger of the left hand because the ancient Greeks maintained that     that finger contains the vena amoris, or the vein of love, that runs straight to the heart. The first recorded wedding rings     appear in ancient Egypt, with the circle representing eternity as     well as powerful sun and moon deities.
Something old, something new, something     borrowed, something blue, and a silver sixpence in her shoe symbolizes continuity, optimism for the future, borrowed happiness,     fidelity, and wealth or good luck, respectively.
Early Roman brides carried a bunch of herbs, such     as garlic and rosemary, under their veils to symbolize fidelity and     fertility and to ward off evil. These herbs served as a precursor to     the modern bridal bouquet.
The tradition of bridesmaid's dresses came from the     superstition that if bridesmaids were dressed in similar bride-like     gowns, they would confuse rival suitors, evil spirits, and robbers.
"Tying the knot" initially came from an     ancient Babylonian custom in which threads from the clothes of both     the bride and bridegroom were tied in a knot to symbolize the     couple's union. Literally tying some type of ceremonial knot at a     wedding ceremony can be found across cultures.
1,400 actresses were     interviewed for the part of Scarlett O'Hara in Gone     with the Wind. The     most extensive screen tests in the history of motion pictures had MGM     shooting 149,000 feet of black-and-white test film and another 13,000     feet of color film with the 60 finalists.
Luc Godard said film is the truth 24 times a second.
Who are the stars who have won     the most awards?
      Barbra Streisand - Total 17 = 4 Emmys, 10 Grammys, 2 Oscars, 1 Tony 
      Mike Nichols -  Total 13 = 4 Emmys, 1 Grammy, 1 Oscar, 7 Tonys 
      Marvin Hamlisch  - Total 12 = 4 Emmys, 4 Grammys, 3 Oscars, 1 Tony 
      Mel Brooks - Total 11 = 4 Emmys, 3 Grammys, 1 Oscar, 3 Tonys
      Liza Minnelli  - Total 6 = 1 Emmy, 1 Grammy, 1 Oscar, 3 Tonys
      Whoopi Goldberg - Total 5 = 2 Emmys, 1 Grammy, 1 Oscar, 1 Tony 
      Rita Moreno - Total 5 = 2 Emmys, 1 Grammy, 1 Oscar, 1 Tony 
The Oscar was designed by MGM     art director, Cedric Gibbons, in 1928. He asked a young Mexican     actor, Emilio Fernadez, to model for the figurine.
When an orange is shown in any of the Godfather movies, this means that someone is about to die or a close call is to occur.
Alfred Hitchcock filmed the shower scene in Psycho     in black and white, using 78 pieces of film perfectly edited into a     45-second sequence featuring the piercing shriek of Bernard     Herrmanns violin. The attacker was actually an extra, as     Anthony Perkins was in New York that week, appearing in a play!
Rin Tin Tin was smuggled into the U.S.     from France, and starred initially in silent films written by his     owner. He turned out to be one of Warner Brothers' most profitable commodities.
The first full length animated movie was Snow     White and the Seven Dwarfs. It     was released in 1937, and has been named to the Americal Film     Institute's list of 100 best American films. 
Marcel Marceau was a French     actor and mime who gained renown in 1947 with the creation of Bip, a     sad, white-faced clown with a tall, battered hat­reminiscent of     Charlie Chaplins Tramp. Noted for his eloquent, deceptively     simple portrayals, he earned worldwide acclaim in the 1950s with his     production of the mimodrama of Nikolai Gogols Overcoat.     During that time, he visited New     York, and was a guest in the drama workshop at Barnard where Bobbi     met him as a student.
28% of all primetime TV shows     are now "reality" shows.  Do viewers realize that most     of these are scripted and even rehearsed? that most of the     contestants are using this exposure as a short-cut to a career in     film or broadcasting. What the audience thinks is sincerity is all     artifice, all acting. Just like the make-up on these supposedly     scrubbed faces.
An analysis of the most popular TV dramas has shown     that there is a formula for success: 65% drama, 12% shocks and     surprises, 9% comedy, 8% action, 6% romance.
Charles Douglass,     inventor of the canned laughter we hear on sitcoms, recorded the     guffaws for his original "Laff Box" during broadcasts of     The Red Skelton Show. The "laugh track" then became a part of most sit-coms.
The first ever television broadcast occurred at     Alexandra Palace, London in 1936.
The Muppets came from a British show that was     rejected by almost every U.S. network before PBS began to carry it.     Almost all the Muppets are left-handed, since most puppeteers work     their characters' mouths with their right hands. The original Kermit     was from a coat that one belonged to Jim Henson's mother. His eyes     were made from ping-pong balls.
Mick Jagger copied Marilyn     Monroe when choreographing his trademark moves. Jagger     also sang backup for Carly Simon's hit You're     So Vain,     the song supposedly written about Warren Beatty.
The popular song, We've Only Just Begun,     which was a best-seller by The Carpenters, was written by Paul     Williams, contracted by an ad agency to write a song for an ad     campaign for a bank in Los Angeles.
Warner Communications  paid     $28 million for the copyright to the song Happy     Birthday.
Originally a jazz pianist, Nat King Cole performed     in Los Angeles nightclubs with his trio in the 1930s but did not     achieve commercial success until he began singing. His warm, velvety     voice brought a personal touch to his ballads, and he became     internationally popular for his broodingly romantic hits, such as Unforgettable.     He went on to become one of the first African-American artists to     star in a radio show and to host a network television show.
Sidney Poitier, called     Hollywood's first black leading man, was born in the Bahamas, moved     to Miami when he was 15, and was living in New York, working as a     dishwasher, when he first auditioned for the American Negro Theatre.     Semi-literate, he taught himself to read and comprehend by studying     newspapers, and learned to speak properly by listening to the radio.   
John Wagner, a Hallmark artist,     is the creator of the popular cartoon,  Maxine. She was modeled     on a combination of  his mother, his maiden aunts and his     grandmother. Hired for Hallmark's new Shoebox Greetings in 1986 led     to the creation of Maxine.  People     at Shoebox started referring to the character as John Wagner's old lady,  said the artist in an interview, so he instigated a contest among     the Shoebox group to name the character.  Three entries     suggested Maxine,  which  John agreed is perfect.
Abraham Al Jaffee, was born in 1921. A     regular contributor to Mad Magazine for more than 55 years,     Jaffee is the satirical magazines longest-running contributor,     as both an illustrator and writer. Since 1964, only one issue has     been published without new material from Jaffee. He created some of     the magazines most popular features, such as blueprint-style     inventions and his famous fold-inswhich he     continues to draw by hand.
The first printing press in North America was used     in Mexico City in 1539.
The first book printed in the U.S. was the Bay     Book of Psalms, printed in     1640 in Boston.
In 1845, Rufus Porteran eccentric inventor,     painter, and editorpublished the first issue of Scientific     American, a weekly newspaper about new inventions. By 1853, its     circulation had reached 30,000 and it was reporting on various     sciences, such as astronomy and medicine. In 1921, it became a monthly.
Hearst started the King     Syndicate in 1915, to distribute comic strips and other features to     his papers. They now reach 2800 newspapers in 70 countries. 
Walt Disney got his idea     for Mickey Mouse while he worked in a garage. He was watching the     mice play one night and got the inspiration for Mortimer Mouse. He     didnt change the name until shortly before he finished the     first Mickey Mouse cartoon  the 1928  Steamboat     Willie,     Disneys first attempt to use sound and the first fully     synchronized sound cartoon. He named Mickey Mouse after Mickey     Rooney, whose mother he dated for some time. Mickey was created in     1928, making his debut in the silent film Plane     Crazy.
But well     before that, Walt     Disney created a character called Oswald the Lucky Rabbit.     Unfortunately, Universal Studios claimed the rights, as he was their     employee. That caused Disney to protect Mickey Mouse and all his     subsequent characters so vigorously.
On December 21st, 1937, Snow     White and the Seven Dwarfs premiered.     It was the first full-length animated feature film in history. It     was animated entirely by hand and took Walt Disney and his studio     three years to complete. It was exponentially more expensive than the     animated shorts the studio had produced until that time and met with     considerable opposition. Disney eventually had to mortgage his house     to help finance the project, which was derisively nicknamed Disneys     Folly by those in the film industry.
Mickey Mouse only has     four fingers on each of his hands because it was less expensive to animate.
Peter Pan is the only Disney cartoon movie that features both parent characters     alive and present throughout the entire film.
Walt Disneys     mother died from a furnace leak in the house Disney bought for her.     Producer Don Hahn believes that the reason so many characters in the     franchise are motherless is because Disney used his work to process     his guilt and his grief.
The longest Hollywood kiss was from the 1941 film, You're     in the Army Now. It lasted for     three minutes and three seconds, between Regis Toomey and Jane Wyman     (first wife of former President Ronald Reagan). Stars of the film     were Jimmy Durante and Phil Silvers. 
Peter Falk, who died     in 2011 at the age of 84,     made 65 episodes of Columbo over a period of 32 years. The show and     subsequent movies are still broadcast all over the world, translated     into many languages. Bobbi's article about buying Peter Falk a     jockstrap for a play she stage-managed in New York in 1955 has been     sold to many magazines and newspapers over the years, and now appears     in Prose to Go .   Falk, an Oscar and Emmy winner, wrote an autobiography, Just     One More Thing, in 2006, in which     he recounts many episodes in his life as an actor, but not the     jockstrap incident!
How different The     Music Man might     have been with someone other than Robert Preston in the role. A new     book (I'm     the Greatest Star,     by Robert Viagas) reveals that Danny Kaye, Milton Berle, and Art     Carney all turned down the role.
Music likely preceded language     in evolution. Singing was used to communicate friendship, joy,     comfort, knowledge, religion and love, the six songs Daniel Levitin describes in his book, The     World in Six Songs: How the Musical Brain Created Human Nature.
The harmonica is the world's     best-selling music instrument.
Showing off at a party one     evening, Chopin played the entire Minute     Waltz in less than 10 seconds.
On December 22, 1808, Beethoven rented a hall in     Vienna and promoted the concert to end all concerts: the debut,     over four hours, of three of the greatest works in the history of music.
Franz Schubert, one of the most gifted musicians of     the 19th century, was an Austrian who wrote his first of nine     symphonies in 1813 at the age of 16. He wrote more than 600 songs,     many to the lyrics of German poets, and also composed music for the     stage, overtures, choral music, masses, and piano music. He died at     31, having produced more masterpieces by that age than almost any     other composer in history.
Francis Scott Key was a young lawyer who wrote the     poem, The Star Spangled Banner,     after being inspired by watching the Americans fight off the British     attack of Baltimore during the War of 1812.  The poem became the     words to the national anthem.
Cole Porter's first two     musicals flopped on Broadway.
Andrew Lloyd Weber has had at     least one musical running in London for 40 years, and at one point,     he had five different shows playing at the same time.
The Lion King has now     raked in more box office dollars than any work in any media in     entertainment history. It has grossed $6.2 billion worldwide.
Radio City Music Hall seats     6000, and its Great Stage, designed by Peter Clark, measures 66.5 by     144 ft.  Its system of elevators was so advanced that the U.S.     Navy incorporated identical hydraulics in constructing World War II     aircraft carriers. During the war, government agents guarded the     basement to assure the Navy's technological advantage. This elevator     system was also designed by Peter Clark, and was built by Otis     Elevators. The Music Hall's "Mighty Wurlitzer" pipe organ     is the largest theater pipe organ built for a movie theater.     Identical consoles with four manuals (keyboards) are installed on     both sides of the Great Stage. Installed in 1932, the instrument was     the largest produced by the Rudolph Wurlitzer Manufacturing Company     of North Tonawanda, New York; it was built as a serious concert     instrument rather than to accompany silent movies, capable of playing     many styles of music including classical organ literature. A total     rebuild of the historic organ was completed in time for the theater's     restoration in 1999.
Andre Segovia, acknowledged     to be one of the world's greatest guitarist, was primarily self-taught.
The romantic guitar and the     mandolin were both invented in Naples.
Leo     Fender invented the electric guitar in 1948, although he never     learned how to play it!
Les Paul invented the     8-track, the modified electric guitar, and over-dubbing. As a kid, he     punched extra holes in his mother's piano rolls and covered existing     holes, just to see how it would sound. Like many geniuses, he dropped     out of high school. Always open to new ideas, was playing in a     country band on the radio in Chicago while spending evenings at jazz     clubs. He was the first to play the guitar beyond the third fret.     Other guitar players thought he was crazy until they heard the sound     he was able to produce. His use of a tape recorder was the result of     an auto accident which damaged his right arm. Invention often comes     out of adversity.
Arnold Jacobs, a tuba player with the Chicago     Symphony and a professor at Northwestern University, says there     are  two cranial nerves that allow a musician to communicate     when he or she is playing. Jacobs explains that thinking is as     important as technique in creating music, and urges musicians to     practising as if you're performing, listening to the sound in your     head rather than just going through the motions of rehearsing.
Frank Sinatra couldn't read music.
The S-shaped hole in the body     of the violin, which permits the sound to escape, is the same as the     mathematical symbol for integral, one of the basic tools of calculus,     with numerous applications in science and engineering.
There are 600 violins and     cellos built by Antonio Stradivari still in existence     today.
Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, and Jim Morrison were     all 27 years old when they died.
The national anthem of     Greece has 158 verses.
Among the most unusual musical instruments the     worlds first and only Great Stalacpipe Organ, created     by electronic engineer Leland W.     Sprinkle. The organ itself works by tapping these ancient stalactites     with rubber mallets, all connected to a keyboard that looks like a     traditional organ/piano.
Norwegian drummer and composer, Terje Isungset,     turns ice into music. He shapes ice into a variety of instruments     using his chainsaw like a paintbrush. Trumpets, xylophones,
Englands East Lancashire is home to an art     installation known as the Ringing Singing Tree. Its a giant     instrument made up of a bunch of steel pipes of different lengths     stacked in different directions, so that any passing breeze     transforms into eerie melodies. This crazy piece of art stands just     over three meters tall and was created in 2006 by Mike Tonkin and     Anna Liu and won a Royal Institute of British Architects award
The Vegetable Orchestra of Vienna are a group of     touring musicians who have transformed everyday vegetables into a     variety of instruments: pan-pipes, recorders, even a clarinet made     from a carrot. Not only can the orchestra carry a vegan melody, they     even give out fresh vegetable soup at the end of their concerts.
The Hornucopian Dronepipe was designed by Eric     Goldemberg and Veronica Zalcberg from Monad Studios,  using a     3-D printer as part of a trio of futuristic instruments. The other     two include a two-string electric violin, a one-string electric bass     guitar, a one-string electric cello/violin hybrid and a small didgeridoo.
Theremins were made famous for producing the iconic     eerie soundtracks to the science fiction films of the 1950s and 60s. Their trademark     howl is made from contactless play. The player moves his hand     between two metal antennae without touching them. The distance from     one antenna determines frequency (called pitch), and the     distance from the other controls the volume (called amplitude). Theremists can play higher notes by moving     their hands closer to the pitch antenna, and control volume by     playing with the other antenna. The Theremin gets its name from Leon     Theremin, who invented it in 1928.
The American Library Association maintains a long list of books banned by schools and     libraries. It includes such classics as All     Quiet on the Western Front, A Farewell to Arms, The Grapes of Wrath,     For Whom the Bell Tolls, Animal Farm, 1984, Doctor Zhivago, Harry     Potter, The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin, Huckelberry Finn,     Gone With the Wind, To Kill a Mockingbird, and Anne Frank: The Diary of a Young Girl.
One of the most popular     books ever published in the United States was To Kill a     Mockingbird. Michael Brown, who wrote industrial musicals for     American corporations,  used some of his earnings to support     Harper Lee while she wrote To Kill a Mockingbird.
Penguin Books was     launched in 1935, starting the paperback revolution. But much     earlier, in the 1840s, The American Library of Useful Knowledge began     to publish cheap editions of European novels. Pocket Books started in     1939, with Penguin opening an American office the same year, Avon in     1941, Popular Library in 1942, Dell in 1943, Bantam in 1945, and many     more after World War II, including New American Library's Signet and     Mentor divisions.
Publishers collaborated     to produce Armed Service Editions of popular titles, which had double     columns and were small enough to fit into a pocket. Because they were     free to the troops, many returned home with the habit of reading for     pleasure.  Instead of printing only the books soldiers and     sailors actually wanted to read, though, publishers decided to send     them the best they had to offer. From small Pacific islands to     sprawling European depots, soldiers discovered the addictive delights     of good books. By giving away the best it had to offer, the     publishing industry created a vastly larger market for its wares.     More importantly, it also democratized the pleasures of reading,     making literature, poetry, and history available to all." Full     article from the Atlantic: http://theatln.tc/1uNwuLN
By 1954, Anchor was     selling 600,000 paperback books a year, and Knopf had launched it's     quality paperback line, Vintage. This was soon followed by Beacon and     Meridian. Soon Grove and New Directions came on board, and several     publishers started producing anthologies of new writing, such as     Mentor's New World Writing series.
In 1940, before dying of a     massive heart attack in a Hollywood apartment at the age of 44, F.     Scott Fitzgerald  earned a grand total of $13.13 in royalties,     despite the later success of The Great Gatsby, first published     in 1925.
Arthur Frommer     self-published his first travel book in 1955, as a GI stationed in     Europe. Two years later, he launched the $5 a Day series, publishing     58 titles a year until he sold the company in 1977. When the new     owners lost interest in the books, Frommer bought back 340 titles,     and resumed publishing with the help of his daughter, Pauline.
Hugo Boss, founder of the popular clothing company,     designed some of the Nazi SS uniforms. Boss joined the Nazi Party in     1931 after being bankrupt and coming to an agreement with his     creditors. He later stated that he joined the party because of their     promise to end unemployment and because he felt temporarily withdrawn from the Lutheran Church.
Guess who this woman is,     described by acclaimed author John McPhee in Time Magazine:
Her feet are too big, her     nose is too long, her teeth are uneven, she has big, half-bushel     hips, her hands are huge, her forehead is low, her mouth is too large.
McPhee was describing Sophia Loren!
In 1966, President Lyndon Johnson     designated the third Sunday in June as Fathers Day.     Fathers Day has been celebrated annually since 1972 when     President Richard Nixon signed the public law that made it permanent.