The Book of Useless Information Read online

  A funambulist is a tightrope walker.

  A horologist measures time.

  A klazomaniac is someone who feels like shouting.

  A librocubicularist is someone who reads in bed.

  A phrenologist feels and interprets skull features.

  A sultan’s wife is called a sultana.

  An anthropophagite eats people.

  Killing a king is called regicide.

  Spat-out food is called chanking.

  The ball on top of a flagpole is called the truck.

  A fox’s tail is called a brush.

  The two ends of a magnet are called poles.

  The word diastima refers to having a gap between your teeth.

  The word lethologica describes the state of not remembering the word you want to say.

  The word samba means to rub navels together.

  When your sink is full, the little hole that lets the water drain, instead of flowing over the side, is called a porcelator.

  Women who wink at men are known as nictitating women.

  A necropsy is an autopsy on animals.

  A poem written to celebrate a wedding is called an epithalamium.

  A scholar who studies the Marquis de Sade is called a Sadian, not a Sadist.

  According to author Douglas Adams, a salween is the faint taste of dishwashing liquid in a cup of fresh tea.

  Alma mater means “bountiful mother.”

  An animal epidemic is called an epizootic.

  Degringolade means “to fall and disintegrate.”

  Dendrology is the study of trees.

  Dibble means “to drink like a duck.”

  EEG stands for electroencephalogram.

  EMI stands for electrical and musical instrument.

  Groaking is to watch people eating in the hope that they will offer you some.

  “Hara kiri” is an impolite way of saying the Japanese word seppuku, which means, literally, “belly splitting.”

  It is possible to drown and not die. Technically, the term drowning refers to the process of taking water into the lungs, not to death caused by that process.

  Karaoke means “empty orchestra” in Japanese.

  Kemosabe means “soggy shrub” in Navajo.

  Koala is Aboriginal for “no drink.”

  Lead poisoning is known as plumbism.

  Scatologists are experts who study feces.

  Sekkusu means “sex” in Japanese.

  Spain literally means “the land of rabbits.”

  The “You Are Here” arrow on a map is called the IDEO locator.

  The third year of marriage is the leather anniversary.

  The abbreviation “e.g.” stands for “exempli gratia,” or “for example.”

  The abbreviation for pound, “lb.,” comes from the astrological sign Libra, meaning “balance.”

  The French term bourrage de crane for wartime propaganda means “brain stuffing.”

  The infinity character on the keyboard is called a lemniscate.

  The Japanese translation of switch is pronounced suitchi.

  The name for fungal remains found in coal is sclerotinite.

  The phrase “jet lag” was once called boat lag, back before airplanes existed.

  The Sanskrit word for war means “desire for more cows.”

  The slang word crap comes from T. Crapper, the man who invented the modern toilet.

  The slash character is called a virgule, or solidus. A URL uses slash characters, not backslash characters.

  The word karate means “empty hand.”

  The word byte is a contraction of “by eight.”

  Trabant is the German word for “satellite.”

  Zorro means “fox” in Spanish.

  A coward was originally a boy who took care of cows.

  A group of officers is called a mess.

  The next-to-last event is the penultimate, and the second-to-last is the antepenultimate.

  The symbol on the pound key is called an anoctothorpe.

  SEMANTICS

  Naked means “to be unprotected”; nude means “unclothed.”

  A hamlet is a village without a church, and a town is not a city until it has a cathedral.

  FUN WITH LETTERS

  Certain sounds in the English language are real germ spreaders, particularly the sounds F, P, T, D, and S.

  Of all the words in the English language, the word set has the most definitions.

  Rhythm and syzygy are the longest English words without vowels.

  Skepticisms is the longest typed word that alternates hands.

  The letter J does not appear anywhere on the periodic table of elements.

  The letter W is the only letter in the alphabet that doesn’t have one syllable; it has three.

  The longest one-syllable word in the English language is screeched.

  The longest word in the English language is 1,909 letters long, and it refers to a distinct part of DNA.

  The most used letter in the English alphabet is E; Q is the least used.

  The oldest word in the English language is town.

  The only fifteen-letter word that can be spelled without repeating a letter is uncopyrightable.

  The only contemporary words that end with -gry are angry and hungry.

  The words racecar and kayak are palindromes; they’re the same whether they are read left to right or right to left.

  Only four words in the English language end in -dous: tremendous, horrendous, stupendous, and hazardous.

  Only three world capitals begin with the letter O in English: Ottawa, Canada; Oslo, Norway; and Ouagadougou, Burkina Faso.

  Six words in the English language have the letter combination uu: muumuu, vacuum, continuum, duumvirate, duumvir, and residuum.

  Ten body parts are only three letters long: eye, ear, leg, arm, jaw, gum, toe, lip, hip, and rib.

  There was no punctuation until the fifteenth century.

  When two words are combined to form a single word (e.g., motor + hotel = motel; breakfast + lunch = brunch), the new word is called a portmanteau.

  You would have to count to one thousand to use the letter A in the English language to spell a whole number.

  Bookkeeper is the only word in the English language with three consecutive double letters.

  Facetious and abstemious contain all the vowels in the correct order, as does arsenious, meaning “containing arsenic.”

  Cleveland spelled backward is DNA level C.

  There are only twelve letters in the Hawaiian alphabet. Hawaiian words do not contain consonant clusters. For example, Kahlúa is not a Hawaiian word.

  “I am” is the shortest complete sentence in the English language.

  In England in the 1880s, pants was considered a dirty word.

  In English, four is the only number that has the same number of letters as its value.

  Stewardesses is the longest word that is typed with only the left hand.

  No word in the English language rhymes with month, orange, silver, or purple.

  Quisling is the only word in the English language to start with “quis.”

  Maine is the only state whose name is just one syllable.

  The most recent year that could be written upside down and right side up and appear the same was 1961. The next year this will be possible will be 6009.

  LANGUAGE BARRIER

  There are about five thousand different languages spoken on Earth.

  Chevrolet tried marketing a Chevrolet Nova in Spanish-speaking countries—it didn’t sell well because “no va” means “doesn’t go” in Spanish.

  In Italy, a campaign for Schweppes Tonic Water translated the name into Schweppes Toilet Water.

  In Papua New Guinea, there are villages within five miles of each other that speak different languages.

  More than twenty-six dialects of Quichua are spoken in Ecuador.

  Native speakers of Japanese learn Spanish more easily than English. Native speakers of English learn Spanis
h more easily than Japanese.

  Polish is the only word in the English language that, when capitalized, is changed from a noun or a verb to a nationality.

  Rio de Janeiro translates to River of January.

  The correct response to the Irish greeting “Top of the morning to you” is, “And the rest of the day to yourself.”

  The D in D-day stands for “day.” The French term for D-day is J-jour.

  The Kentucky Fried Chicken slogan “Finger-lickin’ good” came out as “Eat your fingers off” in Chinese.

  The three best-known western names in China are Jesus Christ, Richard Nixon, and Elvis Presley.

  The stress in Hungarian words always falls on the first syllable.

  No Spanish words begin with the letter W (except for those of American-English origin).

  The Eskimo language has more than twenty words to describe different kinds of snow.

  WAS IT AT CHUCK E. CHEESE?

  The earliest document in Latin in a woman’s handwriting is an invitation to a birthday party from the first century C.E.

  SPECIAL OCCASIONS

  World Tourist Day is observed on September 27.

  October 10 is National Metric Day.

  November 19 is Have a Bad Day Day.

  November 29 is National Sinky Day, a day to eat over one’s sink and worship it.

  COMMON THREADS

  The most common name for a goldfish is Jaws.

  The most common name in Italy is Mario Rossi.

  The most common name in the world is Mohammed.

  The most common Spanish surname is Garcia.

  The most common Russian surname is Ivanov.

  The most common Swedish surname is Johansson.

  The most common name for a boat in 1996 was Serenity.

  ON THE MENU

  WATER WORLD

  Drinking water after eating reduces the acid in your mouth by 61 percent.

  Forty-eight million people in the United States receive their drinking water from private or household wells.

  In the typical Canadian home, 45 percent of water is used for the toilet, 28 percent is used for bathing and personal matters, 23 percent is used for laundry or dishes, and 4 percent is used for cooking or drinking purposes.

  It’s impossible to get water out of a rimless tire.

  Less than 2 percent of the water on Earth is fresh.

  A tea in China called white tea is simply boiled water.

  THE HOUSE THAT RONALD BUILT

  Ray Kroc bought McDonald’s for $2.7 million in 1961 from the McDonald brothers.

  Seven percent of Americans eat McDonald’s every day.

  Four hundred quarter-pounders can be made out of one cow.

  A man named Ed Peterson is the inventor of the Egg McMuffin.

  The big M on McDonald’s signs in Paris is the only one in the world that is white, rather than yellow; it was thought that yellow was too tacky.

  McDonald’s in New Zealand serves apricot pies instead of cherry ones.

  The McDonald’s at The Skydome in Toronto is the only one in the world that sells hot dogs.

  On average, there are 178 sesame seeds on each McDonald’s Big Mac bun.

  SODA OR POP?

  Carbonated water, with nothing else in it, can dissolve limestone, talc, and many other low-Mohs hardness minerals. Coincidentally, carbonated water is the main ingredient in soda pop.

  The citrus soda 7-Up was created in 1929; “7” was selected because the original containers were seven ounces. “Up” indicated the direction of the bubbles.

  Fanta Orange is the third largest selling soft drink in the world.

  Coca-Cola was first served at Jacob’s Pharmacy in Atlanta in 1886 for only five cents a glass. The formula for Coca-Cola was created by pharmacist John Pemberton. Only two people in the world know the secret recipe for Coca-Cola.

  Earl Dean developed the bottle design for Coca-Cola.

  Coca-Cola was originally green.

  A can of Diet Coke will float in water, while a can of regular Coke sinks.

  Coca-Cola owns the world’s second largest truck fleet.

  Coke is used to clean up blood spills on highways.

  Diet Coke was only invented in 1983.

  Pepsi originally contained pepsin, hence the name.

  The first western consumer product sold in the former Soviet Union was Pepsi Cola.

  In 1989, Pepsi came out with a morning soft drink called Pepsi AM. It didn’t last long on the market.

  Pepsi is commonly used by wooden boat owners to clean mold from decks. You can spill it on for about thirty seconds, but it needs to be rinsed to be sure it does not erode the decks completely.

  HOLD YOUR LIQUOR

  A full 7 percent of the entire Irish barley crop goes to the production of Guinness beer.

  Beer foam will go down if you lick your finger and then stick it in the beer.

  Researchers in Denmark found that beer tastes best when drunk to the accompaniment of a certain musical tone. The optimal frequency is different for each beer, they reported. The correct harmonious tone for Carlsberg lager, for example, is 510 to 520 cycles per second.

  Widows of a recently deceased king among the Baganda people of Uganda have the honor of drinking the beer in which the king’s entrails have been cleaned.

  The Bloody Mary is known as the “Queen of Drinks” and was invented in Harry’s Bar in Paris in the 1930s.

  If you put a raisin in a glass of champagne, it will keep floating to the top and sinking to the bottom.

  The first man to distill bourbon whiskey was a Baptist preacher in 1789.

  Wine will spoil if exposed to light, hence the tinted bottles.

  Lab tests can detect traces of alcohol in urine six to twelve hours after a person has stopped drinking.

  In medieval England, beer was often served with breakfast.

  Vikings used the skulls of their enemies as drinking vessels.

  CRACKING SOME NUTS

  Almonds are a member of the peach family. They are the oldest, most widely cultivated and extensively used nuts in the world.

  Peanuts are cholesterol-free. They are one of the ingredients of dynamite.

  George Washington Carver invented peanut butter. It takes more than five hundred peanuts to make one twelve-ounce jar of peanut butter.

  Australian chemist John Macadamia discovered the macadamia nut.

  The only real food U.S. astronauts are allowed in space are pecan nuts.

  In the summer, walnuts get a tan.

  EAT YOUR VEGGIES

  Vegetarians make up 4 percent of the U.S. population.

  Ninety percent of the vitamin C in brussels sprouts is lost in cooking.

  You use more calories eating celery than there are in celery itself.

  Eggplant is a member of the thistle family.

  Eating raw onions is good for unblocking a stuffed nose.

  Onions are low in calories and a good source of vitamin C, calcium, potassium, and fiber. They also help circulation.

  Onions get their distinctive smell by soaking up sulfur from the soil.

  The oldest known vegetable is the pea.

  The most popular sweet pepper is the bell pepper.

  The heat of peppers is rated on the Scoville scale.

  The color of a chili is no indication of its spiciness, but size usually is—the smaller the pepper, the hotter it is.

  Pumpkins contain vitamin A and potassium.

  Turnips turn green when sunburned.

  TUTTI FRUITY

  Pomology is the study of fruit.

  Tomatoes and cucumbers are fruits.

  Apples, not caffeine, are more efficient for waking you up in the morning.

  Fresh apples float because 25 percent of their volume is air.

  The avocado has the most calories of any fruit.

  The most widely eaten fruit in America is the banana.

  The average banana weighs 126 grams.

  Approximately seve
nteen thousand bananas are eaten each week in the Boston University dining room.

  Bananas do not grow on trees but on rhizomes.

  Cranberries are sorted for ripeness by bouncing them; a fully ripened cranberry can be dribbled like a basketball.

  Cranberry jelly is the only jelly flavor that comes from the real fruit, not artificial flavoring.

  A cucumber consists of 96 percent water.

  Grapes explode when you put them in the microwave.

  Lemons contain more sugar than strawberries.

  Seeds are missing from a navel orange. The bigger the navel, the sweeter the orange.

  In Ivrea, Italy, thousands of citizens celebrate the beginning of Lent by throwing oranges at one another.

  Orange juice helps the body absorb iron easily when consumed with a meal.

  The most common pear worldwide is the Bartlett. It is bell shaped, sweet, and soft, with a light green color.

  More than a third of all pineapples come from Hawaii.