The Internet Archive has more than 8500 MS-DOS games online, and they’re playable in nearly any browser. Prepare to travel back in time to when you were just a kid with a clunky computer, and kiss your free time goodbye.
Within moments of firing up this classic game—which was created by a history teacher and his two roommates in the 1970s and based on a real journey undertaken by 400,000 settlers—it’s likely that one of your companions will die, another will come down with dysentery, you’ll try (and fail) to ford a river, then lose hundreds of pounds of food in a wagon fire. Life on the trail has not gotten easier since elementary school.
In this sequel to Life & Death (which focused on the abdominal region), you’re studying to be a brain surgeon—going to class, examining patients, and performing tests to diagnose them (where you’ll learn a very valuable lesson: Never send someone with a pacemaker to get an MRI). Then, if the diagnoses warrant it, you’ll get the chance to crack open a few skulls in the operating room. A doctor who reviewed the game gave it high marks.
This first-person shooter is pretty tough, even on the easiest level (“Can I Play, Daddy?”). The game features Allied spy B.J. Blazkowicz, who is captured by Nazis but manages to escape, and then has to face challenges (and plenty of Nazis) on every floor of Castle Wolfenstein. If you haven’t played this since you were young, it’s going to take a lot of practice to get to the final level and face Hitler in his mech suit.
In this Pac-Man-esque game based on the hit ’80s sitcom, players must collect four cats, two spaceship parts, and a key from each level, depositing everything in a garage, while also trying to avoid Willie Tanner and the dog catcher. They also have to eat pizza, which makes ALF strong enough to catch the cats (who have hidden the spaceship parts). All four levels have to be completed before the clock reaches 24 hours. The cats are very fast, and ALF—who is just a disembodied head—is pretty slow, making this a tough game to win.
Inspired by The Oregon Trail, this game featured many of the same elements: Choosing guides, managing supplies, and navigation. But its premise was a bit more magical. A black jaguar, sent by the Inca king, visits the main character in a dream, explaining that the Inca are sick with a fever and hiding from conquistadors in a secret city. The mission: Travel back in time and explore the Amazon and its tributaries; find a certain plant and deliver it to the Inca king.
Lovers of the 1990 movie who are also terrible at video games will appreciate this simple game, which incorporates a number of elements from the film. Players join the ranks of Delbert McClintock’s exterminating company and go from home to home using spray and bug bombs to kill the poisonous spiders, which either stalk on the ground, use web to hover in the air, or leap through the air at you. Three bites and you’re dead—which leads to the video game interpretation of a death scene from the movie that fans will definitely recognize.
In this game, players help twin kid crimesolvers, Jake and Jennifer Eagle of the Eagle Eye Detective Agency, investigate mysteries while they’re on holiday in London. The mysteries focus on English history, geography, and literature.
Kids who were obsessed with the Inspector Gadget cartoon and longed to be as cool as Penny will love this game, where they control Gadget’s niece (and dog Brain!) to help the clueless cyborg detective rescue UN members kidnapped by Dr. Claw—but first, they have to rescue Gadget himself.
The goal of this classic game is to track and apprehend Carmen’s henchmen, who are stealing priceless artifacts—and, eventually, capture the lady herself. Now, enjoy Rockapella singing the theme to the Carmen Sandiego game show.
In this game, you’re an ant running a simulated colony in a suburban backyard, building burrows, fighting humans and red ants, and trying to spread through the backyard and even into the house, driving out all of your enemies. The game’s creator, Will Wright—who created SimCity, The Sims, and among other games—based SimAnt on biologist E.O. Wilson’s The Ants.
If you’re in the habit of looking down at your feet as you walk, you may have noticed that most manholes, and their covers, are round. Or perhaps you’ve been in a job interview where your prospective employer asked this question (which apparently happens enough that it was included in the third edition of The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Job Interviews).
Whoever is asking likely wants to know about your ability to think on your feet, and isn’t so much interested in the correct answer, but it is a good question. Of all of the potential shapes for manholes, why was a circle chosen?
There are a number of reasons, according to Larry Scheckel in his book Ask A Science Teacher: 250 Answers to Questions You’ve Always Had About How Everyday Stuff Really Works. Manholes are round because “it is the best shape to resist the compression of Earth around it.” Round shapes are easier to manufacture than square or rectangular shapes, and because manhole covers are heavy, being round makes them easier to move from place to place (just roll them!). As an added benefit, workers don’t need to line up the covers with any angles, making round covers easy to slip into place.
But perhaps the biggest reason that manhole covers are round is all about safety: Round covers can’t fall through a circular opening. “For all manholes, there is a ‘lip’ around the rim of the hole, holding up the cover, which means that the underlying hole is smaller than the cover,” Scheckel writes. “A round manhole cover can’t fall through its circular opening, because no matter how you position it, the cover is wider than the hole. But a square, rectangular, or oval manhole cover could fall in if it was inserted diagonally into the hole,” which would be bad news for unobservant pedestrians and drivers alike.
A version of this story ran in 2015; it has been updated for 2023.
This New Year’s Eve, crowds will gather in Times Square to watch the iconic ball drop at midnight on December 31. The 11,875-pound sphere, decked out with 2688 crystal triangles, 32,256 lights, and its own Twitter account, is the centerpiece of a Times Square New Year’s Eve tradition that’s been going on for more than a century. But before the champagne starts flowing and the countdown kicks off to a proverbial clean slate, let’s take a look back at the history of this annual celebration.
Street View of Broadway at 46th Street, Times Square / George Rinhart/GettyImages
In 1904, construction was completed on a 25-story skyscraper on the triangle of land created by the intersections of 42nd Street, 43rd Street, 7th Avenue, and Broadway. It was to be the new headquarters of The New York Times. That same year, the city had plans to open the first set of underground subway lines with 28 different stations. Grand Central Station was also located on 42nd Street, and a number of stations followed Broadway’s route through the city. It was, supposedly, an attempt to avoid nominal confusion regarding the station at the base of the Times’s tower that first led to the suggestion that the city should change the name of the surrounding area from “Longacre Square” to “Times Square.”
Reports differ as to whether the idea to rename the relatively underutilized collection of intersections originally came from Adolph S. Ochs, the publisher of the Times from 1896 to 1935, or from August Belmont Jr., president of the Interborough Rapid Transit Company. Regardless of who first thought to apply the paper’s name from the building to the geography, in early April, the city’s Board of Aldermen approved a resolution and, on April 8, 1904, the signature of Mayor George B. McClellan made it official. The next morning, a headline on page two of the Times read, “Times Square Is the Name of City’s New Centre.”
View of Times Square in the early 20th century / George Rinhart/GettyImages
As 1904 drew to a close, Ochs wanted to celebrate the paper’s impending move in January to their recently completed Times Tower, officially bearing the address of One Times Square. In prior years, the city had celebrated New Year’s Eve at Trinity Church in downtown Manhattan, where the ringing of bells marked the change in the calendar. But sparing no expense, Ochs officially launched a new tradition with an opulent celebration, to the delight of 200,000 attendees. Fanciulli’s Concert Band, a group of featured performers who played at the St. Louis World’s Fair earlier in the year, provided the soundtrack to the final moments of 1904. The Times touted its own publicity stunt the next morning in an article with a colorful headline that proclaimed: “BIG NEW YEAR FETE AT TIMES SQUARE: Mammoth Crowd Centres There for Celebration.”
“As the old year died and 1905 was born the news flared out from the tower of the Times Building to the north and to the south, in giant figures which took on all the colors of the rainbow and bore the tidings to thousands who waited and watched over many miles of territory,” the article read. The rainbow came in the form of fireworks that transformed the building into “a torch to usher in the new born, funeral pyre for the old.”
Times Square waits for the new millennium in 1999 / Brent Stirton/GettyImages
New York rang in the new year with fireworks as 1905 turned into 1906, and again as 1906 turned into 1907. But then, in 1907, the city banned the fireworks display for safety reasons, and Ochs had to find a different means to signify the city’s annual rebirth. In a January 1, 1908 article, the Times first described what would become the event’s signature tradition: “At ten minutes to midnight the whistles on every boiler in Manhattan, the Bronx, Brooklyn and the waters thereof began to screech. Tens of thousands stood watching the electric ball and then—it fell.”
The new ceremony was chosen to mimic the ball drop at the Royal Observatory in Greenwich, England, which has signaled 1 p.m. for Londoners and ship captains on the Thames since 1833. There, the object of focus is a simple bright red ball. But for Times Square, Ochs commissioned something a little more elaborate: a behemoth 700-pound wood-and-iron creation, five feet in diameter and illuminated by 100 25-watt bulbs. It was built by Russian immigrant Jacob Starr while he worked for Benjamin Strauss in a family-owned sign making company, Strauss Signs. Strauss and Starr later formed Artkraft Strauss, which produced the ball drop through 1996.
A practice blackout in Times Square during World War II / Hulton Deutsch/GettyImages
The ball drop in Times Square on New Year’s Eve has been a remarkably consistent tradition since that first voyage on the precipice of 1908—with two notable exceptions. The New York Times noted the melancholy of the event’s first absence: “New Year’s Eve in Times Square had a weird quality last night … There was a note of sluggishness, an absence of real gayety. The restless thousands lacked zest. War somehow laid its hand on the celebration and tended to mute it. At midnight, the crowd watched in vain for the glowing white ball to slide down the flag staff atop the New York Times tower.”
That was the story on January 1, 1943, after a wartime dim-out on lights replaced the glowing orb and a respectful moment of silence hung heavy in place of cheers or jubilation. A similar story the following year noted another New Year’s Eve darkened by the war.
New Year’s Eve ball in Times Square / Anadolu Agency/GettyImages
The iconic symbol has seen several upgrades through the past century-plus. In 1920, an entirely wrought-iron version lopped 300 pounds off the original weight. Aluminum got the heft down to roughly 200 pounds in 1955. The same aluminum construction got a makeover in the early 1980s, when red lights and a green stem turned the classic orb into a Big Apple in accordance with the “I <3 NY” campaign. A short-lived white ball sat at the center of the ceremony from 1987 through 1998, during which time computer controls replaced manual labor. Waterford Crystal designed the Millennium Ball for the 2000 ceremony, which has undergone aesthetic adjustments each year since.
As for One Times Square, the original raison d’etre of the whole shebang? The New York Times outgrew the building in 1913, and these days, apart from a Walgreens on the first floor, the skyscraper is more valuable as a supportive structure for Times Square’s famous LED signs and billboards. But it remains the focus of the nation’s gaze every New Year’s Eve.
A version of this article was published in 2014; it has been updated for 2022.
The animal kingdom is filled with a vast collection of wonderful creatures—maybe too many for any hopeful zoologist to commit to memory. But doing so would be much easier if so many species didn’t have such misleading names. With dolphins masquerading as whales, lizards as toads, and marsupials as bears, it can be tough to keep track of which animals are which. Here’s a rundown of some of the worst offenders in the taxonomical misnomer game.
A sleeping binturong (‘Arctictis binturong’), also known as the bearcat. / Marcos del Mazo/GettyImages
Officially known as the binturong, this scruffy treetop resident has no relation to the bear and only the most distant connection to cats; its closest living relatives are fellow branch-dwelling mammals like the civet and the genet. Its genus name, Arctictis,translates to “bear weasel,” which is also inaccurate.
The electric eel isn’t an eel at all. / Mark Newman/The Image Bank/Getty Images
Though this animal isn’t an eel at all, it has gained a monopoly on our connotations with the word. In fact, the electric eel is a type of knifefish (the common term for the order Gymnotiformes), and only earned its name due to the snakelike appearance it shares with eels. Unlike true eels, the electric eel breathes air, lays its eggs in fresh (not ocean) water, and has no teeth or dorsal fin.
A red panda (‘Ailurus fulgens’) resting in a branch. / Marcos del Mazo/GettyImages
There’s a reason that the bronze-furred, bushy-tailed, catlike red panda looks almost nothing like its much larger black-and-white namesake: They’re not even related. The Himalayan omnivore occupies its own family (Ailuridae), and its closest relatives are weasels, raccoons, and skunks.
Surprisingly, these auburn fluff balls didn’t swipe the panda name from the grayscale bears of China. The red panda got the moniker—which is believed to derive from the second part of the Nepali term Nigálya-pónya—first, following its original classification in the 1800s. It wasn’t until early in the 20th century that the giant panda, newly (and incorrectly) assumed to be a relative of the former, borrowed the handle, and has kept a tight hold on it ever since.
A King Cobra (‘Ophiophagus hannah’). / Matt Cardy/GettyImages
Although it may boast etymological authority over the cobra species, the so-called king cobra is actually a different type of snake: It’s the only snake in the genus Ophiophagus (true cobras belong to the genus Naja) and probably got its name because its main food source is other snakes. A king cobra is marked by a much narrower hood than true cobras; other differences include body size, color, scale makeup (especially around the face), diet, reproductive patterns, habitat, and venom content and toxicity.
A mountain goat (‘Oreamnos americanus’). / Wolfgang Kaehler/GettyImages
This North American native is close enough in relation to the common goat to forgive this particular infraction. But all true goats, wild and domesticated, belong to the genus Capra, whereas the so-called mountain goat is the sole species belonging to the genus Oreamnos.
An orca (‘Orcinus orca’) hunting. / Alexis Rosenfeld/GettyImages
Known both as the killer whale and the blackfish, Orcinus orca is actually a dolphin (and the world’s largest dolphin at that). They reportedly came by the former moniker because sailors of yesteryear saw them hunting and killing large whales.
This feisty animal—which is native to parts of Africa and Asia and is properly known as a ratel—might look superficially like a badger, but it belongs to a different subfamily, Mellivorinae, of which it’s the only living species.Its genus name and common name come from its love of honey.
A peacock mantis shrimp (‘Odontodactylus scyllarus’). / Paul Starosta/Stone/Getty Images
These sea dwellers aren’t shrimp or mantises. They occupy a unique order of marine crustacean, Stomatopoda. Characteristics that distinguish the mantis shrimp from other crustaceans include a 50-mph punch and an incredibly complex optical structure, allowing for a more sophisticated comprehension of color than any other known animal.
Don’t call them “buffalo.” / Danny Lehman/The Image Bank/Getty Images
There’s no such thing as an American buffalo, as the furry beast that roamed the frontier of our very own Old West was actually a bison. Buffalo in the genera Syncerus and Bos hail naturally from Central and Southern Africa and the Indian subcontinent, and are marked by much larger horns and leaner bodies than the American bison.
Let’s get the real disappointment out of the way first. Flying lemurs can’t fly; much like the flying squirrel, they glide and swoop. And though they’re closely related to primates, the animal—which is also known as a colugo—isn’t a lemur, either: It’s a completely separate creature occupying its own order (Dermoptera) and family (Cynocephalidae) with two extant species living in southeast Asia.
Maned wolf (‘Chrysocyon brachyurus’). / Joe McDonald/The Image Bank/Getty Images
Genetic sequencing has shown that this South American canine isn’t a wolf, and though it looks like a tall fox, it isn’t one of those, either. In fact, it has its own genus, Chrysocyon, which translates to “golden dog.” It’s a separate category from the genera Canis (including wolves, coyotes, and dogs) and Vulpes (true foxes),
Horned toad. / Fotosearch/Getty Images
These desert denizens aren’t toads, or even frogs—they’re actually 14 species of lizards covered in sharp horns, spines, and scales. The reptiles do have the flat face and stout body you’d more likely find on a toad than a lizard, and its genus name translates to “toad body,” which could explain its confused nomenclature.
This is not a bear. / Lisa Maree Williams/GettyImages
Many people are well aware that Australia’s sleepy, eucalyptus-chomping marsupial is not a bear—in fact, just about the only thing the two creatures have in common is that they’re both mammals. The koala is the only extant animal in the family Phascolarctidae (the name translates to “pouched bear”), and its fellow Aussie the wombat is its closest living relative.
One of the only creatures whose name is even more zoologically inaccurate than the koala bear’s is the jellyfish, which isn’t even in the same phylum (and that’s as far back as you can go without leaving the animal kingdom) as the fish. Despite being one of an impressive 10,000 sea creatures living under the Cnidaria phylum, the pesky beach stinger is still branded with the all-purpose, ever-oppressive fish label. And it’s not the only one.
Other creatures wrongly called fish are starfish and cuttlefish, each one a member of a phylum (Echinodermata and Mullosca, respectively) distinct from fish.
Taxonomically speaking, fish are actually more closely related to humans than they are to either jellyfish or starfish—fish and humans both belong to the phylum Chordata, along with all other mammals, birds, reptiles, and amphibians … but not jellyfish, starfish, or cuttlefish.
The mother of misnomers is this frog that goes by the name chicken. The endangered amphibian—which is officially known as the giant ditch frog (Leptodactylus fallax)—was once abundant across several Caribbean islands but now can only be found on Dominica. There are a few theories as to how the frog came by its common name: According to one, it was often eaten by locals and was said to taste like chicken; others relate to its size (it can weigh up to 2 pounds) or its vocalizations, which kind of sound like a chicken squawking.
A version of this story ran in 2014; it has been updated for 2023.
As these musicians can attest, conspiracy theories aren’t just reserved for UFOs.
Conspiracy theorists believe that Jay-Z is a member of a secret society called the Illuminati that has the ability to control world affairs. The proof, conspiracy theorists say, is in the rapper’s “diamond cutter” hand symbol, which is believed to be connected to the Illuminati’s All-Seeing Eye and Pyramid symbols. Conspiracy theorists believe that Jay-Z also has the power of mind control and time travel. In 2013, a curator at the New York Public Library unearthed a Sid Grossman photograph from 1939 that depicts two men, one of which looks very similar to the Brooklyn-born rap superstar.
Other recording artists that are believed to be members in the Illuminati are Beyoncé, Rihanna, Kesha, David Bowie, and Lana Del Rey.
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Some people believe that Michael Jackson’s accidental drug overdose was not an accident at all, but rather the Iranian government’s well-orchestrated attempt to divert Western media coverage of the Iranian Revolution in June 2009. Iranians protested and disputed presidential elections after Mahmoud Ahmadinejad was reelected president. Although the Iranian government tried to block news coverage, the people took to social media to get the word out about the revolution. But in the United States, most news outlets were covering Michael Jackson’s death.
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According to conspiracy theorists, Mark David Chapman was just a pawn in John Lennon’s assassination. The real mastermind of the ex-Beatles’ death was the C.I.A. According to the theory, the organization recruited Chapman to kill Lennon because the C.I.A. was secretly surveying the recording artist for his anti-American and anti-capitalist political views and pacifism.
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In 1999, British writer and sports broadcaster David Icke published a book called The Biggest Secret that details his belief that a majority of the world’s political leaders and celebrities are actually a race of reptilian aliens called the Babylonian Brotherhood. They are from the constellation Draco and have the ability to shapeshift into human form and control all of humanity. The internet, naturally, loved Icke’s theory. Kris Kristofferson is reportedly one of these shapeshifters; other members of the Babylonian Brotherhood include Barack Obama, George W. Bush, Bill Clinton, Queen Elizabeth II, and Pope Francis.
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Apparently, the Andrew W.K. that we know today is not the same Andrew W.K. depicted on the record I Get Wet from 2001. In fact, Andrew W.K. grew a beard to hide his true identity, which may or may not be a person known as Steev Mike, who is believed to be a corporate amalgam that created the persona Andrew W.K. and is credited as Executive Producer on I Get Wet.
As the conspiracy theory goes, there were many people who played the role of Andrew W.K. in the past and there will be others in the future.
The conspiracy theory goes like this: Beyoncé didn’t want to gain weight while she was pregnant, so she hired a surrogate to carry her daughter Blue Ivy Carter to term. The pop star announced her pregnancy by rubbing her baby bump at the tail end of her performance during the MTV Video Music Awards in 2011. However, a week before her performance on MTV, Beyoncé performed a concert and many believe that she showed no visible signs of a pregnancy. The conspiracy theory also stemmed from an interview with Beyoncé soon after after the MTV VMAs when her belly seemed to fold as she began to sit down, and rumors suggested that she was wearing a prosthetic pregnancy belly. The singer denied that she used a surrogate, and footage that aired during the On the Run tour that shows her naked baby bump seems to have proven conspiracy theorists wrong.
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According to conspiracy theorists, in 1991, record label CEOs and very wealthy “decision makers” met behind closed doors to invent and actively push Gangster Rap onto the American public. The goal, allegedly, was to promote selling drugs and street violence through music to fill privately-owned corporate prisons. An anonymous letter sent to HipHopIsRead.com detailed a music industry insider’s part in this conspiracy theory.
The idea that Pink Floyd’s Dark Side of the Moonperfectly syncs up with The Wizard of Oz is probably one of the most well-known and popular conspiracy theories among the general public. Supposedly, if you start playing the record at a certain point in The Wizard of Oz, then Pink Floyd’s music will be in step with the visuals of the Hollywood classic. “The result is astonishing,” Charles Savage wrote in the Fort Wayne Journal Gazette in 1995. “It’s as if the movie were one long art-film music video for the album. Song lyrics and titles match the action and plot. The music swells and falls with character’s movements. Don’t expect to be overwhelmed. But do expect to see enough firm coincidences to make you wonder whether the whole thing was planned. And expect to see many more coincidences that would be definite reaches if it weren’t for other parts lining up so well.”
The reality is The Wizard of Oz is roughly 112 minutes, while Dark Side of the Moon is about 43 minutes long, so you’d have to play the record around two and a half times to get the audio to perfectly sync with the picture.
“It’s such a non-starter, a complete load of eyewash,” Alan Parsons, Pink Floyd’s audio engineer, told Rolling Stone in 2003. “I tried it for the first time about two years ago. One of my fiancée’s kids had a copy of the video, and I thought I had to see what it was all about. I was very disappointed. One of the things any audio professional will tell you is that the scope for the drift between the video and the record is enormous; it could be anything up to twenty seconds by the time the record’s finished. And anyway, if you play any record with the sound turned down on the TV, you will find things that work.”
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Many believe that Elvis Presley is alive and well, and living in Graceland in Memphis, Tennessee today. According to conspiracy theorists, Elvis faked his death in 1977 because he was tired of being famous. There are a few “clues” that point to Elvis still being alive: His middle name is misspelled on his gravestone; multiple sightings (such as allegedly being an extra in Home Alone and seen with Muhammad Ali in 1984); and his life insurance was never cashed or claimed. Of course, this is all myth and speculation.
Elvis isn’t the only deceased musician that conspiracy theorists believe faked his death; it’s also believed that rapper Tupac Shakur is still alive.
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It has been rumored since 1967 that Paul McCartney died in a car accident and was replaced with a lookalike. Conspiracy theorists point to two records from the Beatles that “confirm” McCartney’s death. Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band is believed to be McCartney’s burial record: The cover features a hand above McCartney’s head, which indicates being blessed and given Last Rites; on the record’s inside jacket, he’s facing backwards, while the rest of the band is facing the viewer. Abbey Road, conspiracy theorists say, is his funeral procession album; it features McCartney barefoot, which symbolizes Paul being out-of-step with his “living” bandmates.
Rumors of McCartney’s death were so prevalent that he had to explain his whereabouts to LIFE magazine in 1969. “Perhaps the rumour started because I haven’t been much in the press lately,” he said. “I have done enough press for a lifetime, and I don’t have anything to say these days. I am happy to be with my family and I will work when I work. I was switched on for 10 years and I never switched off. Now I am switching off whenever I can. I would rather be a little less famous these days.”
Parts of the northeastern United States are looking at a ginormous amount of snowfall just before Thanksgiving—particularly western New York, which could see “multiple feet” of lake-effect snow. You might be vaguely familiar with the mountains of drift this effect produces, but what really causes it?
As you probably guessed, you need a lake to experience lake-effect snow. The primary factor in creating lake-effect snow is a temperature difference between the lake and the air above it. Because water has a high specific heat, it warms and cools much more slowly than the air around it. All summer, the sun heats the lake, which stays warm deep into autumn. When air temperatures dip, we get the necessary temperature difference for lake-effect snow.
As the cool air passes over the lake, moisture from the water evaporates and the air directly above the surface heats up. This warm, wet air rises and condenses, quickly forming heavy clouds. The rate of change in temperature as you move up through the air is known as the “lapse rate”; the greater the lapse rate, the more unstable a system is—and the more prone it is to create weather events.
Encountering the shore only exacerbates the situation. Increased friction causes the wind to slow down and clouds to “pile up” while hills and variable topography push air up even more dramatically, causing more cooling and more condensation.
The other major factors that determine the particulars of a lake-effect snowstorm are the orientation of the wind and the specific lake. Winds blowing along the length of a lake create greater “fetch,” the area of water over which the wind blows, and thus more extreme storms. The constraints of the lake itself create stark boundaries between heavy snow and just a few flurries and literal walls of snow that advance onto the shore. The southern and eastern shores of the Great Lakes are considered “snow belts” because, with winds prevailing from the northwest, these areas tend to get hit the hardest.
A version of this story ran in 2014; it has been updated for 2022.
November 11, 2022 marks the 100th anniversary of the birth of Slaughterhouse-Five author Kurt Vonnegut, who died in 2007 at the age of 84. But the words of the free-thinking, veteran skeptic, humanist humorist live on. So it goes.
1. “I was taught that the human brain was the crowning glory of evolution so far, but I think it’s a very poor scheme for survival.” — As quoted in The Observer, 1987
2. “A purpose of human life, no matter who is controlling it, is to love whoever is around to be loved.” — From The Sirens of Titan
3. “It strikes me as gruesome and comical that in our culture we have an expectation that man can always solve his problems … This is so untrue that it makes me want to cry—or laugh.” — From Conversations With Kurt Vonnegut
4. “We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful about what we pretend to be.” — From Mother Night
5. “Maturity is a bitter disappointment for which no remedy exists, unless laughter can be said to remedy anything.” — From Cat’s Cradle
6. “Why were so many Americans treated by their government as though their lives were as disposable as facial tissues? Because that was the way authors customarily treated bit-part players in their made-up tales.” — From Breakfast of Champions
7. “I don’t know about you, but I practice a disorganized religion. I belong to an unholy disorder. We call ourselves ‘Our Lady of Perpetual Astonishment.’“ — From “Worship”
8. “All persons, living and dead, are purely coincidental.” — From Timequake
9. “I think it can be tremendously refreshing if a creator of literature has something on his mind other than the history of literature so far. Literature should not disappear up its own asshole, so to speak.” — From a “self-interview“ in The Paris Review
10. “There is no reason why good cannot triumph as often as evil. The triumph of anything is a matter of organization. If there are such things as angels, I hope that they are organized along the lines of the Mafia.” — From The Sirens of Titan
11. “One of the few good things about modern times: If you die horribly on television, you will not have died in vain. You will have entertained us.” — From “Cold Turkey,” In These Times
A version of this story ran in 2014; it has been updated for 2022.
In the animal kingdom, the order Carnivora has two suborders. Caniformia, which means “dog-like,” includes dogs, of course, but also bears, skunks, raccoons, seals, and walruses. Feliformia, meaning “cat-like,” includes cats in the family Felidae as well as non-cats in other families. Here are a few you may not be familiar with.
The fossa (Cryptoprocta ferox) is the largest carnivore in Madagascar, where they eat lemurs and other small animals. As a female fossa matures, she goes through a stage of “masculinization,” in which her genitals elongate and resemble a spiny penis. Fossas are considered a vulnerable species and are protected in reserves, but are still hunted and eaten in some communities. Because they are widespread and claim a large individual territory, it is hard to get meaningful numbers on their population. Some consider them vermin due to their tendency to prey on chickens and small livestock.
The falanouc (Eupleres goudotii) also lives in Madagascar and belongs to the same family as the fossa, but resembles a mongoose more than its cousin. Its teeth are different from most of its taxonomically close relatives because the falanouc eats mainly insects and earthworms.
There are more than a dozen species of civet in Africa and Asia belonging to several genera. What they have in common is their anal musk glands, which they use to mark territory and attract mates. Civets look like cats with the elongated bodies of otters or weasels. The African civet (Civettictis civetta) is the most common species and the one from which chemists traditionally obtain musk for use in perfumes—though synthetic Civetone is used more frequently today. African civets are found in the savannah, forests, and rainforests of Africa. They have masked face markings like a raccoon.
The name mongoose refers to 29 species in the family Herpestidae, which live in southern Europe, southern Asia, and in Africa. They are famous for their ability to fight snakes. The mongoose has receptors for acetylcholine that reject the neurotoxins in snake venom, much like snakes themselves have. Therefore, they are immune to snake venom. Another distinctive trait is the mongoose’s horizontal pupils, which give them a wider field of vision in front and behind them. This pupil shape occurs more frequently among grazing animals.
There are four species of linsang: two in Africa, and two in Asia. The Asiatic linsang (genus Prionodon) comes in two flavors: banded (P. linsang) or spotted (P. pardicolor). That describes their body markings; both have long striped tails. The banded linsang resembles a weasel or ferret, with a longer tail and more catlike teeth, and lives in the rainforest canopies of Southeast Asia.
The binturong (Arctictis binturong), also called the bearcat, is found in Southeast Asia. It looks and moves like a small round bear, and is a distant relative to genets, palm civets, and linsangs. Despite belonging to the order Carnivora, the binturong eats mostly fruit. They will also eat meat, eggs, fish, and insects when the opportunity arises. Binturongs spend most of their time in trees, which is made easier by their ankles, which can turn 180 degrees, and their prehensile tails, which can grip like a fifth limb.
A European or common genet. / Rainer Mueller/imageBROKER/Getty Images
The European genet (Genetta genetta) is often mistaken for a cat, although it is more closely related to the mongoose. A couple dozen species range throughout Africa and Europe. In 2014, a camera trap caught a genet hitching a ride on a buffalo and a rhinoceros in South Africa. It was determined that it was the same genet, and it had made a habit of riding other animals on different occasions.
We all know meerkats (Suricata suricatta) for their charming habit of scanning the horizon for danger as if they were posing for the camera, and because of a Disney character named Timon. Meerkats are mongooses in the family Herpestidae. What sets them apart is their tendency to live in clans of 20 to 50 animals, and that habit of standing on their back feet in order to see across the African plains. Meerkats are social and loyal to the group, often babysitting and even nursing each other’s young.
A version of this story was published in 2014; it has been updated for 2024.
You’ve heard of Ernest Shackleton, Lawrence of Arabia, and Lewis and Clark. But do you know the incredible accomplishments of Gertrude Bell, Osa Johnson, or Valentina Tereshkova? In the pantheon of female explorers, there are heiresses, socialites, rebels, and gender transgressors. But the one thing they share beyond their sex is an intrepid spirit that thirsts for adventure.
A portrait of explorer Gertrude Bell. / Hulton Archive/Getty Images
A contemporary and colleague of T.E. Lawrence (a.k.a. the inspiration for Lawrence of Arabia), Gertrude Bell was a writer and archaeologist who traveled all around the Middle East, Asia, and Europe. Her books gave the people of Great Britain a clear concept of the empire’s outer territories and are still studied today.
An Oxford graduate who was fluent in Persian and Arabic, she met Lawrence while working in the Arab Bureau in Cairo during World War I. She’s best known for her contribution to the Conference in Cairo in 1921, where the beginnings of Iraq as a nation were forged. She’d later pioneer the school of thought that relics and antiquities should be preserved in their home nations. The National Museum of Iraq was born from her efforts.
Journalist Nellie Bly two years before embarking on her round-the-world journey. / Apic/Getty Images
American journalist Nellie Bly (a.k.a. Elizabeth Jane Cochrane) is best known for her world-changing exposé (for which she went undercover) to reveal the abuse at the Women’s Lunatic Asylum on Blackwell’s Island in New York City. But on November 14, 1889, Bly took on a new challenge for Joseph Pulitzer’s paper, The New York World.
Inspired by Jules Verne’s novel Around the World in 80 Days, Bly set out to beat the fictional globetrotting record. Traveling in ships, trains, and rickshaws, on horseback and on mules, Bly made her way from England to France, Singapore to Japan, and California back to the East Coast. And she did all this in 72 days. Well, 72 days, six hours, 11 minutes and 14 seconds to be precise. Naturally, Bly’s bold endeavor made for a series of thrilling news stories, as well as a memoir—Around the World in Seventy-Two Days.
British traveler and writer Isabella Bird, circa 1885. / Hulton Archive/Getty Images
A prolific author and fearless traveler, Isabella Bird thwarted social convention and her often-poor health by traveling about the world at will, and frequently alone. “The English Bird” wrote her first book after coming to the United States in 1854. From there, she traveled to Australia and then Hawaii, where she trekked up an active volcano. She also explored the Rocky Mountains in Colorado before traveling to Japan, China, Indonesia, Morocco, and the Middle East. Her journeys resulted in books like The Lady’s Life in the Rocky Mountains, Unbeaten Tracks in Japan, and The Yangtze Valley and Beyond. For her incredible contributions, Bird was inducted into the Royal Geographical Society of London in 1892. She was the first woman ever to earn the honor.
Traveling with her husband William Hunter Workman, M.D., this American mountaineer broke a string of women’s altitude records while becoming a noted geographer, cartographer, and travel writer. The Workmans both came from wealth, enabling them to go on extravagant and arduous trips, like bicycle rides through Spain and India and treks up the Himalayas.
An enthusiastic self-promoter, Workman earned a reputation for riling her rivals. But her dedication to detailing her accomplishments with precise measurements and thorough documentation meant she could back up her boasts. Fanny was a compelling orator who became the first American woman to lecture at the Sorbonne in Paris, and the second female explorer ever allowed to address—and later join—the Royal Geographical Society of London.
Imagined portrait of Jeanne Baré dressed as a sailor. / Wikimedia Commons // Public Domain
A French sailor and botanist in the 1700s, Jeanne Baré was the first woman to circumnavigate the world. However, she did it disguised as a man, a ruse that kept her close to her love, Philibert de Commerson. The two met over a shared passion for botany. First she was the teacher to the widowed man’s children, then his assistant, and then his partner.
When Commerson scored a commission from the French government to sail the world and conduct research, the couple conspired to hide Baré’s gender by dressing her as a man, “Jean.” It worked for more than a year, but when the crew hit the South Pacific, some islanders uncovered the truth, though particulars on how vary. When Baré returned to France, the Navy paid tribute to “this extraordinary woman” and her work of gathering new species of plants by giving her a pension of 200 livres a year.
An American railroad heiress born in 1864, Aimée Crocker was famous for her lavish parties and long list of lovers and husbands. She was a frequent subject of society gossip and a proud friend of Oscar Wilde. But when the public attention became too much, Crocker took off on a tour of the Far East.
On route, she detoured to Hawaii, where she met King Kalākaua, who—according to her memoir And I’d Do It Again—was so enchanted with her that he gave her an island and the title Princess Palaikalani (which is said to translate to “Bliss of Heaven”). Crocker’s book offers a slew of other outrageous encounters, including run-ins with headhunters in Borneo, a would-be murderer in Shanghai, and a sultry boa constrictor in India. After 10 years abroad, Crocker returned with wild tales, tattoos, a devotion to Buddhism, and a whole new allure for the high society of America.
Though barred from the Royal Geographical Society of London because of her gender, this Austrian globe-trekker took to traveling once her children were grown, and frequently journeyed alone. Knowing the risk, she penned up her will before heading off on her first trip to the Holy Land. From there, she trekked to Istanbul, Jerusalem, and Giza, visiting the pyramids on camelback. On her return trip, she detoured through Italy.
From these travels, Pfieffer published her first book in 1846. Its success funded her next exploration to Iceland and Scandinavia, which in turn became the subject of her next book. More trips were made to Brazil, China, India, Iraq, Borneo, and Indonesia. Her works would be translated into seven languages and earn her spots in the geographical societies of Berlin and Paris.
Sacagawea was an important member of the Corps of Discovery (shown here in a fanciful illustration). / Edgar Samuel Paxson, Wikimedia Commons // Public domain
Most of the credit for the Lewis and Clark expedition traditionally goes to its namesakes Meriwether Lewis and William Clark (and Thomas Jefferson), but this teenager proved to be a crucial member of the Corps of Discovery. A member of the Lemhi Shoshone, she and her trader husband Toussaint Charbonneau met Lewis and Clark while the explorers were staying with the Mandan and Hidatsa communities in present-day North Dakota.
When Lewis hired Charbonneau as an interpreter, Sacagawea and their newborn son Jean Baptiste joined the expedition. She also served as an interpreter when the party reached southern Montana, where she grew up. With her help, the newly acquired territories of the West were explored and mapped, a crucial step in maintaining the United States’ claim to them.
The traveler and filmmaker Osa Johnson. / George Eastman House, Wikimedia Commons // Public domain
Born Osa Helen Leighty, this American explorer met her match in travel photographer Martin Johnson. The pair married May 15, 1910, and by 1917 they began traveling the globe together, making films to document their journeys. Their documentaries boasted such provocative (and what modern viewers would consider culturally insensitive) titles as Among the Cannibals of the South Pacific,Jungle Adventures, Headhunters of the South Seas, and Wonders of the Congo.
They worked as a team. Martin shot pictures and film, while Osa hunted for food and when necessary defended her husband with her rifle. This was the case when a rhino in the wild charged the pair. Osa brought it down, while Martin captured the entire encounter with his camera. The Johnsons promoted their films with lecture tours, and in 1940 Osa released her best-selling memoir, I Married Adventure. The Johnsons’ films and photos can be seen in Disney’s Animal Lodge and at the Martin and Osa Johnson Safari Museum in their home state of Kansas.
Isabelle Eberhardt dressed as a French sailor. / Louis David, Wikimedia Commons // Public Domain
Born in 1877 in Geneva to a Prussian aristocrat and an ex-priest-turned-anarchist, Isabelle Eberhardt was fated to defy convention. She took to wearing men’s clothes at an early age; by the time she turned 20 she had converted to Islam. When she later began traveling alone through North Africa in the 1890s, she presented herself as a Muslim man named Si Mahmoud Saadi.
Eberhardt only lived to be 27; her life was cut short by a flash flood in a desert in 1904. In her brief life she participated in revolts against French colonialism, wrote travel essays for French magazines, survived an assassination attempt that nearly severed her arm, and smoke, drank, and had sex whenever and with whomever she liked.
This Polish sea captain and shipbuilding engineer earned the title of “first lady of the oceans” when she became the first woman to sail solo around the world. On February 28, 1976, Chojnowska-Liskiewicz departed the Canary Islands on her ship Mazurek, built in Poland with its construction led by her husband. Her route took her through the Caribbean and the Panama Canal to the Pacific Ocean. From there, Chojnowska-Liskiewicz steered across the Indian Ocean and then around Africa.
She returned to the Canary Islands on April 21, 1978, having traversed 31,166 nautical miles in 401 days. That meant more than a year with only herself as company and crew, preparing all her meals, maintaining the boat, and facing potential threats like storms, rough seas, and even pirates alone. She said of her solo voyage, “Grown people should be aware that sometimes in life is lonely. But during the trip I was not plagued by loneliness. I was not lonely, but alone. There’s a difference.”
Amelia Earhart in front of her biplane ‘Friendship’ in Newfoundland. / Getty Images News
American aviator Amelia Earhart is best known for becoming the first female pilot to fly solo across the Atlantic Ocean. Her interest in aviation was sparked as a young woman when she attended a stunt-flying exhibition. A natural tomboy, she wasn’t deterred by social pressure that suggested a cockpit was no place for a woman. She took her first flying lesson on January 3, 1921, and bought her own plane six months later.
The following year she’d break the woman’s world altitude record, reaching 14,000 feet. A slew of other accomplishments followed, including speed records and solo flights. Earhart urged other women to fly by writing pieces about aviation for Cosmopolitan magazine and helped found The Ninety-Nines: International Organization of Women Pilots. It was while attempting to set a record for flying around the world that Earhart and her plane went missing. Some evidence suggests she crash-landed on an uninhabited island and lived out the rest of her days there.
Annie Londonderry pictured on a cabinet card. / Towne Portrait Studio, Wikimedia Commons // Public Domain
Born Annie Cohen in Latvia , she married in the U.S. and became Annie Kopchovsky. But this mother of three’s ambitions as an athlete, entrepreneur, and explorer urged her to create a new name for herself: Annie Londonderry, the first woman to circle the globe on a bicycle. A bet was made that challenged her to circumnavigate the world in under 15 months while earning at least $5000 along the way. What might seem a silly wager became a way to challenge the concept of female propriety as well as a chance for her to show just how a woman might get on in the world on her own.
Departing from her husband and children on June 25, 1894, Londonderry set off from the Massachusetts State House in Boston with a crowd of 500 looking on. Along her route she sold promotional photos of herself and made paid appearances. She leased out advertising space on her clothes and bicycle, among these a billboard for Londonderry Lithia Spring Water. Once her ride was complete, The New York World called her adventure “the most extraordinary journey ever undertaken by a woman.”
Charming and witty, Lady Stanhope was an admired socialite in English high society. But after a string of messy romances, she left England forever at the age of 33, and went on to become a biblical archaeologist. She journeyed to Greece, Turkey, France, and Germany.
En route to Egypt, Stanhope discarded her feminine and European attire for menswear, a look that would prove her signature the rest of her days. She traversed Israel, Lebanon, and Syria. Later, she’d tell tales of how she so impressed the Bedouin tribes that they named her “queen of the desert,” successor to Zenobia. But her greatest success came in 1815, when she convinced Ottoman authorities to allow her to excavate the ruins of Ashkelon. Stanhope went looking for gold, but instead found a 7-foot headless marble statue—which she ordered smashed to bits.
Valentina Tereshkova, the first woman to travel into space, at the Science Museum in London, England. / Leon Neal/Getty Images News
Leaving Earth exploration behind, we move to on to the first woman in space, Russian cosmonaut Valentina Tereshkova. She flew the Vostok 6 mission, which launched on June 16, 1963. But her path to space was paved with tragedy. Her family suffered personally and financially when her father died in World War II. Tereshkova was only able to attend school from ages 8 to 16.
While working at factories, she continued her education through correspondence courses. Though she had no piloting experience, Tereshkova was accepted into the Soviet space program because she’d done 126 parachute jumps, an essential skill in a cosmonaut’s descent to Earth. After much training, she was chosen to pilot Vostok 6, and logged 70 hours in space, making 48 orbits around Earth. Her work earned her the title of hero of the Soviet Union, as well as the Order of Lenin and the Gold Star Medal.
A version of this list ran in 2014; it has been updated for 2023.
Victorian and turn-of-the-century ghost stories have a particular attraction: They need no contrivances to create places that are lonely and old, a place where bad things are kept hushed up instead of dealt with. From the first line, you’re put in a world with no electricity to banish darkness and no 911 to call if the darkness becomes more than you can handle.
Rudyard Kipling. / George Rinhart/GettyImages
In 1888’s “The Phantom ’Rickshaw,” Jack Pansay has a torrid affair with the married Mrs. Wessington. Quickly, his passion dies, his “fire of straw burnt itself out to a pitiful end,” and he tries to free himself of her. But even when he brutally tells her he can’t stand her, she refuses to believe they can’t live happily ever after. He makes plans to marry another woman, and Mrs. Wessington becomes so distraught that she dies, as Victorians who have been spurned are wont to do. Jack is very happy she’s dead. But he keeps seeing her private rickshaw around town—and then he sees her. Mrs. Wessington still has love left to give, whether Jack wants it or not.
According to Kipling biographer Andrew Lycett, the author put a fair amount of himself into the tale. Pansay, for example, begins by saying that his doctor told him he needed rest and fresh air; this, Lycett writes, “clearly referred to Rudyard’s physical and mental condition” when he spent time in Simla (now Shimla), India. Lycett also says that Pansay’s hallucinations are drawn from Kipling’s thoughts about a woman he couldn’t get off his mind: Florence Garrard, who broke up with him while he was in India, causing Kipling to throw himself into his work (something else he had in common with Pansay). The experience inspired Kipling’s first novel, The Light That Failed.
Mrs. Margaret Oliphant. / Culture Club/GettyImages
Scottish novelist Margaret Oliphant was a prolific writer; after publishing her first novel in 1849, she went on to pen everything from travelogues to historical fiction to literary criticism—and a few ghost stories, too. In “The Open Door,” published in the early 1880s, the young son of the narrator begins raving about an unbearable noise he hears at night outside their Victorian country mansion. Everyone thinks the boy is going mad—except his father, who believes his boy is neither crazy nor lying. At night, he too hears the noise, the most soul-wrenching piteous crying he’s ever heard. It’s coming from the abandoned ruins of the old servant’s quarters. It isn’t easy to recruit friends and servants to track down the source of the horrible noise, but if he’s to save his son from “brain-fever,” he must uncover the secret of the abandoned cottage. Oliphant dedicated the story to the mother of her publisher, William Blackwood III; the Blackwood family home served as inspiration for the home in “The Open Door.”
The 1846 story “The Cold Hand”—wherein an overnight guest is tormented in his bed by the specter of, well, a cold hand—is the first story in a different sort of ghost story collection. The compilation of tales in Ghost Stories: Collected with a Particular View to Counteract the Vulgar Belief in Ghosts and Apparitions are intended to disprove the existence of ghosts. Its compiler, Felix Octavius Carr Darley, does so by presenting mystery stories for which the most exciting solution is “ghost,” but in actuality is something easily explained. These tales have less style than Sherlock Holmes stories, but the same idea of illuminating the impossible so that whatever remains must be the truth.
Mrs. Elizabeth Gaskell. / Culture Club/GettyImages
Elizabeth Gaskell—well known enough in her day to simply go by “Mrs. Gaskell”—could spin a mean ghost story. Charles Dickens thought so, anyway. He mentored her and published her often in his journal Household Words. “The Old Nurse’s Story” from 1852 features a sweet little orphan girl, Rosamund, that the Old Nurse devoted her own youth to caring for. She accompanies the child when she becomes a ward of elderly relatives, and takes up residence in a grand but lonely mansion. Life is settling nicely for the nurse and her sweet charge … until a tiny ghost-child begins banging on the windows, leading little Rosamund up into freezing hills behind the estate. It seems the sins of the elderly relatives are demanding atonement in the form of the youngest member of the family.
Saki was the pen name of Scottish writer Hector Hugo Munro, who specialized in wit and satire. “The Open Window,” published in 1914, is a quick dive into the style that made him popular. It concerns a man who has gone to the countryside to deal with his many minor ailments, particularly his nerves. While there he visits friends of a relative, mostly to have someone to talk to about his many afflictions. It is on one of these visits he learns of the tragedy that took place out on the bogs, a desperate widow’s delusion, and how formidable teenage girls can be.
Arthur Machen. / E. O. Hoppe/GettyImages
“The Bowmen” by Welsh author Arthur Machen (a.k.a. Arthur Llewellyn Jones) is probably the most stout-hearted ghost story ever written. In the story, the English soldiers of WWI are outnumbered by thousands of Germans at a key piece of ground. They know all is lost, and accept it with good cheer. All except one soldier, who remembers his Latin, Adsit Anglis Sanctus Georgius: “May St. George be a present help to the English.” The story was published in a 1914 issue of The Evening News and was hugely popular, but in an introduction to the story published in 1915, Machen wrote, “I was heartily disappointed with it, I remember, and thought it—as I still think it—an indifferent piece of work.” You can form your own opinion by reading it here.
A version of this story ran in 2014; it has been updated for 2023.
Many people may never encounter a moose in the wild, but for some, they’re part of everyday life. Michelle Carstensen, wildlife health group leader for the Minnesota Department of Natural Resources, gave us the scoop on these furry giants.
A moose in autumn. / stevewestland/iStock via Getty Images
Moose are the largest members of the deer family, weighing as much as 1200 pounds; they can grow to be 5 to 6.5 feet from hooves to shoulders. This does not include a raised head or antlers, so it’s safe to say that the majority of moose tower over all non-basketball players.
A moose chomps on wildflowers. / RichardSeeley/iStock via Getty Images
With huge size comes a huge appetite. Moose are browsers and will casually devour 73 pounds of food a day in the summer and 34 pounds in the winter. They eat an assortment of shrubs, woody plants, and aquatic vegetation; in the winter, their diet is more restricted, so they’ll eat the buds of plants as well.
A wolf pack surrounds a moose carcass in the snow. / Film Studio Aves/iStock via Getty Images
Moose are formidable opponents with sharp hooves that can kick with tremendous force, but even they have predators. A pack of wolves or a black bear is no match for a healthy adult moose, so bears and wolves typically pick off the young, sick, or old. And even though moose are powerful and quite large, a single bite can do one in: There’s a good chance the bite from a predator will cause an infection that eventually kills the animal up to two weeks later.
Moose also have a much smaller menace to worry about: parasites. Brain worm (Parelaphostrongylus tenuis) is a parasite contracted from eating snails. The infectious larvae migrate to the moose’s brain and cause neurological damage. “It’s interesting thinking of something as big as a human hair killing a 1200 pound moose, but they do,” Carstensen told Mental Floss in 2014.
Another tiny nuisance is the winter tick. Tick infestations depend on the weather and habitat: Harsh winters mean fewer ticks the following year. When ticks fall off animals to complete their cycle and there’s still snow on the ground, they die. So hard, long winters are great news for moose.
Antlers come in handy in combat. / aviking/iStock via Getty Images
When fighting off predators, the antlers, or paddles, don’t come into play as much as you would think; a moose’s first line of defense is its sharp hooves, which are capable of mortally wounding a wolf or bear.
Paddles are found only on males, and used mainly for fighting and displaying. During mating season in autumn, bulls will cover a lot of ground looking for females to mate with. They establish breeding territory by fighting off other males in the area. The fights are not always fight-to-the-death scenarios, and often a competing moose will back away from a fight if the challenger has a more impressive rack of antlers. Great paddles are not the only way to find mates; some males with better navigational skills—or just sheer luck—may come across a female by chance and completely skip antler combat.
Moose lose their paddles every winter and grow new ones the following spring. “Antler growth is based on testosterone levels and day length,” Carstensen said. “So they start to grow those antlers in the late spring and summer, and they’re covered in velvet. The velvet is vascularized so there is a blood flow supplying these antlers as they’re growing.” By early fall—a.k.a. mating season—bulls start to shed and shine their paddles by rubbing them against trees. Their fuzzy velvet-covered antlers go through a gory transformation, and by October they will have shiny new paddles for competition and display.
Antlers are also a great indicator of age. With each winter, young moose paddles grow in size: nubs become spikes and spikes become full racks. Bulls in their prime, between ages 5 and 8, have the largest racks. With old age, the antlers become more deformed and less impressive.
An antlerless moose takes a swim. / wilpunt/iStock via Getty Images
Just like the moose themselves, antlers can come in different sizes. The paddles are essentially a big bone, so they generally weigh quite a bit; bulls develop muscular necks to help hold up the enormous paddles. A full grown moose’s antlers can weigh about 40 pounds.
A moose mom and calf. / visionsofmaine/iStock via Getty Images
Female moose, or cows, generally have one or two calves in May. On average, the calves weigh about 30 pounds at birth and grow very quickly. Baby moose don’t have the skills to run or protect themselves very well, so the mother stays with her offspring for a year and a half, fighting off wolves and bears that try to pick off the young.
A moose with velvet-covered antlers in a pond. / Kyslynskyy/iStock via Getty Images
Moose are naturally gifted swimmers. It’s common to see one hop right into a lake and swim across at up to 6 mph. The animals have an innate ability to know how to swim, so even calves can do it.
An Alaskan moose scans the horizon. / photoak/iStock vua Getty Images
Moose, whose scientific name is Alces alces, can be categorized into four subspecies in North America: the eastern moose (A. alces americana), the Shiras moose (A. alces shirasi), the Alaskan moose (A. alces gigas), and the northwestern moose (A. alces andersoni), which Carstensen works with in Minnesota. Moose subspecies can be distinguished by their different sizes and antler shapes. The largest moose is the Alaskan moose (pictured above) that can stand more than 6 feet tall with an antler span of 6 feet.
A moose in winter. / karlumbriaco/iStock via Getty Images
Northern Minnesota once had a flourishing moose population. In the mid-1980s, there were 2000 of the animals in the state’s northwest, but that number dropped to fewer than 200 in just two decades. The northeastern herds are now facing similar a problem; the moose population there has dropped 50 percent since the mid-2000s.
In 2013, Carstensen began leading a moose mortality study to solve the mystery. Her team collared more than 170 moose with GPS trackers to keep tabs on them; when a moose died, the team received an email and text with the animal’s location. “The goal [was] to get there within 24 hours to determine the cause of death,” Carstensen said. “[That was important] because moose are a very large animal and they have very thick skin, a very insulating coat, and when they do die, they decompose very rapidly. Being able to get to an animal in 24 hours gives us the best diagnostic level samples that we can collect and help us determine cause of death.”
The data suggested that two unpleasant factors were contributing to most of the moose mortality. Parasite and bacterial infections accounted for 50 percent of the deaths, while predation by wolves accounted for another 30 percent, and accidents, legal hunting, and other events made up the rest [PDF]. Research into this ecological puzzle continues.
A version of this story was published in 2014; it has been updated for 2024.
Trick-or-treating, Jack-O‘-Lanterns, and creepy costumes are some of the best traditions of Halloween. Share these sweet facts with friends as you sort through your candy haul.
Squirrels also appreciate the tradition. / Joe Raedle/GettyImages
Jack-O’-Lanterns, which originated in Ireland using turnips instead of pumpkins, are supposedly based on a legend about a man name Stingy Jack who repeatedly trapped the Devil and only let him go on the condition that Jack would never go to Hell. When he died, however, Jack learned that Heaven didn’t really want his soul either, so he was condemned to wander the Earth as a ghost for all eternity. The Devil gave Jack a lump of burning coal in a carved-out turnip to light his way. Eventually, locals began carving frightening faces into their own gourds to scare off evil spirits.
Boo! / Heritage Images/GettyImages
Celtic people believed that during the festival Samhain, which marked the transition to the new year at the end of the harvest and beginning of the winter, spirits walked the Earth. Later, the introduction of All Souls Day on November 2 by Christian missionaries perpetuated the idea of a mingling between the living and the dead around the same time of year.
Halloween means gore galore. / Anadolu Agency/GettyImages
With all these ghosts wandering around the Earth during Samhain, the Celts had to get creative to avoid being terrorized by evil spirits. To fake out the ghosts, people would don disguises so they would be mistaken for spirits themselves and left alone.
A modern Samhain celebration. / Dave Etheridge-Barnes/GettyImages
There is a lot of debate around the origins of trick-or-treating. One theory proposes that during Samhain, Celtic people would leave out food to placate the souls and ghosts and spirits traveling the Earth that night. Eventually, people began dressing up as these otherworldly beings in exchange for similar offerings of food and drink.
Other researchers speculate that the candy bonanza stems from the Scottish practice of guising, itself a secular version of souling. In the Middle Ages, soulers, usually children and poor adults, would go to local homes and collect food or money in return for prayers said for the dead on All Souls’ Day. Guisers ditched the prayers in favor of non-religious performances like jokes, songs, or other “tricks.”
Some sources argue that our modern trick-or-treating stems from belsnickling, a tradition in German-American communities where children would dress in costume and then call on their neighbors to see if the adults could guess the identities of the disguised guests. In one version of the practice, the children were rewarded with food or other treats if no one could identify them.
Black cats are not evil. / Heritage Images/GettyImages
The association of black cats and spookiness actually dates all the way back to the Middle Ages, when these dark kitties were considered a symbol of the Devil. It didn’t help the felines’ reputations when, centuries later, accused witches were often found to have cats as companions. People started believing that the cats were a witch’s “familiar”—animals that gave them an assist with their dark magic—and the two have been linked ever since.
Children bobbing for apples, circa 1935 / brandstaetter images/GettyImages
This game traces its origins to a courting ritual that was part of a Roman festival honoring Pomona, the goddess of agriculture and abundance. Multiple variations existed, but the gist was that young men and women would be able to foretell their future relationships based on the game. When the Romans conquered the British Isles, the Pomona festival was blended with the similarly timed Samhain, a precursor to Halloween.
Black cats and orange pumpkins fit the theme. / Dave Kotinsky/GettyImages
The classic Halloween colors can also trace their origins back to the Celtic festival Samhain. Black represented the “death” of summer while orange is emblematic of the autumn harvest season.
As a phenomenon that often varies by region, the pre-Halloween tradition, also known as “Devil’s Night,” is credited with a different origin depending on whom you ask. Some sources say that pranks were originally part of May Day celebrations. But Samhain, and eventually All Souls Day, seem to have included good-natured mischief. When Scottish and Irish immigrants came to America, they brought along the tradition of celebrating Mischief Night as part of Halloween, which was great for candy-fueled pranksters.
Just make sure you don’t leave the fires unattended. / Matt Cardy/GettyImages
These days, candles are more likely than towering traditional bonfires, but for much of the early history of Halloween, open flames were integral in lighting the way for souls seeking the afterlife.
Delicious! / John Greim/GettyImages
People have been coating fruit in sugar syrups as a means of preservation for centuries. Since the development of the Roman festival of Pomona, the goddess often represented by and associated with apples, the fruit has had a place in harvest celebrations. But the first mention of candy and caramel apples being given out at Halloween didn’t occur until the 1950s.
Bats, like black cats, are not actually evil. / Fototeca Storica Nazionale./GettyImages
It’s likely that bats were present at the earliest celebrations of proto-Halloween, not just symbolically but literally. As part of Samhain, the Celts lit large bonfires, which attracted insects. The insects, in turn, attracted bats, which soon became associated with the festival. Medieval folklore expanded upon the spooky connotation of bats with a number of superstitions built around the idea that bats were the harbingers of death.
The ingredients for a sugary Halloween feast. / Scott Olson/GettyImages
The act of going door-to-door for handouts has long been a part of Halloween celebrations. But until the middle of the 20th century, the “treats” kids received were not necessarily candy. Toys, coins, fruit, and nuts were just as likely to be given out. The rise in the popularity of trick-or-treating in the 1950s inspired candy companies to make a marketing push with small, individually wrapped confections. People obliged out of convenience, but candy didn’t dominate at the exclusion of all other treats until parents started fearing anything unwrapped in the 1970s.
Candy corn is the most divisive Halloween candy. / Vivien Killilea/GettyImages
According to some stories, a candymaker at the Wunderlee Candy Company in Philadelphia invented the revolutionary tri-color candy in the 1880s. The treats didn’t become a widespread phenomenon until another company brought the candy to the masses in 1898. At the time, candy corn was called “Chicken Feed” and sold in boxes with the slogan “Something worth crowing for.” Originally just autumnal candy because of corn’s association with harvest time, candy corn became Halloween-specific when trick-or-treating rose to prominence in the U.S. in the 1950s.
A version of this story originally ran in 2014; it has been updated for 2023.
Chances are, anyone taking a trip out west to a national park like Grand Teton or Yellowstone will see plenty of bison dotting the plains. Or are they buffalo? Is there a difference between the two?
“In North America, the names are used interchangeably for the species Bison bison,” Ross MacPhee, Curator Emeritus in Department of Mammalogy at the American Museum of Natural History, told Mental Floss in 2014.
But though both bison and buffalo are bovids, or members of the cattle family, there are some definite differences between them. “Elsewhere—in non-English-speaking Europe, for example—a bison is the European Bison, Bison bonasus, a species very closely related to B. bison,” MacPhee said. “A buffalo is either a Cape Buffalo Syncerus (Africa), or Water Buffalo Bubalus (South Asia), neither of which are closely related to either kind of bison.”
So if you’re yearning for a home where the buffalo roam, you’d better move to another continent.
A bison in Badlands National Park, South Dakota. Note its short horns and large hump. / Eastcott Momatiuk/DigitalVision Vectors/Getty Images
To tell the difference between a buffalo and a bison, “just look at the horns,” MacPhee said. “[Bison’s] are like typical cow horns; in buffalo, they are relatively huge, sweeping arcs.” Bison also have a large shoulder hump.
Water Buffalo (‘Bubalus bubalis’), Kaziranga National Park, Assam, India. / James Warwick/The Image Bank/Getty Images
Telling the difference between the two species of bison is slightly tougher. “An average male European bison has less hair, especially in the cape, or mane,” MacPhee explained. ”Allegedly there is a difference in the angulation of the horns, but I don’t see it, or it’s too variable to be useful.”
No buffalo have ever lived in North America, according to MacPhee, so how come we call bison by that name? According to the National Park Service, when early explorers came to North America—at which point there may have been as many as 60 million bison on the continent—they thought the animals resembled old world buffalo, and so they called them that. According to the Online Etymology Dictionary, the word comes from the Portuguese bufalo, or “water buffalo,” from the Latin word bufalus, a variant of bubalus, which meant ”wild ox.” (Though some apparently believe that the buffalo came into English from the French word for “beef,” boeuf.) The Lakota word for bison is tatanka.
Bison came very close to extinction. In 1883, there were approximately 40 million of the animals in North America; by the 1900s, hunting had reduced the population to under 1000 animals. The bison you see in the National Parks today were bred from just a few individuals from the Bronx Zoo and Yellowstone. As of 2022, according to the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, “there are approximately 20,500 Plains bison in conservation herds and an additional 420,000 in commercial herds. While bison are no longer threatened with extinction, the species faces other challenges. The loss of genetic diversity, combined with the loss of natural selection forces, threatens the ecological restoration of bison as wildlife. A low level of cattle gene introgression is prevalent in most, if not all, bison herds.”
A version of this story ran in 2014; it has been updated for 2023.
In the Northern Hemisphere, the autumnal equinox—the point after which the nights become longer than the days, as the North Pole tilts away from the sun—falls on September 23, 2023. Though Labor Day is seen as the end of summer, the autumnal equinox officially kicks off fall.
The darkening days and chilly weather are a bit melancholy, but that doesn’t stop people from celebrating. Here are six ways people honor the autumnal equinox around the world.
Picking apples is a great way to honor the fall equinox. / SOPA Images/GettyImages
In pagan mythology, the equinox is called Mabon, or Second Harvest. It’s a time to give thanks for the summer and to pay tribute to the coming darkness. It is also a time to prepare for Samhain (October 31–November 1), the larger Celtic festival that inspired Halloween. Some rituals for Mabon include building an altar with harvest fruits and vegetables, meditating on balance, gathering and feasting on apples, offering apples to the goddess, sharing food, and counting one’s blessings.
Autumn cemetery visits don’t have to be spooky. / Colors Hunter – Chasseur de Couleurs/Moment/Getty Images
Japan marks the equinoxes—both of them—with a period called “Ohigan” (sometimes spelled O-higan). The Japanese Buddhist belief is that the land of the afterlife is due west, and during the equinoxes, the sun sets directly west. The equinoxes are also symbolic of the transitions of life. Ohigan is therefore a time to visit the graves of one’s ancestors. People spruce up the grave sites and leave flowers for the dead. It is also a time of meditation and to visit living relatives.
Delicious! / twomeows/Moment/Getty Images
China and Vietnam celebrate the Moon Festival, or Mid-Autumn Festival, which is on the full moon nearest the equinox. On a lunar calendar, it’s the 15th day of the eighth lunar month. Parts of the celebrations include gazing at the moon and eating moon cakes; in the southern United States, Moon Pies are often used in place of moon cakes. A similar holiday in Korea is called “Chuseok.”
Or you could just eat nuts. / Anadolu Agency/GettyImages
Michaelmas is the Catholic feast of the Archangel Michael. Some traditions use this feast day to celebrate other archangels—Michael, Gabriel, Uriel, and Raphael—as the Feast of the Angels. The feast day is September 29; it’s thought the feast was set near the autumn equinox as a Christian version of previous pagan celebrations. In England, it was a time of transitions, as servants were paid their wages after the harvest, and workers scrambled to find new employment contracts. The employment fairs that facilitated this custom became an opportunity for community celebration.
Traditions include gathering and eating nuts (which began on Holy Rood Day on September 14), and eating a fattened goose, if you could afford that luxury.
The autumnal equinox at Stonehenge, 2017. / Matt Cardy/Stringer/Getty Images
Neo-Druids and other pagans gather at Stonehenge to watch the sunrise on the autumnal equinox. This happens every year, both in spring and fall. The equinoxes, as well as the solstices, are the few times the public can get up-close-and-personal with the stones.
A shadowy serpent appears at Chichen Itza on the equinoxes. / ATSZ56, Wikimedia Commons // Public Domain
According to legend, a feathered serpent deity named Kukulcan visits the Maya city of Chichen Itza every equinox. On both the vernal and autumnal equinox, crowds gather to watch as a snake-like shadow slides down the god’s namesake pyramid.
A version of this story was originally published in 2014; it has been updated for 2023.
Here are 15 larger-than-life fun facts to help you celebrate William Howard Taft—born 157 years ago yesterday—and his plus-sized legacy.
Between the Lincoln and Taft administrations, all but two commanders-in-chief boasted some sort of face fuzz. But since our 27th president left the White House in 1913, clean-shaven candidates have monopolized the job.
His son, Robert (also known as “Mr. Republican”), became one of the twentieth century’s most influential senators; his grandson—William Howard Taft IV—went on to tackle various executive duties for Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush.
Pauline Wayne was quite the bovine beauty. A gift from Wisconsin Senator Isaac Stephenson, this purebred cow produced roughly eight gallons of daily milk for the first family. Sensing a crowd-pleaser, the 1911 International Dairymen’s Exposition arranged to transport her all the way from D.C. to Milwaukee—but Pauline’s train car wound up getting lost en route. After some frenzied telegraphing, the President’s cow was discovered two days later in a Chicago stockyard, where she just barely avoided getting slaughtered.
Though he’s best remembered for his one-term stint on Pennsylvania Avenue, Taft had been pining for the Judicial Branch since 1889. Upon becoming Chief Justice in 1921, he happily declared “I don’t remember that I was ever president.”
Hall of Famer Walter Johnson managed to snag a low-flying ball Taft gracelessly lobbed from the stands at the start of a 1910 Washington Senators game. One hundred and four years later, this opening day tradition’s still going strong.
It’s hard to demean someone whose spouse is sitting right in front of you. After her husband won the Republican presidential nomination, First Lady Helen Herron “Nellie” Taft made a beeline for the Democratic National Convention in Baltimore. Grabbing a front-row seat, she stared down orator after orator, including the cantankerous William Jennings Bryan of Nebraska, who suddenly decided to soften his anti-Taft rhetoric.
For the record, Nellie called him “Sleeping Beauty” due to Taft’s bad habit of dozing off at parties (more on that later).
As Chief Justice, he administered the oath of office to fellow conservatives Calvin Coolidge and Herbert Hoover.
Taft covered courthouse news for The Cincinnati Commercial while making ends meet as a law student. However, after becoming president, his attitude towards journalists cooled considerably.
“I can truthfully say that I never felt any younger in all my life,” Taft announced, having given up bread, potatoes, pork, and liquor. “Too much flesh is bad for any man.”
Ever been to a “Build-An-Opossum” workshop? Neither have we. Worried that America’s Teddy Bear mania would evaporate after Roosevelt’s last term, toy manufacturers started producing stuffed “Billy Possums”—named in president-elect Taft’s honor—en masse. Needless to say, these things didn’t last long.
“Most of the time,” admitted Indiana Senator James Watson, “[Taft] simply did not and could not function in alert fashion… Often while I was talking to him after a meal, his head would fall over on his breast and he would go sound asleep for 10 or 15 minutes. He would waken and resume the conversation, only to repeat the performance in the course of half an hour or so.” President Taft was also seen snoozing at operas, funerals, and—especially—church services.
The government’s Judicial Branch didn’t always convene in the majestic building we know today. Before 1935, the Supreme Court issued its rulings from various rooms inside the Capitol. Chief Justice Taft changed all that, successfully lobbying Congress to give the Court its own separate building at a cost of $10 million.
Since 2006, wonky caricatures of George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Abraham Lincoln, and Teddy Roosevelt have been sprinting across the Nats’ home field and into the hearts of D.C. sports fans. These Rushmore racers were given some awfully big competition when Taft was added to their roster in 2013. “He might even give Teddy a run for his money,” said Nationals COO Andy Feffer.
Today, most people remember Taft as “the president who got stuck in a bathtub while in office.” The actual evidence behind this particular washroom anecdote is rather murky, but at least one of Taft’s bathing sessions ended in catastrophe. While entering a hotel tub in 1915, the ex-president apparently failed to take fluid displacement into account. A wave of Taft’s dirty bathwater instantly poured out, seeped through the floor, and started dripping all over people’s heads on the level beneath him. Though briefly humiliated, Taft made light of the situation. While looking out at the Atlantic Ocean shortly thereafter, he quipped, “I’ll get a piece of that fenced in some day, and then I venture to say there won’t be any overflow.”
Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five is (rightfully) considered a modern literary masterpiece. It propelled Vonnegut, who had been largely ignored and classified as a sci-fi paperback writer, to fame and literary acclaim.
The novel follows Billy Pilgrim, a man who has become “unstuck in time,” and weaves together different periods of his life—his time as a hapless soldier, his post-war optometry career, and a foray in an alien zoo where he served as an exhibit—with humor and profundity. “The dominant theme of what I have written during the past forty-five years or so,” Vonnegut wrote in 1994, is “the inhumanity of many of man’s inventions to man.” Here are 15 things you may not have known about this 1969 classic (not that the dates matter to Tralfamadorians).
After repeated and failed attempts to start his “Dresden book,” Vonnegut finally began what would become Slaughterhouse-Five during a two-year teaching stint at the University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop. He had stopped writing fiction and was in a considerable funk when he accepted the invitation, offered by his former editor George Starbuck who was a full-time professor of English at the university.
“Suddenly writing seemed very important again,” he said. “This was better than a transplant of monkey glands for a man my age.” In addition to befriending Nelson Algren and Jose Donoso, he also became friends with Richard Yates while there, and some of his students included Gail Godwin, John Irving, Jonathan Penner, Bruce Dobler, John Casey, and Jane Casey.
Impressed by the book reviews Vonnegut wrote during his hiatus from fiction, publisher Seymour Lawrence offered Vonnegut a $25,000 advance to work on his Dresden book (and two other novels) full-time.
Published on March 31, 1969, Slaughterhouse-Five became an instant and surprise hit. It spent 16 weeks on The New York Times bestseller list and went through five printings by July.
The novel owes much of its immediate success to two rave reviews; one in The New York Times Book Review, which was featured on the section’s front page, and another in the Saturday Review.
Robert Scholes, who wrote the Times review, was a colleague of Vonnegut’s at Iowa. As Jerome Kinkowitz writes inVonnegut in Fact, “A correlation exists between the first two major reviews of Slaughterhouse-Five: each was written by a critic who had heard Vonnegut speak to audiences, and who had been, moreover, deeply impressed by the personal voice in the author’s fictive statement. Not that public speaking was Vonnegut’s chosen profession; rather, his talk at Notre Dame University’s Literary Festival (as heard by Granville Hicks) and his two-year lectureship at the University of Iowa (where Robert Scholes was a colleague) were stopgap measures to generate some income after his customary publishing markets had either closed … or ceased to respond.”
Slaughterhouse-Fivewas banned from Oakland County, Michigan, public schools in 1972. The circuit judge there accused the novel of being “depraved, immoral, psychotic, vulgar, and anti-Christian.” In 1973, a school board in North Dakota immolated 32 copies of the book in the high school’s coal burner.
“My books are being thrown out of school libraries all over the country—because they’re supposedly obscene,” Vonnegut told The Paris Review. “I’ve seen letters to small-town newspapers that put Slaughterhouse-Five in the same class with Deep Throat and Hustler magazine. How could anybody masturbate to Slaughterhouse-Five?”
In 2011, Wesley Scroggins, then an assistant professor at Missouri State University, called on the Republic, Missouri, school board to ban Vonnegut’s novel. He wrote in the local paper, “This is a book that contains so much profane language, it would make a sailor blush with shame. The ‘f word’ is plastered on almost every other page. The content ranges from naked men and women in cages together so that others can watch them having sex to God telling people that they better not mess with his loser, bum of a son, named Jesus Christ.” The board eventually voted 4-0 to remove the novel from the high school curriculum and its library.
In response to this ban, the Kurt Vonnegut Memorial Library in Indianapolis gave away 150 free copies of Slaughterhouse-Five to Republic, Missouri, students who wanted to read it.
The American Library Association listed the book as the 46th most banned or challenged book of the first decade of the 21st century.
A film adaptation of Slaughterhouse-Five directed by George Roy Hill and starring Michael Sacks as Billy Pilgrim was produced in 1972. Vonnegut called it “flawless.”
The character “Wild Bob” is based on William Joseph Cody Garlow, grandson of Buffalo Bill Cody and commander of the 423rd regiment in World War II. A private in that regiment, Vonnegut was captured along with Garlow on December 19, 1944, at the Battle of the Bulge.
While Vonnegut fills the novel with non-fiction asides and excerpts from real accounts, the pornographic postcard carried around by Roland Weary depicting a woman with a pony flanked by doric columns is non-existent; the story of the photographer André Le Fèvre is completely fictionalized. However, the name “André Le Fèvre” may come from André Lefèvre, a famous French scoutmaster—the equivalent of a Boy Scout leader.
In a “Special Message” written for the Franklin Library’s limited edition of Slaughterhouse-Five, Vonnegut wrote, “The Dresden atrocity, tremendously expensive and meticulously planned, was so meaningless, finally, that only one person on the entire planet got any benefit from it. I am that person. I wrote this book, which earned a lot of money for me and made my reputation, such as it is … One way or another, I got two or three dollars for every person killed. Some business I’m in.”
“So it goes,” the book’s melancholic refrain, appears in the text 106 times.
A version of this story originally ran in 2014; it has been updated for 2022.
Silent letters are the scourge of spellers and often a stumbling block when learning how to write in English. To the modern eye, it’s unclear what these letters are doing in the words in question, and learners sometimes simply have to memorize them. But the silent letters are very often hidden remnants of how the words passed through different languages on their way to English. Here are 15 words that prove that English spelling is far from rational.
Definition: “dwelling beneath the surface of the earth”
Greek-derived words often feature tricky consonant clusters that don’t get pronounced that way in English. The word chthonic (from Greek kthon, meaning “earth”), tends to lose its initial “k” sound and ends up sounding like thonic.
Definition: “expectorated matter; saliva mixed with discharges from the respiratory passages; in ancient and medieval physiology it was believed to cause sluggishness”
The “g” sound in phlegmwas lost when Latin phlegma became Old French fleume. But the silent g still gets pronounced in variations on the word, such as phlegmatic, which means “showing little emotion.”
Pterodactyl came into English from Greek. / CSA Images/Vetta/Getty Images
Definition: “extinct flying reptile”
The first part of the word pterodactyl is from pteron, Greek for “feather” or “wing.” The second part comes from daktylos, meaning “finger.”
Definition: “animal tissue consisting predominantly of contractile cells”
The word muscle comes from Latin musculus, literally meaning “little mouse,” but the c went silent when the word entered French.
Definition: “of or relating to or involving the practice of aiding the memory”
The word mnemonicis from the Greek mnemonikos, “pertaining to memory.” The mn- consonant cluster proved too tricky in the languages that have borrowed the word and was simplified to an “n” sound. (Now that you know that, check out some mnemonic tricks and sentences to boost your knowledge.)
Definition: “respiratory disorder characterized by wheezing; usually of allergic origin”
The word asthma, which dates from the late 14th century, used to be spelled as it is pronounced, asma. It was only in the 16th century that the t and h were reintroduced to the English spelling, to make it like the Latin and Greek spellings.
Definition: “of an appropriate or pertinent nature”
The word aproprosis from French, like rendezvous and faux below, where final consonants are often silent.
Receipt was tweaked because of Latin. / igor kisselev, www.close-up.biz/Moment/Getty Images
Definition: “an acknowledgment (usually tangible) that payment has been made”
In the Anglo-French spoken by the Norman conquerors, the word receiptwas spelled receite. The spelling eventually changed in English to add a p (bringing it into line with the Latin root recepta), but the pronunciation stayed the same.
Definition: “marked by truth”
The root of honest is Latin honestus, meaning “honorable,” ultimately from honos, also the source of honor. And like honor, the initial “h” sound was lost in the French versions of the word on their way to English.
Definition: “bite or chew on with the teeth”
The word gnawstarted out in Old English as gnagan. Just as kn- words from earlier eras of English lost their k, gn- words were also simplified to the “n” sound.
Knead comes from Old English and Middle English words. / Adam Gault/OJO Images/Getty Images
Definition: “manually manipulate (someone’s body), usually for medicinal or relaxation purposes”
The word kneadcomes from the Old English verb cnedan and Middle English kneden. But like other kn- words, including knight and know, the k went silent in Modern English.
Definition: “difficult to detect or grasp by the mind or analyze”
Like receipt, subtle is what happens when you make the spelling imitate Latin but forget about the pronunciation. French had lost the b in Latin subtilis (“fine”), resulting in sotil, which was then remade to look (but not sound) like the Latin original.
Definition: “dignified and somber in manner or character and committed to keeping promises”
As with phlegm above, the silent n in solemn gets pronounced in related words like solemnity.
Definition: “not genuine or real; being an imitation of the genuine article”
In Old French, Latin falsus (“false”) became fals or faus, eventually leading to faux with a silent x.
Rendezvous comes to English from French. / Willie B. Thomas/DigitalVision/Getty Images
Definition: “a meeting planned at a certain time and place”
This word comes from the French phrase rendez vous, meaning “present yourselves.” Following the French pronunciation, both the z and s go silent.
A version of this story was created in 2014 in partnership with Vocabulary.com; it has been updated for 2023.
Eyebrows are the Swiss Army knife of the human face. Scientists believe they remained, even after evolution caused humans to lose most of their body hair, because they serve a few key purposes.
First, they protect your eyes. The shape of the brow ridge and the outward-growing hairs of the brows themselves channel sweat, rain, and moisture away from the eyeballs, so your vision stays clear. They can also catch dust or shield eyes from sun glare.
Second, they’re essential for nonverbal communication. Scientists who study facial expressions say eyebrows are important for expressing happiness, surprise, and anger, a function that our human ancestors may have employed as well.
In 2018, researchers tried to decipher why the brow ridges of Homo neanderthal and Homo erectus were much more prominent that ours, and hypothesized that it had to do with accommodating the force of their bite. But when they manipulated a 3D computer model of an ancient hominin, bite pressure didn‘t justify the big brows. The researchers surmised that social communication was the more likely reason.
Over millennia, our brows have evolved to be smaller, more malleable, and useful for nonverbal communication. For example, today‘s speakers of sign language contort their eyebrows to complement hand signs.
Third, eyebrows act as an ID card. Eyebrows stand out against the forehead, can be clearly seen from a distance, and don’t change very much over time—making them perfect for identifying people. In a 2003 study at MIT [PDF], people were shown a picture of Richard Nixon with his eyes Photoshopped out, and then a picture with his eyebrows erased. The participants had significantly more trouble identifying Nixon and other celebrities when the brow was bald.
The takeaway? If you’re going undercover, forget the sunglasses. Shave your eyebrows instead.
A version of this story ran in 2014; it has been updated for 2023.
Even some of the most mundane words can have delightful back stories.
School is derived from the Greek word skhola, which meant leisure or spare time. What a luxury it was to just hang around and learn!
Companion comes from the Latin prefix com- and panis, meaning “together” and “bread.” A companion is someone you share bread with.
Windows are kind of eye-like. / Charles Gullung/The Image Bank/Getty Images
From Old Norse vindauga for “wind eye.” It won out over other old words meaning “eye hole” and “eye door.”
Squirreloriginally comes from the Greek skiaoura, or “shade tail.” The big, fluffy tail of a squirrel makes a nice parasol.
One of these arms has more little mice than the other. / PM Images/Stone/Getty Images
From Latin musculus for “little mouse,” perhaps because a rippling muscle can sometimes look like a little mouse running around under the skin.
Eavesdrop is derived from the Old English term for the line around a house where rain would drip down from the roof. It came to represent the activity of standing under the eaves in order to spy on what the neighbors were up to.
According to Merriam-Webster, no one is completely sure how wheedle entered the English language, though it seems to have done so by the 1600s. One theory is that it derives from the German wedeln, or “wag the tail,” and was picked up by English soldiers fighting in the Thirty Years’ War.
A dandelion. / SOPA Images/GettyImages
Dandelion comes from the French phrase dent de lion, “tooth of the lion,” for the jagged outline of the flower petals. The plant goes by other names as well, including tell-time and piss-a-bed.
From French couvre feu for “cover fire.” In medieval Europe, there were fire safety regulations under which a bell would ring in the evening when it was time to extinguish fires and go to sleep; the word curfew had arrived at its current meaning by the 19th century.
An astronaut during a spacewalk. / Corbis/GettyImages
The word astronaut is formed from the Greek roots for star (astro-) and sailor (nautes), and first popped up in 1928.
Flaircomes from the Latin flagrare, which is an altered form of fragare, “to smell” (related to “fragrant”). A flair for something is a bit of extra perceptiveness, an ability to catch the scent; the Online Etymology Dictionary traces this meaning to American English in the 1920s.
A friendly shortening of the more formal “how do ye?” or “how do you?”
Cushy comes from the Hindi khush for “pleasant” or “happy.” According to the Online Etymology Dictionary. the word cushie has an earlier, not-so-nice meaning in Scottish: “soft, flabby.”
From the Latin explanare for “smooth out, flatten, or make planar.” A good explanation will make the rough, pointy bits easier to understand.
A daisy. / Tim Graham/GettyImages
The word daisy is derived from the Old English daeges eage, meaning “day’s eye.” A daisy opens with the day and closes at night.
A version of this story ran in 2014; it has been updated for 2022.
Even if you’ve never worked on a midway, you can still pepper your speech with delightfully authentic carnival jargon. Start slipping these terms into conversation and watch as your friends bally about how great talking to you is.
To attract a crowd by making a great commotion about how terrific a show is.
This slang term for a failure or a spectacular fall was named for Steve Brodie, a man who claimed to have survived a fall from the Brooklyn Bridge in 1886.
This slang term for a circus performer originally referred to just acrobats. Kinker talk, meanwhile, was “the special language of the circus,” according to The Language of American Popular Entertainment.
A private, employees-only tent for gambling was a G-top.
This slang term for a repairman is also sometimes spelled waxy, and according to Dictionary of American Slang, it’s “obs[olete] except for circus use.”
A version of this story ran in 2015; it has been updated for 2023.
Are you a logophile? Do you want to learn unusual words and old-timey slang to make conversation more interesting, or discover fascinating tidbits about the origins of everyday phrases? Then pick up our new book, The Curious Compendium of Wonderful Words: A Miscellany of Obscure Terms, Bizarre Phrases, & Surprising Etymologies, out June 6! You can pre-order your copy on Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Books-A-Million, or Bookshop.org.
