I love information. I love facts.
I am a store of useless information. I was recently reading a book called Word
Drops: A Sparkling of Linguistic Curiosities by Paul Anthony Jones and came
across some interesting facts that I never knew and I thought would share them
on my blog of all other fact enthusiasts. You never know it may help you at
your next table quiz!
- Spas are named after the Belgian town of Spa
- Duffel Coats are named after the Belgian town of Duffel
- Netherlands means ‘lower lands’
- Holland means ‘Woodland’
- Turkey in Turkish is Hindi which means Indian – because they thought the bird had come from India).
- Turkey in Portuguese is Peru - was named this because at the same time Turkey’s began appearing was also the time Peru had been conquered by Pizarro who was from Brazil.
- Ever wondered where J.K Rowling got the name of Dumbledore from for her character of Albus Dumbledore – well a Dumbledore is an old name for Bumblebee and Rowling choose that name in allusion to the professor’s love of music as she imagined him walking around humming to himself ‘like a bumblebee’
- There is no Q in the names of any states of the USA
- Word is the 487th commonest word in the English Language while Time is the commonest noun
- Four has four letters. It is the only self-describing number in the English Language
- Teddy Bears were named after US President Theodore Roosevelt
- A group of Buffalo is called an obstinacy
- A group of Polar Bears is called an aurora
- A group of Mockingbirds is called an echo
- Individual letters of the alphabet were once called bookstaves
- Eleven percent of the entire English language is just the letter E
- K is the least frequently used letter of the alphabet Spanish and Italian
- Alcove, Cotton, Ghoul, Algebra, Mascara, Zero and Coffee all derive from Arabic
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