Coffee Over Tea in the United States
It seems odd on that surface that in the United States, with its cultural roots in England, coffee is preferred over tea. This was not always the case, and perhaps is also no longer as distinctly the case as it …
Category: Fun Fact of the Day
It is Now Time to “Pull out all the Stops!”- The Cool Story Behind a Common Phrase.
When we say we are going to “pull out all the stops,” we are saying we are going to go to the greatest degree we can to make the thing we are doing the most impressive we can make it. …
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Historian mini-rant: NAPOLEON DID NOT HAVE A NAPOLEON COMPLEX!
I was reading a respected news site today and they had an article talking about a correlation between height and heart disease. The article’s headline was “Short People More Prone to Heart Disease” The image that accompanied the article was …
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Fun Fact of the Day: The Neat Story Behind the Word “Sheriff”
As should be pretty clear, I love the history of words and the stories they tell. I think it is amazing that a history can be gleaned from an assortment of letters that created a word. In the Middle Ages, …
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Why is Easter called Easter?
The etymology of Christmas is not that hard to see. It is the Christ-Mass. That works. Easter is etymologically weird. The fact that Easter, ostensibly celebrating the resurrection of the Christ, is associated with bunnies and eggs is weirder. As is …
April Fools’ Day! Why?
Where did April Fools’ Day come from? In a previous post I spoke about how January was added to the calendar because of the Romans, and how the new year moved from March (coinciding with the coming of spring) to …
Happy Maryland Day! …9 Months till Christmas…
My Father, A Marylander through and through, sent the following email to the family this morning. He gave me his permission to put it in the blog. Just for some extra context, my father grew up on a farm …
Fun Fact St. Patrick’s Day Edition:
St. Patrick’s Day was never really a huge deal in Ireland. It was Irish immigrants in New York, forming the St. Patrick’s Day Parade in order to celebrate Irish pride, that caused the day to become the popular day it …
Christmas Fun Fact of the Day: Humbug!
At the office today we got into a discussion about the Grinch, which got me thinking about the original Christmas Grinch, Ebenezer Scrooge. In Charles Dickens’ Christmas classic, “A Christmas Carol,” Scrooge dismisses the idea of Christmas with his classic line “Bah, humbug!” …
Fun Fact of the Day: Weird Quirk of English Language History: The Animal vs. What we Eat
Why is it that the bird is a “Chicken” but we eat “Poultry?” The animal is a “Cow,” but we eat “Beef?” The animal is a “Pig” but we eat “Pork?” The answer is…the Norman Invasion of 1066! Prior to …
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