Category: Bazaar News

As a method of supposed communication with the spirit world, the Ouija board has terrified countless slumber partying children and served as a plot vehicle in a number of Hollywood films. Here’s where it came from.

Ouija boards have their roots in spiritualism, which began in the United States in the late 1840s. (Claims that ancient Ouija boards existed are unfounded.) The new movement was led by mediums, who claimed to be intermediaries between the living and the dead.

There were a number of ways mediums made followers believe that they were communicating messages from those who had passed. One, table turning, involved the table moving or knocking on the floor in response to letters called out from the alphabet. Another method used planchettes—heart-shaped devices with two wheels at one end and a pencil at the point. Users would place their fingers on the device, which would then be guided by spirits who would “write” messages.

Both methods were problematic. Table turning took too long, and planchette writing was hard to decipher. According to the Museum of Talking Boards, some mediums got rid of these methods altogether, preferring to channel while in a trance, while others built complicated tables, dials, and tables painted with letters that required people to use a planchette as a pointer. This method became the most popular—and paved the way for the Ouija board.

In 1886, the New York Daily Tribune reported on a new talking board being used in Ohio. It was 18 by 20 inches and featured the alphabet, numbers, and the terms yes, no, good evening, and goodnight; the only other necessary object was a “little table three or four inches high … with four legs” that the spirits could use to identify letters.

The brilliance of the board was that anyone could make it—the tools suggested in the article are “a jack-knife and a marking brush.” Operating the board was easy, too:

“You take the board in your lap, another person sitting down with you. You each grasp the little table with the thumb and forefinger at each corner next to you. Then the question is asked, ‘Are there any communications?’ Pretty soon you think the other person is pushing the table. He thinks you are doing the same. But the table moves around to ‘yes’ or ‘no.’ Then you go on asking questions and the answers are spelled out by the legs on the table resting on the letters one after the other.”

(Of course, any messages generated probably weren’t from spirits; instead, they were likely a result of the Ideomotor effect. This psychological phenomenon was first described in 1852 by William Benjamin Carpenter who, in a scientific paper analyzing how talking boards worked, theorized that the movement of muscles could occur independently of a person’s conscious desires.)

These types of talking boards became very popular, and in 1890, Elijah Bond, Charles Kennard and William H.A. Maupin had the idea to turn the board into a toy. They filed the first patent for a game they called the “Ouija board,” which looked and operated much like the talking boards in Ohio; the patent was granted in 1891. The name, according to Kennard, came from using the board, and was an ancient Egyptian word meaning “good luck.” The Kennard Novelty Company manufactured the boards, which were made of five pieces of wood across the face braced by two vertical slats on the back; they retailed for $1.50.

Kennard left the company in 1891, and the Kennard Novelty Company became the Ouija Novelty Company. William Fuld, an employee there, eventually took over production of the boards; in 1901, he began making his own boards under the name Ouija, which Fuld said came from a combination of the French and German words for “yes”—the etymology that is accepted today.

Fuld would go on to design many different versions of the board (he holds more Ouija patents and copyrights than anyone else in history—a grand total of 21 registrations in three countries—including the design for the modern planchette). Because of the board’s huge success, a number of competitors tried their hands at creating their own Ouija-like devices. Fuld sued many of those copycats, right up until his death in 1927.

In 1966, Fuld’s estate sold the family business—which included more than just Ouija boards—to Parker Brothers, which manufactured the modern boards as we know them today. In 1991, Parker Brothers was sold to Hasbro, which now holds all the Ouija rights and patents.

Hasbro has even allowed the creation of movies based on the game: Ouija, directed by Stiles White, came out in 2014, and Ouija: Origin of Evil, directed by Mike Flanagan, came out in 2016. (Several of the actors featured in that project would go on to star in Flanagan’s 2018 Netflix adaptation of Shirley Jackson’s The Haunting of Hill House.) “They were actually very supportive,” Flanagan told Fandango. “One of the things they never wanted to shy away from was trying to present their product as something that was frightening. I think that was smart. If they were like, ‘Behold theOuija board and all its terrifying abilities, none of which are that scary because we don’t want to turn off the marketing people,’ you’re kind of in no-man’s land.”

A version of this story ran in 2014; it has been updated for 2023.

When you think of an anglerfish, you probably imagine something like the creature above: a big mouth, gnarly teeth, a lure bobbing from its head. In short, perfect nightmare fodder.

During the 19th century, when scientists began to discover, describe, and classify anglerfish from a particular branch of the anglerfish family tree—the suborder Ceratioidei—that’s what they thought of, too. The problem was that they were only seeing half the picture. The specimens that they were working with were all female, and they had no idea where the males were or what they looked like.

Researchers sometimes found other fish that seemed to be related based on their body structure, but they lacked the fearsome maw and lure typical of ceratioids and were much smaller—sometimes only as long as 6 or 7 millimeters—and got placed into separate taxonomic groups.

It wasn’t until the 1920s—almost a full century after the first ceratioid was entered into the scientific record—that things started to become a little clearer. In 1922, Icelandic biologist Bjarni Saemundsson discovered a female ceratioid with two of these smaller fish attached to her belly by their snouts. He assumed it was a mother and her babies, but was puzzled by the arrangement.

“I can form no idea of how, or when, the larvae, or young, become attached to the mother. I cannot believe that the male fastens the egg to the female,” he wrote. “This remains a puzzle for some future researchers to solve.”

While Saemundsson kicked the problem down the road, it was Charles Tate Regan, working at the British Museum of Natural History in 1924, who picked it up. Regan also found a smaller fish attached to a female ceratioid. When he dissected it, he realized it wasn’t a different species or the female angler’s child. It was her mate.

The “missing” males had been there all along, just unrecognized and misclassified, and Regan and other scientists, like Norwegian zoologist Albert Eide Parr, soon figured out why the male ceratioids looked so different. They don’t need lures or big mouths and teeth because they don’t hunt, and they don’t hunt because they have the females. The ceratioid male, Regan wrote, is “merely an appendage of the female, and entirely dependent on her for nutrition.” In other words, a parasite.

When ceratioid males go looking for love, they follow a species-specific pheromone to a female, who will often aid their search further by flashing her bioluminescent lure. Once the male finds a suitable mate, he bites into her belly and latches on until his body fuses with hers. Their skin joins together, and so do their blood vessels, which allows the male to take all the nutrients he needs from his host/mate’s blood. The two fish essentially become one.

With his body attached to hers like this, the male doesn’t have to trouble himself with things like seeing or swimming or eating like a normal fish. The body parts he doesn’t need anymore—eyes, fins, and some internal organs—atrophy, degenerate, and wither away, until he’s little more than a lump of flesh hanging from the female, taking food from her and providing sperm whenever she’s ready to spawn.

Extreme size differences between the sexes and parasitic mating aren’t found in all anglerfish. Throughout the other suborders, there are males that are free-swimming their whole lives, that can hunt on their own and that only attach to the females temporarily to reproduce before moving along. For deep-sea ceratioids that might only rarely bump into each other in the abyss, though, the weird mating ritual is a necessary adaptation to keep mates close at hand and ensure that there will always be more little anglerfish. And for us, it’s something to both marvel and cringe at, a reminder that the natural world is often as strange as any fiction we can imagine.

Naturalist William Beebe put it nicely in 1938, writing, “But to be driven by impelling odor headlong upon a mate so gigantic, in such immense and forbidding darkness, and willfully eat a hole in her soft side, to feel the gradually increasing transfusion of her blood through one’s veins, to lose everything that marked one as other than a worm, to become a brainless, senseless thing that was a fish—this is sheer fiction, beyond all belief unless we have seen the proof of it.”

A version of this article was originally published in 2014 and has been updated for 2023.

In 1776, the Continental Congress ratified the Declaration of Independence. But the document you know and can probably recite from memory (at least partially) is much different from what Thomas Jefferson—the primary author in a committee of five men (including John Adams and Benjamin Franklin) commissioned to draft the document—originally wrote.

Jefferson submitted the “rough draught” of the Declaration of Independence to the Second Continental Congress on June 28, 1776. Delegates argued the details of the document for two days before making a number of changes to it—and Jefferson was not pleased. In the days after the document was ratified, the founding father handwrote several copies of his original version, underlining what had been changed, and sent them off to several friends.

Most of the changes were made to the last half of the document; notably, the following passage, which referred to slavery, was omitted to mollify delegates from Georgia and South Carolina. Of the king, Jefferson wrote (bold indicates an underlined portion):

“[H]e has waged cruel war against human nature itself, violating its most sacred rights of life & liberty in the persons of a distant people, who never offended him, captivating & carrying them into slavery in another hemisphere, or to incur miserable death in their transportation thither. this piratical warfare, the opprobrium of infidel powers, is the warfare of the Christian king of Great Britain. determined to keep open a market where MEN should be bought & sold, he has prostituted his negative for suppressing every legislative attempt to prohibit or to restrain this execrable commerce: and that this assemblage of horrors might want no fact of distinguished dye, he is now exciting those very people to rise in arms among us, and to purchase that liberty of which he has deprived them by murdering the people upon whom he also obtruded them; thus paying off former crimes committed against the liberties of one people, with crimes which he urges them to commit against the lives of another.”

Also omitted was this rallying cry (again, emphasis Jefferson’s):

“[W]e might have been a free & a great people together; but a communication of grandeur and of freedom, it seems, is below their dignity. be it so, since they will have it: the road to happiness and to glory is open to us too; we will climb it apart from them, and acquiesce in the necessity which denounces our eternal separation!”

Each year before the Fourth of July, the New York Public Library puts its copy—from which this text is taken, one of only four to survive—on display; you can get a closer look at it yourself here.

The library added this “fair copy” to its collections in 1897, and can follow its ownership back to Cassius F. Lee of Alexandria, Virginia. It may have been the copy that Jefferson sent to his former law professor George Wythe, though it’s never been proven.

A version of this story ran in 2014; it has been updated for 2023.

We’ve all seen the photos that make the rounds every so often: a furry little critter beams at the camera, at a leaf, at a tourist. From this adorable gallery—which naturally went viral—we can discern two facts: 1) that the furry little critter is called a quokka and 2) that this quokka must be the world’s happiest animal. It even says so, right there in the photo gallery.

But life is rarely so simple. It may be known for its sweetness, but the quokka has a salty side. What is a quokka, anyway? How do you pronounce its name? And are they really that happy-go-lucky? Read on for a reality check, and the sobering truth behind that smile.

Quokkas are nocturnal marsupials. They’re some of the smallest members of the macropod (or “big foot”) family, which also includes kangaroos and wallabies. The quokka clan makes its home in swamps and scrublands, tunneling through the brush to create shelters and hideouts and emerging at night to find food.

They’re the only land mammal on Rottnest Island, and have become something of a tourist attraction. Quokkas were first described by Dutch sea captain Willem de Vlamingh, who reported finding “a kind of rat as big as a cat.” The squeamish seaman named the quokkas’ island Ratte nest (“rat’s nest”), then sailed away, presumably toward more genteel wildlife.

As for pronunciation, dictionaries offer two options. North Americans usually pronounce it kwo-ka (rhymes with mocha), and everyone else says kwah-ka (rhymes with wokka wokka). It’s really up to you. Quokkas don’t care.

The “world’s happiest animal” is not all sunshine and lollipops. You may not want to hear this, but it’s true. A quokka’s big feet are tipped with very sharp claws.

Journalist Kenneth Cook learned this the hard way when he tried to befriend a quokka along a dirt road. Cook noted the animal’s “small, mean mouth,” but decided it was probably too small to do much damage. “It was a malicious-looking beast,” he wrote in his 1987 book Wombat Revenge, but he wasn’t afraid. He offered the little animal a piece of apple, which the quokka spat out, and a crumb of gorgonzola cheese. The quokka popped the gorgonzola into its mouth, chewed, and then, Cook wrote, “fell down in a dead faint.”

Convinced he’d just poisoned the creature and determined to save it, Cook zipped the quokka’s body into his backpack, left a little room for air, swung the pack onto his back, and pedaled his bicycle frantically down the road to find help. After a few minutes of bumping along at breakneck speed, the quokka began to revive, and blearily climbed out of the backpack, claws first.

Afraid to turn around in case he lost control of his bike, Cook sped onward. The quokka grabbed his neck and began shrieking in his ear. The bike kept going. The shrieking quokka sank its teeth into Cook’s earlobe and hung there, dead weight, like a large, furry earring. Disoriented, the journalist steered his bike off a cliff and into the ocean. Surfacing, he looked around and found the quokka standing on the shore, glaring at him and snarling.

The story seems incredible, but Cook is far from the winsome creature’s only victim. Teddy-bear ears and doe eyes aside, these animals are ready, willing, and able to fend for themselves. Each year, the Rottnest Island infirmary treats dozens of patients for quokka bites.

Among their own kind, quokkas are primarily a peaceful bunch. Males don’t fight over choice females, food, or water, although they will occasionally scrap over a nice, shady napping spot.

Quokkas, who are inquisitive, appealing, and fearless, have adapted to human presence in their environment in admirable fashion. Campsites and condos are all fair game for hungry quokkas, who have become notorious for raiding local homes in search of late-night snacks. Quokka settlements have sprung up around youth hostels and tourist sites—places, in other words, where the canny animals are assured of an easy meal. Cognitive science researchers have turned the tables on the quokkas by setting up shop in these same sites, knowing the wild animals will play nice.

On Rottnest Island, the inquisitive critters have made themselves something of a nuisance for business owners. “They wander down the streets and into cafes and restaurants,” Senior Constable Michael Wear told the Daily Telegraph in 2003.

They’re not just after our food, though—we also make good entertainment. While tracking a female quokka named Imelda through the brush at night, Bangor University conservationist Matt Hayward (then a visiting fellow at the University of New South Wales) realized he was being followed. “I heard footsteps approaching,” he told National Wildlife in 2007. Each time Hayward turned off his tracking equipment, the footsteps ceased. Just as his terror reached its peak, he said, “a little head poked out from behind a bush.” His stalker? Imelda.

Think of the quokka as the panda’s polar opposite. Where the panda seems determined to erase its own species from the face of the Earth, the quokka is a gritty survivor, ready to do anything it takes to stick around.

For example: Pandas spend between 10 and 16 hours each day foraging and eating. Why? Because bamboo—which makes up 99 percent of their diet—has almost no nutritional content. Quokkas, on the other hand, divide their time between eating leaves and grasses and snoozing in the shade. When water is scarce, quokkas chow down on water-storing succulents [PDF]. When the good leaves are hard to reach, they climb trees. The quokka does not settle for useless food.

Both pandas and quokkas are prone to offing their own offspring, but there’s a crucial difference: intention (or lack thereof, in the panda’s case). When pursued by a predator, a fleeing quokka mom will eject her baby from her pouch. Thusly launched, Baby Q flails about on the ground, making weird hissing noises and attracting the predator’s attention while mama quokka escapes to live another day [PDF]. She can, and will, reproduce again. It’s a stone-cold strategy, but it works.

Panda cubs, those rare and precious million-dollar babies, have been killed when their own mothers accidentally sat on them.

Sorry. Wild quokka populations are declining as invasive predators like foxes and cats move into quokka territory. They need to stay in the wild. And don’t try to smuggle them, or snuggle them, either: Rottnest Island authorities will slap a $300 fine on anyone caught touching a quokka.

Behavioral scientist Clive Wynne’s cognitive experiments disproved the long-held assumption that quokkas were “really, really dumb”—an assumption, he said, he found even in scientific literature. The smiley little guys don’t “have any magical cognitive abilities,” he says, “but they’re not stupid. They have the skills they need—honed by evolution over millions of years—to thrive in their natural environment.”

So why are they smiling? The quokka’s Mona Lisa smile, Wynne says, is “an accident of evolution.”

A version of this story originally ran in 2014; it has been updated for 2022.

History is full of fun, fascinating old school slang terms that are well overdue for a comeback. Here are 83 words you’ll want to start using, adapted from an episode of The List Show on YouTube.

A wet sock is a limp handshake or, in Australia, a dull person.

Happy cabbage is a sizable amount of money to be spent on self-satisfying things. 

Pang-Wangle is to live or go along cheerfully in spite of minor misfortunes. 

In the ketchup means “in the red” or “operating at a deficit.”

Flub the dub means “to evade one’s duty.”

A pine overcoat is a coffin.

A butter and egg man has nothing to do with breakfast preferences. The term, according to Green’s Dictionary of Slang, refers to a wealthy but unsophisticated small-town businessman who acts like a playboy when he visits the big city.

A zib is a nincompoop.

To give someone the wind is to jilt a suitor.

The 1909 book Passing English of the Victorian Era: A Dictionary of Heterodox English Slang and Phrase captured some great phrases: For instance, they called sausages bags o’ mystery. 

Cop a mouse was a Victorian-era phrase that meant “get a black eye.” As Passing English explains, “Cop in this sense is to catch or suffer, while the colour of the obligation at its worst suggests the colour and size of the innocent animal named.”

Don’t sell me a dog was a fancy way of saying “Don’t lie to me.”

A door-knocker was a type of beard, “shaved leaving hair under the chin, and upon each side of the mouth forming with moustache something like a door-knocker.” 

A bald head was called a fly rink.

A gigglemug referred to a person who was always smiling. 

A nose bagger is “someone who takes a day trip to the beach. He brings his own provisions and doesn’t contribute at all to the resort he’s visiting.”

If something or someone was not up to dick, it was not healthy.

Take the egg means “to win.” 

Inferior singers.

A rain napper was an umbrella.

Your mouth was your sauce box.

Here’s a multi-purpose bit of slang, according to the 1967 Dictionary of American Slang: Pretzel-bender can mean a peculiar person, a player of the French horn, a wrestler, or a heavy drinker. 

So what happens when a pretzel-bender drinks too much? That’s when you’d need to use some old slang terms for being drunk. Like having your flag out, or being soapy-eyed, full as a tick, seeing snakes, canned up, zozzled, owled, striped, squiffed, or swacked.

People needed a lot of ways to describe excessive heat in the days before air conditioning. One phrase was hotter than Dutch love in harvest. 

You might also hear the bear got him (the bear, in this case, was heatstroke) and full of moist.

A regional term from the south for anything hot.

Give a body the flesh creep—a.k.a. the shivers—can be used when it’s cold outside.

More very colorful ways to refer to the cold.

Nineteenth-century Australians had some phrases we may want to adopt—like to have one’s shirt out, which means “to be angry.”

Two ways 19th-century Australians could describe someone who was acting a little bonkers. 

To hump the swag means “to carry your luggage on your back.”

Happy returns describes vomiting, despite those returns being less than happy.

Someone who is tipsy could be called a leanaway.

This piece of beatnik slang means “corny.”

Red onion is another name for a dive bar.

To focus your audio means “to listen carefully.”

In beatnik speak, someone who’s claws sharp is well informed on a variety of topics. 

But if you know too much, particularly of the kind of information that could lead you to ratting someone out, you might have bright disease—often fatal, at least in the mafia.

There are actually a lot of old school ways to call someone a rat, like blobber, cabbage hat, pigeon, viper, and telegram.

There are also, of course, many interesting words for anatomy. For me, there are a master john goodfellow, gentleman usher, the staff of life, the Cyprian scepter, and the maypole, among many others.

And for women, there are the Phoenix nest, the Netherlands, Mount Pleasant, and Mrs. Fubbs’ Parlor.

Bring these things together and, at least according to the 1811 version of Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue, you get amorous congress, basket making, blanket hornpipe, or convivial society.

And if you were caught cheating on your significant other a century ago, you could be accused of carrying tackle, being on a left-handed honeymoon, or in Shakespeare’s time, groping for trout in a peculiar river.

Let’s talk food slang: Cluck and grunt referred to ham and egg. 

Eggs on toast.

Hot dogs with sauerkraut.

French fries.

Frank and beans.

Any kind of meat served rare.

Two cups of coffee.

All ways of saying water.

George Eddy is a customer who doesn’t tip well. 

Additional Sources: The Dictionary of American Slang; Dictionary of American Regional English; Passing English of the Victorian Era, Straight From the Fridge, Dad: A Dictionary of Hipster Slang; 1811 Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue; Dictionary of the Slang-English of Australia and of Some Mixed Languages; Dictionary of the Underworld; Jonathon Green’s Dictionary of Slang

The Explorers Club headquarters on East 70th Street might be New York City’s best-kept secret. In spirit and purpose, it is the meeting place and physical center for an international association of scientists and explorers. In aesthetics, it resembles a Jacobean manor house crossed with a natural history museum, complete with wood-paneled walls, elaborate molding, and a terrace marked by a colonnade from a monastery in France that matches the one in the Cloisters.

The club first met in 1904 as an unofficial gathering of like-minded men (women weren’t allowed until 1981). By the following year, the Explorers Club was incorporated, though it bounced around several locations—first on the Lower East Side and then by Columbia University—before ending up at its current location in 1965. The house was originally built in 1910 for Stephen Clark, heir of the Singer sewing machine fortune, with the intention of mimicking a historical style. Clark lived there with his family until he passed away in 1960. Five years later, the entire multistory townhouse was purchased for the club with the help of member Lowell Thomas.

These days, the club serves as a fellowship that awards grants and provides a social and professional network for continuing generations of explorers. Entry into that network, which includes dozens of chapters around the world, requires a background of extensive travel and a number of recommendations from current members. The house retains certain functions of its own: Members give lectures on their research and travel, relevant films are shown, and independent organizations from charities to documentary filmmakers make use of the stunning setting. The club invites passers-by, perhaps intrigued by the heavy iron doors or the personalized flag, to pop in and get a feel for the place. But those interested in getting a closer look, either at any of the objects mentioned here or the vast research collection of exploration documents, should make an appointment with the club’s curator.

One of the first remarkable artifacts in the club is hidden in plain sight. A sumptuous sitting room centers around a heavy wooden coffee table with a rich history. It’s built from a hatch cover for the USS Explorer, an unarmed research vessel that was one of only seven ships in the area to survive the 1941 attack on Pearl Harbor. At the time of the bombing, the Explorer was out to sea—in fact, it was the nearest American ship to the Japanese fleet responsible for the attack—which was how it was spared a violent end.

In the same room as the USS Explorer table is a chair with royal origins. Not much is known about the intricately carved wooden seat, but it is rumored to have belonged to Empress Wanrong, the wife of Puyi, last emperor of China.

Matthew A. Henson, who became the first Black person admitted to the club in 1937, was Robert Edwin Peary’s assistant on a number of Arctic expeditions, including the one they claimed as the first to reach the geographic North Pole in 1909. The club displays sealskin mittens with polar bear fur cuffs made for Henson by an Inuit woman who accompanied them on their voyage. On the gloves is inscribed Matthew A. Henson, May 5, 1934… To — Explorers Club … worn by me from Cape Sheridan to it — North Pole, April 6, 1909.

In 1947, club member Thor Heyerdahl wanted to show that early South Americans could have settled the islands of the South Pacific as far back as 500 CE. The Norwegian mariner set sail from Peru with a five-man crew aboard a raft, called the Kon-Tiki, made of balsa logs and other materials and techniques consistent with what would have been available to Indigenous sailors at that time. One hundred and one days and 4300 miles later, the team landed in Polynesia. (Later research disproved Heyedahl’s theory, anthropologists now believe Polynesian navigators settled the islands.) Heyerdahl’s expedition was first proposed and partially planned using this globe, which was at the time located in the Explorers Club headquarters on West 72nd Street.

In 1881, Adolphus W. Greely—a decorated Civil War veteran who would become the Explorers Club’s first president in 1905—set off with a crew of 24 men to explore extreme northern Canada. The government-funded Lady Franklin Bay Expedition made numerous scientific contributions and observations, with some members trekking farther north than anyone before them. However, during the expedition, heavy ice stranded the explorers and prevented relief vessels from reaching them for three years. By the time a rescue ship found the crew on June 22, 1884, at Cape Sabine on Ellesmere Island, two-thirds had succumbed to starvation, exposure, scurvy, drowning, and suicide—and one member had been executed as punishment for stealing food. In the aftermath, the six survivors were plagued by rumors of cannibalism.

The painting, commissioned by the government to hang in the U.S. Capitol, depicts a scene of the rescue. Artist Albert Operti did extensive research, interviewing the survivors as well as those who were part of the rescue team, for details about the tents and other materials. He even studied pre-expedition portraits of the deceased crew members. The club purchased the painting in 1946 for $105.

The Bear was a U.S. Coast Guard cutter that was part of a three-ship mini fleet responsible for finding and rescuing Greely’s surviving crew. The bell was presented to the club in 1933 and since then has been rung to mark the start of club functions.

The club’s flag is an iconic part of its tradition. Each flag produced is assigned a number, and members must apply for the honor of carrying one on their expeditions, submitting a thesis-style report to be included in the flag’s file upon return. A database tracks all of the flags’ voyages. Often, explorers who have been granted the privilege seek to carry a flag that has been to similar locations or was carried by one of their idols. On the occasion of some particularly admirable voyage, or because of damage sustained, flags are retired to be part of the rotating collection on display in the club. The Flag Room provides a sense of the club’s wide-ranging purview in the world of exploration and notable historical events—the Apollo 13 flag was returned unopened in the non-flammable plastic casing in which it was packed, with a note explaining that since “plans were disrupted” it was never planted on the moon’s surface.

Not all explorers opt for flags that have been to similar locations—in fact, an instance of just the opposite created a unique artifact. Flag 161 accompanied 19 voyages during its active tenure from 1955 to 2012. Among those was a trip to the top of Mount Everest, and the last one was a descent with James Cameron to the bottom of the Mariana Trench in the Deepsea Challenger. Along with a host of other accomplishments, this means that Flag 161 is the only object in the world to have traveled to both the highest and lowest points on the planet.

Tales of an abominable snowman called the Yeti inspired Explorers Club members Sir Edmund Hillary and Marlin Perkins to travel to Nepal in 1960. Among the evidence for this mythical monster cited by locals was a supposed scalp, which had been housed at a temple in Khumjung for over 200 years. Unfortunately for Yeti enthusiasts everywhere, Perkins, a zoologist, concluded that the “scalp” was made from the hide of a Himalayan serow—a goat-like hoofed mammal. To substantiate this claim, he had a villager create an exact replica using goat hide, which is what you see here.

Despite suffering an ignominious military defeat in Egypt, Napoleon Bonaparte’s campaign up the Nile in 1798–99 provided the world with one of the most important documents in Egyptology. Along with his army, Napoleon brought nearly 200 scholars and scientists known as savants to compile ethnographic information about ancient and modern Egypt. The result was 22 volumes called Description de l’Égypte, ou recueil des observations et des recherches qui ont été faites en Égypte pendant l’expédition de l’armée française. Or in English: Description of Egypt, or collection of observations and research made in Egypt during the expedition of the French Army. The texts are, of course, written in French, but the oversized volumes that include hand-colored pictures are stunning and worth a look.

These four tusks, the fearsome-looking result of a rare genetic mutation, all belonged to the same elephant. The tusks were collected by club member Armand Denis, an adventurer and filmmaker who led a famous expedition across Africa in 1934, but they were donated by the estate of Sally H. Clark, wife of James L. Clark, who served as director for preparations at the American Museum of Natural History.

Not much is known about this stuffed whale penis, which was given to the club in 1977 by Mr. and Mrs. Frederick S. Schauffler, but it is a favorite among visitors. Worth checking out, if only for a better sense of scale.

A version of this story was published in 2016; it has been updated for 2023.

Which nickname sounds a bit out of place: “The Athens of America,” “The Cradle of Liberty,” “The Hub of the Universe,” or “Beantown”? New England’s largest city goes by all four aliases, yet the last one sticks out. So, how did Boston get such an odd title in the first place?

There’s no definite answer, but this hasn’t stopped historians from speculating. One theory hinges on the fact that Massachusetts has long been noted for its baked beans, a tradition dating back to its Native American roots. However, in the late 1600s, the area was synonymous with a very different product: rum.

Along with their neighbors in Rhode Island, Massachusettsans distilled alcohol, enabling their colony to break into the notorious “triangle trade.” Boston’s booze was usually taken to Africa, where it would be exchanged for new enslaved people. The enslaved people were, in turn, taken to sugar plantations in the Caribbean, where they were forced to produce (among other things) molasses, a key ingredient in rum.

But molasses shipped to Boston for distilling served another culinary function: colonists started putting it in their baked beans. Native Americans were already preparing beans with maple syrup, but this new preparation method spread across the greater Boston area. Eventually—according to legend—sailors and merchants on the triangular route began calling the city “Bean Town.”

Another story paints a very different picture. Boston hosted a Civil War veterans’ convention during the summer of 1890. To commemorate this gathering, the Beverly Pottery Company handed out small, ribbon-bound bean pots as souvenirs. Afterwards, when asked where they’d gotten such neat little gifts, many of the vets supposedly replied “bean-town.”

Then again, perhaps a publicity gimmick is to blame. In 1907, Boston threw its first annual Old Home Week. Former residents were encouraged to revisit their old haunts during a week-long celebration. An aggressive advertising campaign helped draw continental attention to the event, with posters and stickers being distributed nationwide, many of which included wholesome sketches of bean pots. As the yearly shindig grew, tourism slogans like “You Don’t Know Beans Until You Come to Boston” also started catching on. Theoretically, “beantown” might have been born in the process.

A version of this story originally ran in 2014; it has been updated for 2023.

The 2023 NHL playoffs just wrapped up, with the Las Vegas Golden Knights claimingLord Stanley’s coveted cup against the Florida Panthers in a 9-3 victory in game five. Winning the cup requires scoring goals, of course, and some players are so on fire that they score three goals in a single game (as Mark Stone did last night).

This phenomenal feat is known as a hat trick, a term used in a handful of sports to indicate three individual achievements in a given match-up. But where did the phrase come from, and what does scoring three goals in a game have to do with hats?  

The origins of the phrase don’t have anything to do with hockey at all. In fact, the first use of the term hat trick comes from a specific cricket match from 1858. Bowler H.H. Stephenson, playing for an all-England squad versus a team from Hallam, South Yorkshire, took three consecutive wickets at Hyde Park Cricket Grounds in Sheffield—meaning he hit the three wooden stakes behind the batter three consecutive times. A collection was held because of his outstanding feat and he was presented with a hat that was bought using the proceeds.

Just when the phrase made the jump to ice hockey and other sports is a matter of debate: The Oxford English Dictionary pegs the date to the 1890s, while Online Etymology Dictionary has circa 1909; still other sources believe it didn’t happen until the 1930s or ’40s.

The exact source that popularized the phrase is also fairly hazy. One Montreal haberdasher called Henri Henri claims they “brought the … expression into the world of hockey” after they gave all players who scored three goals during one game at the Montreal Forum a hat on the house.

Another claim comes from the Canadian city of Guelph, whose 1947 Junior-A team was sponsored by Biltmore Hats and dubbed the “Guelph Biltmore Mad Hatters.” As a marketing ploy to advertise its new style of fedora, the company would give away a brand new hat to any league player who scored three goals in a single game. 

The Hockey Hall of Fame officially recognizes a different story as the true origin of the phrase hat trick when it comes to hockey.

When Chicago Blackhawks winger Alex Kaleta visited Sammy Taft’s Toronto haberdashery in January 1946 before a game with the Toronto Maple Leafs, he fell in love with a fedora. But Kaleta—who had just returned to playing professional hockey after serving in the Canadian military during World War II—didn’t have enough money to buy the hat. So Taft cut him a deal: If Kaleta could score three goals against the Maple Leafs at the game that night, he’d give him the hat for free.

“There was no rhyme or reason to it,” Taft recalled in 1992. “I just, for some reason, said, ‘You go out there and score three goals tonight and I’ll give you the hat.’”

Kaleta went on to score four goals in the game (Chicago wound up losing to Toronto 6-5) and got a free hat out of his on-ice feat. Newspapers picked up the story, which took off. According to the Hockey Hall of Fame, Taft then “promoted his hats by giving one to any player who scored three goals during a National Hockey League game in Toronto,” and the rest is hockey history.

A version of this story ran in 2014; 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 get our new book, The Curious Compendium of Wonderful Words: A Miscellany of Obscure Terms, Bizarre Phrases, & Surprising Etymologies, out now! You can pick up your copy on Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Books-A-Million, or Bookshop.org.

Air molecules are always moving around us. When we can feel this movement, we call it wind. If we want to get a little more specific about the windy weather, we can talk about gentle breezes and zephyrs, or forceful gusts and gales—but geographers and climatologists have an additional goody bag full of wonderful wind words that get even more specific about what’s going on with those air molecules and where they’re coming from. Here are 21 names for the wind.

A dry wind from the north or northeast funneled over the Alps into southern France and Switzerland by pressure differences.

A cold wind that blows over the northwest Mediterranean coast when pressure differences funnel it through the Rhône valley.

A cold, very strong, dry wind on the coast of the Adriatic Sea and northern Italy occurring when pressure is high over the Balkans and low over the Mediterranean.

A summer wind in southeastern Australia that brings hot air from the outback to the cooler regions. Named either for the red dust it used to spread over Sydney from local brickworks, or the fact that it turned the soil as hard as bricks.

A cold wind from the south that follows the brickfielder.

A strong northeasterly wind in Siberia and Central Asia that is hot in the summer and freezing in the winter. It’s called the purga when it flows over Arctic tundra and the burga in Alaska.

A hot, dry, dusty wind that moves air from the Sahara into northern Africa and Italy. Over the Mediterranean it picks up moisture and becomes humid; it is caused by a band of low pressure moving east across the southern Mediterranean.

The sirocco in Egypt. It’s the word for 50; the wind is said to blow for 50 days.

The sirocco in Libya.

The sirocco in Malta, pronounced “shlok.”

A föhn wind draws air up one side of a mountain, where it cools and sheds its moisture as precipitation, and then warms as it compresses coming down the other side of the mountain.

A wind that carries warmed air down the Rocky Mountains and quickly raises the temperature in the valley below. Cattle grazing depends on it because it melts the snow.

A Föhn wind that moves over the Sudeten Mountains into Germany and Poland. The term apparently comes from a dialectal version of Matz, the surname of a shepherd who first identified its telltale cloud formation in the mountains.

A Föhn wind that blows eastward over the Andes in Argentina.

A hot, whirling wind in the Sahara and Arabian Desert that plays a role in reshaping dunes; it can move vast quantities of sand. From the Arabic for “poison.”

The annual strong summer winds in the Aegean Sea resulting from a low pressure trough in Asia that is part of monsoon storm systems. Also called meltemi in Greek and Turkish.

The summer low pressure areas in Asia also cause this northwesterly wind in Iraq that whips up sand and dust.

These winds blow from the northeast in the Northern Hemisphere and the southeast in the Southern Hemisphere toward low pressure regions along the equator. They are reliable enough to plan trade routes around.

Strong winds in Central America due to high pressure over North America. They are intensified as they blow through mountain gaps such as the one at the Isthmus of Tehuantepec.

A stormy, cold wind that blows down mountains.

A local whirling wind in Australia that raises small columns of dirt, or dust devils, from the ground.

A version of this story ran in 2014; it has been updated for 2023.

You know giraffes are tall—the tallest mammals in the world, in fact—but you may not be aware of these 20 other amazing facts about the leggy herbivores.

Over short distances, giraffes can run at speeds up to 35 mph. That’s about as fast as a grizzly bear.

They get most of their water from their diet of leaves, seed pods, and bark from the acacia tree—which is good considering their height makes the process of drinking difficult. They need to widen their front legs to reach water at ground level, rendering them vulnerable to lions and other predators.

Aww, heartwarming. But once there, their calves receive a rough welcome into the world. Giraffes give birth standing up, so their babies end up falling over 5 feet to the ground.

The little ones can stand up and even run within a hour of being born.

They are also dark purple, which is thought to help protect them from sun exposure, and prehensile, which assists in plucking leaves from extra-high branches (or zookeepers’ hands).

As with leaning down for a drink of water, lying down to sleep is difficult for giraffes and makes them easy targets for predators. Giraffes usually stay upright while sleeping, and if they do settle into a vulnerable position on the ground, it’s just for a quick six-minute nap.

Both make and female giraffes have ossicones, which are hair-covered protrusions from their skulls. Only males use them (for fighting each other).

Their diet of small leaves and twigs means they spend most of their time eating.

Until 2016, scientists believed there was only one species of giraffe, Giraffa camelopardalis (the second word refers to the ancient Greeks’ opinion that giraffes looked like camels wearing leopards’ coats.) But that year, a study in the journal Nature clarified that there are actually four genetically distinct species that live in different regions of Africa and don’t interbreed: the northern giraffe (G. camelopardalis), southern giraffe (G. giraffa), Masai giraffe (G. tippelskirchi), and reticulated giraffe (G. reticulata). To make things more confusing, the northern giraffe has a subspecies, the Nubian giraffe, whose scientific name is G. camelopardalis camelopardalis.

Giraffes have seven neck vertebrae, like humans, but each vertebra is supersized—up to 10 inches long. That’s what gives them their elongated necks.

Because of their unusual physique, giraffes have a complex cardiovascular system that starts with an enormous heart. It’s 2 feet long and can weigh up to 25 pounds.

The veins contain a series of one-way valves that prevent excess blood flow to the brain when the giraffe lowers its head to drink.

It’s called necking, and it involves head-butting each other’s bodies.

So, the left front and hind legs step, and then the right front and hind legs step. Giraffes’ gait differs from horses and most other quadrupeds.

Although they’re more likely to run from an attack, giraffes are not completely defenseless. A swift kick from one of their long legs and huge hooves can do serious damage to, or even kill, an unlucky lion.

A male giraffe who wants to get busy will try to get a lady giraffe to pee (usually by sniffing her genitals). If she assents, he will place his tongue in the stream of urine, then perform a Flehman response to fully sense the female’s readiness to reproduce.

June 21, to be exact—a date chosen to celebrate the tallest animal on Earth because it’s the longest day (or night, if you’re in the Southern Hemisphere) of the year.

The first giraffe to make its way to Europe was brought there by Julius Caesar from Alexandria in 46 BCE as part of a triumphant return to Rome after years of civil war. 

Some 1500 years after Caesar’s giraffe-related activities, Florentine statesman Lorenzo de’ Medici was given a giraffe by the sultan of Egypt. Giraffes had not been seen in Italy since antiquity, and it caused quite a sensation, wandering the streets of Florence and accepting treats offered out of second-story windows.

The only other species in the family Giraffidae is the okapi (Okapia johnstoni), a shy herbivore that lives among thick rainforests in central Africa and has a much shorter neck. It also lacks the distinctive giraffe-print coat, though the okapi’s hind legs are striped horizontally in zebra-like fashion.

A version of this story was published in 2014; it has been updated for 2024.

Crossing fingers to achieve your own good luck, or in a display of hopeful solidarity that things go well for someone else, is a widely recognized gesture. The finger-cross has a long history—and, originally, it was not a solo act.

There are two main theories regarding the origins of finger-crossing for luck. The first comes from a pre-Christian pagan belief in the powerful symbolism of a cross. The intersection was thought to mark a concentration of good spirits and served to anchor a wish until it could come true. The practice of wishing upon a cross in early European cultures evolved to a tradition in which a person crossed their index finger over someone else’s to express hope that a wish would come true. Eventually, wish-makers realized they could go it alone and impart the benefit of making a cross to support their wishes without another person’s participation. At first, this took the form of a person crossing their two index fingers. Eventually this gesture morphed into the one-handed practice we still use today.

The alternate explanation also stems from the early days of Christianity, when practitioners were frequently persecuted for their beliefs. To recognize their fellow Christians, people developed a series of hand gestures, one of which involved forming the ichthys, or fish symbol, by touching thumbs and crossing index fingers. The symbol represents an acrostic in which the Greek letters i, ch, th, y, and s are also the first letters in the phrase Iēsous Christos, Theou Yios, Sōtēr, which in English means “Jesus Christ, Son of God, Savior.” This theory doesn’t fully explain how luck initially became associated with the gesture, but it suggest that crossing ones fingers imparted a blessing or hope for a wish or prayer.

Have you got a Big Question you’d like us to answer? If so, let us know by emailing us atbigquestions@mentalfloss.com.

A version of this story was published in 2012; it has been updated for 2024.

To city dwellers, it might seem that pigeons multiply magically: All the birds swooping down at us, or scurrying out of the way when we walk, are fully grown. How come we never see baby pigeons anywhere?

Rest assured, baby pigeons, or squabs, do exist—and there’s a good reason you’re not seeing them. It’s partially due to where the birds nest: Pigeons, also known as Rock Doves, build their nests in places that mimic the caves and cliffs that their ancestors used in the Mediterranean. “In New York City, they’re building their nests anywhere they can find, any opening on window sills, on roof tops, under bridges—preferably somewhat protected places,” Charles Walcott, then Professor Emeritus at Cornell University and former executive director of the Lab of Ornithology, told Mental Floss in 2014. “There are lots of nice artificial cliffs that people have erected in New York.”

The other reason why squabs are rarely seen is because of how long they stay in the nest—for about a month to six weeks, “until they are effectively an adult size,” Walcott says. City dwellers typically think of pigeons as rats of the sky, but it turns out that the birds are usually pretty good parents. “Both males and females tend the young and feed them,” Walcott says. “If one of the parents dies, it becomes tougher for the remaining one to raise the young. But often the young will survive.” Baby pigeons survive on a diet of pigeon milk—digested epithelial (or skin) cells made in their parents’ crops—until they’re old enough to eat some solid food. “The parents regurgitate charming things like corn kernels and so on,” Walcott says. Pigeons are mostly grain-eaters, by the way (their ancestors foraged grain from fields), though according to Walcott, “McDonald’s French fries will do just fine, thank you.”

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Once a squab leaves the nest, it ignores its parents, begins to feed itself for the first time, and joins a flock, which is “composed of the same birds day after day that hang out in a particular area and that will be distinct from what goes on a couple blocks away,” Walcott said. “City pigeons are fairly territorial. They have their own area where they hang out and if you take them away, they do return, although they’re in no great rush to do so.”

It’s probably for the best we don’t see baby pigeons. They are, according to Walcott, “revolting. They are naked. They have little pink feathers and they’re sort of semi-transparent.” (You can see a rare squab on the streets of Brooklyn here. It’s not pretty.) Still, you might have seen a juvenile pigeon and just not been aware of it. “You can often recognize a young pigeon because it will have a few little downy feathers poking out from the back of its head,” Walcott said. “That’s probably a young pigeon.”

A version of this story ran in 2014; it has been updated for 2023.

We’ve used the term rat to refer to an informer since approximately 1910. Stool pigeon, which dates back to the 1840s, is also a popular choice, and these days, you might hear the term whistleblower, which dates back to 1970. But Eric Partridge’s A Dictionary of the Underworld, published first in 1949 with a second edition in 1961, shows that in the Cant language of the underworld—which first appeared in Britain in the 16th century and the United States in the 18th—criminals have many more names for snitches. Here are some of them. 

This term dates to the 1800s and meant “a thief who informs on his fellow rogues.” It came from the Hebrew word abaddon, meaning “a destroyer.”

Similar to the phrases to squeak and to squeal, bark, as defined by the 1889 glossary Police!, meant “to inform (to the police).” It was obsolete by 1930. Belch, meanwhile, meant “to inform on one’s accomplice in a crime” to “to inform on the location of a gambling den,” as in this example Partridge cited from around 1898: “The girl had been ‘picked up’ by the police and had then ‘belched’ on the place from which she had escaped.”

In the 1899 glossary Tramping with Tramps, Josiah Flynt wrote that a beefer is “one who squeals on, or gives away, a tramp or criminal.” By the 1930s, the word—which was American in origin—had moved from tramps to become slang for police and journalists, according to Partridge.

Lambs aren’t the only ones who do this. When informants bleat, they give information to the police. Partridge cited November 8, 1836’s The Individual: “Ven I’m corned, I can gammon a gentry cove, Come the fawney-rig, the figging-lay, and never vish to bleat.” The term was obsolete in Britain by 1890, but as of 1920 was a slang term in the U.S.

According to Henry Leverage’s “Dictionary of the Underworld” from Flynn’s magazine, blobber was an American term for an informer from early 1925.

A verb meaning “to blew it; to inform (to the police),” according to the H. Brandon’s 1839 book Poverty, Mendicity and Crime, and J.C. Hotten’s The Slang Dictionary from 1859. It was common slang by 1890, as noted in Farmer & Henley’s Slang and its Analogues.

Cabbage hat and cocked hat were terms for an informer dating to around 1910 that were rhyming on rat, according to D.W. Mauer and Sidney J. Baker’s “‘Australian’ Rhyming Argot in the American Underworld,” which appeared in American Speech in October 1944.

A punny reference (of American origin) to Chrysler cars that meant “a squealer; a traitor; a coward,” according to Leverage’s “Dictionary of the Underworld.”

A 1905 term for someone who became an informer and gave information to the police. By the 1930s, coming copper referred to the actual giving of information.

Come it (or coming it) dates back to 1812, and meant “to be an informer.” Come it strong meant “to do a thing vigorously,” and according to one 1823 source, “They say of a thief, who has turned evidence against his accomplices, that he is coming all he knows, or that he comes it as strong as a horse.”

As a noun, conk dates back to the early 1800s and meant “a thief who impeaches his accomplices; a spy; informer, or tell tale.” As a verb, it meant “to inform to the police,” and was often verbally called “conking it.” Conk was obsolete by 1900.

An Australian term, circa 1910, for a habitual informer to the police. “A man that drops information; also, he causes men to ‘drop’ or ‘fall’ (be arrested),” noted Sidney J. Baker in 1945’s The Australian Language.

This American term for an informer, which dates back to the 1930s, was derived from finger, meaning “to take the fingerprints of a person.”

This slang term for an informer from around 1910 may have derived from fizgig, Australian for “fishing spear.” Partridge wrote that the word is “Often shorted to fiz(z) … By contemptuous euphemism; not unrelated to thingamyjig.” Don’t confuse it with fiz, a term for a swindler.

Grass—which is short for the word grasshopper (circa 1920) and a rhyme on copper—dates back to the 1930s. The phrase come grass was also used to describe someone who informed to the police.

A phrase used in reference to giving information to police from around 1910.

A 1934 American term meaning “one who turns State’s evidence” because he has “turn[ed] sour on his confederates.”

According to Partridge, this British phrase was “used when someone has been, or is, laying information with the police.” It appeared in 1896’s A Child of the Jago: “Presently, he said: ‘I bin put away this time . . .’ — ‘Wot?’ answered Bill, ‘narkin’ dues is it?’ — Josh nodded. — ’Oo done it then? ’Oo narked?” The phrase was obsolete by 1940, but the word nark lives on.

Nose was a 1789 word for a snitch; the phrases to nose or turn nose, both from around 1809, meant “to give evidence or inform.”

A 1933 term, American in origin, for someone who makes a living as an informant to the police: “That mug has always been on the Erie.” (This term can also mean “shut up! Someone is listening.”)

An incarcerated person who informs on other people in prison. Pigeon and stool pigeon were also terms for informers.

A British term for a king’s informer, dating back to 1735; it was obsolete by 1890.

An American term, circa 1925, that meant “to betray secrets.” It was similar to quack, a verb meaning “to inform to the police,” and quag, “unsafe, not reliable; not to be trusted.”

A noun from around 1915 that meant “the giving of information to police, especially by one criminal against another.” Partridge noted that by 1920, scream as a verb began to mean the same as to squeal. From 1915’s The Melody of Death: “‘I don’t want to hear any more about your conscience,’ said the [police] officer wearily. ‘Do you scream or don’t you?’” By 1925, the term had hopped across the pond from England to the United States.

An American term for an informer who concealed his informing, circa 1925.

”A confusion of snitch and snilch,” according to Partridge, this American term meant “to inform to the police.” It first popped up in 1859 and was obsolete by 1920.

An Australian term, circa 1899, for a spy or informer. Like snickle, it fell out of use by 1920.

Turn chirp was a British term from 1846 for turning the king’s evidence that came from G.W.M. Reynolds’s “The Thieves’ Alphabet,” in The Mysteries of London: “N was for a Nose that turned chirp on his pal.” Partridge wondered: “Does it exist elsewhere?”

An American term, circa 1925. “Contemptuous,” Partridge noted, “‘a snake in the grass.’” It could also be used to refer to people who smoked marijuana.

This term dates back to 1924, and it didn’t just mean “an informer,” but also “an untrusted person, or a weakling, in a gang.”

A version of this story ran in 2014; it has been updated for 2023.

Connecticut’s most popularly used unofficial nickname is the “Nutmeg State.” Yet despite the spiced sobriquet, Connecticut doesn’t actually produce nutmeg. The unusual nickname arose from a bit of confusion (or, depending on the story, some trickery).

During the 18th and 19th centuries, several associations between the state and the spice emerged. Early sailors would bring the valuable seed back on their foreign voyages; over time, Yankee peddlers developed a reputation for selling fake nutmegs made of carved wood.

The first recorded instance of this accusation was in a popular newspaper column of the mid-1800s, “The Sayings and Doings of Samuel Slick, of Slickville,” which appeared in the Novascotian and featured the wry observations of a character created by Thomas Haliburton. In a column entitled “The Preacher that Wandered from His Text,” Samuel Slick accuses a fictional Captain John Allspice of Nahant of having “carried a cargo once there of [50] barrels of nutmegs: well, he put half a bushel of good ones into each end of the barrel, and the rest he filled up with wooden ones, so like the real thing, no soul could tell the difference until HE BIT ONE WITH HIS TEETH, and that he never thought of doing, until he was first BIT HIMSELF. Well, its been a standing joke with them southerners agin us ever since.”

Later, it was suggested that it was the confused Southerners to blame for these mix-ups. In a 1980 issue of Connecticut Magazine, Elizabeth Abbe suggested that Southern customers were unaware that nutmeg had to be grated, and instead wrongly thought that the Yankee merchants were trying to scam them.

She writes, “unknowing buyers may have failed to grate nutmegs, thinking they had to be cracked like a walnut. Nutmegs are wood, and bounce when struck. If [Southern] customers did not grate them, they may very well have accused the Yankees of selling useless ‘wooden’ nutmegs, unaware that they wear down to a pungent powder to season pies and breads.”

Finally, it’s possible that no one tried to sell wooden nutmegs and no one accused anyone of selling wooden nutmegs but that the term simply derived as reference to the fictional Samuel Slick column as shorthand for how shrewd Connecticut residents were—suggesting that, like Captain John Allspice, they would have attempted such a stunt.

Technically, Connecticut’s “official nickname”—there is such a thing—is the “Constitution State” because of historian John Fiske’s claim that the Fundamental Orders of 1638/1639 were the first written constitution in history.

“The Nutmeg State” isn’t the area’s only unofficial nickname. In the past, Connecticut was also dubbed “The Provisions State” because of the food and supplies it provided for the Continental Army during the Revolutionary War. It has also been known as “The Blue Law State” because of its early settlers’ Puritan beliefs, which led to strict rules about vices such as drinking and gambling. And in the early 19th century, Connecticut was known as “The Land of Steady Habits” because its residents had a reputation for their strong morals.

When it comes to referring to someone from a certain state, other New England places like Vermont (“Vermonter”) and Rhode Island (“Rhode Islander”) have it easy. Nicknames for people who live in Connecticut, however, are more of a mouthful. Modern dictionaries have used “Connecticuter;” other older options include “Connecticotian” and “Connecticutensian.” And of course, the simplest option is to just “Nutmegger.”

A version of this story originally ran in 2014; it has been updated for 2023.

George Takei may be best known for his role as Mr. Sulu on Star Trek. But there’s far more to Takei than helming the USS Enterprise. Here are 16 facts about the beloved actor and human rights activist.

In 2007, the asteroid formerly known as “1994 GT9” got a star makeover with its new name: 7307 Takei. Occupying a spot between Mars and Jupiter, 7307 Takei joins asteroids named for fellow Star Trek legends Gene Roddenberry (4659 Roddenberry) and Nichelle Nichols (68410 Nichols). Upon learning of the honor, Takei told the Associated Press, “I am now a heavenly body.”

In 1942, President Franklin Roosevelt issued an executive order that resulted in the incarceration of roughly 120,000 Americans of Japanese descent. They were forced to live in a network of 10 camps located in remote areas. George Takei and his family were incarcerated when George was about 5 years old.

His 1994 autobiography, To the Stars, opens with a remembrance of his childhood years spent with his family in incarceration camps in Arkansas and California. Takei wrote about his mother’s attitude during the train journey to the first camp:

“[We] all faced an unknown future, but the reality before us had to be dealt with. She was determined to make her own certainty out of our collective uncertainty. As certain as the rice balls she had wrapped in seaweed and packed in her hand luggage to supplement the cold train box lunches. She was not going to yield to the monotony that others accepted as inevitable. She had stuffed into her limited luggage space special treats for the children; a few lollipops, packages of animal crackers, and Cracker Jack boxes that contained little surprise toys. She packed story books for Daddy to read to us. Boredom was a foe she was determined to fight.”

And she didn’t just pack snacks—she smuggled in a portable sewing machine to make new clothes as the kids grew. Decades later, Takei and his husband Brad Altman brought “Mama” into their home and cared for her in her final years.

On the TV series Heroes, Takei played Kaito Nakamura, the father of the time- and space-bending Hiro Nakamura. Takei’s character rolls up in a limo bearing the license plate NCC-1701 (the registry number of the original USS Enterprise). Nakamura happens to be the maiden name of Takei’s mother, Fumiko Emily Nakamura. (It’s unclear whether this is just a coincidence; Nakamura is a common Japanese surname.)

George Takei was born on April 20, 1937. His parents settled on the name George in honor of King George VI of England, whose coronation was just weeks away. (Takei’s middle name is Hosato, meaning “village of the bountiful harvest” in Japanese). When George’s brother was born a year later, he was named Henry after King Henry VIII. Their sister was born two years later, and was given the name Nancy, after a family friend, with the middle name Reiko, Japanese for “gracious child.”

After California overturned its ban on same-sex marriage in May 2008, Takei and his now-husband Brad Altman, a media producer, promptly applied for a marriage license and were married on September 14 of that year. Takei posted their vows online, along with photos of the ceremony. Walter Keonig, the actor who played Chekhov on Star Trek, was their best man, and Nichelle Nichols, who played Lt. Uhura, was the matron of honor.

Altman told Larry King in 2009, “I’m not a spokesperson for any cause. I just know that George and I love each other, George is the love of my life, and I think everybody should be allowed to get married.”

Takei has written extensively about his family’s experience in the camps, most recently creating the musical Allegiance that explores this dark chapter in American history. He also co-founded the Japanese American National Museum in Los Angeles.

In 2004, the Japanese government awarded Takei the Order of the Rising Sun, Gold Rays with Rosette to honor his lifelong work promoting U.S.-Japan relations. He wrote on his website, “Never in my wildest imagination did I think I would be flying to Tokyo to be granted a decoration by the emperor of Japan in the Imperial Palace for activities I enjoyed and found personally engaging.”

George Takei is indelibly linked with the phrase, Oh myyy! intoned in his rich voice. In Takei’s book Oh Myyy! (There Goes The Internet), Takei credits Howard Stern for associating him with the phrase. Takei wrote:

“Howard also seemed to have fallen in love with me saying ‘Oh my!’ whenever he said or did something outrageous, like when he asked one voluptuous young woman on his show to take her bra off. ‘Oh my!’ What else could I say? It was even more apt when she did. ‘Oh my!’ indeed. Howard, for some unfathomable reason, thought my reflexive ‘Oh my!’ was hilarious. So he played a recording of it over and over again — even when I wasn’t on the show. I thought it was silly, but it was also admittedly quite droll.

I first realized ‘Oh my!’ was becoming personally linked with me when I went on a national book tour for To the Stars. Young men who had patiently stood in line for my autograph would slip the book toward me with roguishly insinuating smiles and ask me to sign it with ‘Oh my!’ I knew right away they were Howard Stern fans and realized then that it had become my signature phrase.”

Takei voiced the memorable character Ricardio, a “wizard heart” on Adventure Time. Naturally, Ricardio utters Takei’s catchphrase.

For Takei, the choice is obvious: “The Naked Time” is tops. In the episode, crew members lose their inhibitions after being infected by a form of space madness. Naturally, this leads to a shirtless, swashbuckling Sulu having a great time. You can watch “The Naked Time” on Hulu, or just enjoy Takei discussing the episode (and his fencing training) above.

Takei doesn’t just fence; he has run a bunch of marathons as well. He earned his best time in 1989, completing the L.A. Marathon in three hours, 40 minutes.

He stopped running marathons just a few years later, but reflected on the experience in 2006, writing:

“It has been 15 years since my last and final marathon. That was the London Marathon back in 1991. Since that punishing run, I have become a steadfast follower of what is called the Law of Nature. It decrees that as time passes, the mind is supposed to grow with insights as the body gives up its strength. It didn’t take my mind to inform my body that the latter is true. I can’t run 26.2 miles anymore. My days of running marathons are over.”

In his spare time, Takei has contributed reviews of Amazon products, giving us a glimpse of his apparently hilarious home life. Here’s a snippet from his one-star review of an inflatable unicorn horn for their three alley cats:

“Their easy, idyllic life changed—and ours along with it—when Brad ordered ACCOUTREMONTS INFLATABLE UNICORN HORNS FOR CATS. Surprisingly, our cats didn’t resist and seemed almost *delighted* when we strapped the horns on. Once anointed, they sat straight up, gazing pensively at one another, their eyes aglow with a preternatural light. They tipped their heads to the left and to the right before commencing an eerie combination of mewling and rapid jaw chattering ordinarily reserved for moths spotted in the yard.”

His review of “canned unicorn meat” is similarly amazing, including a spot-on Harry Potter reference.

In 2009, Takei voiced a character for the animated series Star Wars: The Clone Wars. This marked the first time a Trek series regular had appeared in the Star Wars universe. This unique position led to him to call for “Star Peace” in a YouTube video (above).

He stepped up the Star Peace effort by pulling an April Fools’ prank in 2013, posting a photo of himself as a Jedi (complete with robe and lightsaber) and writing:

“Friends, I am thrilled to announce that I’ll be starring in the Star Wars reboot directed by JJ Abrams. I’ll be playing Master Ceti Maru, a member of the Jedi High Council. The new film, entitled Star Wars: Galactic Empire, is greenlit and will begin filming sometime early next year. It is truly a moment for The Star Alliance. Thanks to all my fans for their decades of support.”

Alas, this was just a joke.

Although Takei’s Facebook and Twitter pages are his main online outlets, he also hosted a YouTube show with AARP called Takei’s Take. In the episode above, Takei explains online dating. Oh my!

In 2011, after the Tennessee state legislature brought up a bill that would prohibit teachers from discussing homosexuality in the classroom, Takei took action. The bill was popularly known as the “Don’t Say Gay” bill, and Takei suggested that instead of saying “gay,” people could simply use the word Takei instead. His his public service announcement explaining the situation is above. The Tennessee bill failed to pass.

In Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country, we learned that Mr. Sulu had become Captain Sulu. Yes, he commanded the USS Excelsior, the first Star Trek ship with a transwarp drive. Here’s to you, Captain Sulu.

In the days before sophisticated medical equipment could definitely determine when someone had passed from this world to the next, many people feared being buried alive—and enacted strict post-passing protocols to ensure it didn’t happen. In Buried Alive: The Terrifying History of Our Most Primal Fear, author Jan Bondeson looked at some of the measures taken to guard against being buried alive, including coffins that featured a bell or flag that would warn passers-by of any movement down below. While many reported cases of burials of the living were exaggerated, Bondeson did unearth a few cases of people who were put in their graves while still breathing. 

In 1822, a 40-year-old German shoemaker was laid to rest, but there were questions about his death from the start. Although the shoemaker’s family confirmed his passing—he looked dead, they said—no one could detect any stench or rigidity in the cadaver. Still, the funeral went on as planned. But as the gravedigger was dispersing the last shovels full of dirt onto the grave, he heard a knocking from below.

Reversing his process and now removing the earth as quickly as possible, the gravedigger found the shoemaker moving inside his coffin. His arms were drawn upward, he wasn’t cold, and when an attending physician opened a vein, blood flowed all over the shroud. Over the course of three days, resuscitation attempts were made, but all efforts were fruitless. The shoemaker was declared dead once more and laid to rest for a second and final time.

In 1915, a 30-year-old South Carolinian named Essie Dunbar suffered a fatal attack of epilepsy—or so everyone thought. After declaring her dead, doctors placed Dunbar’s body in a coffin and scheduled her funeral for the next day so that her sister, who lived out of town, would still be able to pay respects. But Dunbar’s sister didn’t travel fast enough; she arrived only to see the last clods of dirt thrown atop the grave. This didn’t sit well with Dunbar’s sister, who wanted to see Essie one last time. She ordered that the body be removed. When the coffin lid was opened, Essie sat up and smiled at all around her. She lived for another 47 years.

In 1867, a 24-year-old French woman named Philomèle Jonetre contracted cholera. Not long after, she was presumed dead. As was custom, a priest arrived to administer the last sacraments, and Jonetre’s body was placed in a coffin. Only 16 hours later, her body was lowered six feet underground.

Like the shoemaker’s case, a gravedigger heard Jonetre knocking against her coffin lid and promptly removed her from the earth. Though no breath was apparent when a lit candle was placed under her nose, distinct rhythmical sounds could be heard in her chest, and she exhibited some muscle contraction and eyelid twitching. This didn’t last long, however; Jonetre was officially pronounced dead the following day and was buried a second time.

Bondeson calls the case of 19-year-old Frenchman Angelo Hays “probably the most remarkable twentieth-century instance of alleged premature burial.” In 1937, Hays wrecked his motorcycle, with the impact throwing the young man from his machine headfirst into a brick wall. Hays’s face was so disfigured that his parents weren’t allowed to view the body. After locating no pulse, the doctors declared Hays dead, and three days later, he was buried. But because of an investigation helmed by a local insurance company, his body was exhumed two days after the funeral.

Much to those at the forensic institute’s surprise, Hays was still warm. He had been in a deep coma and his body’s diminished need for oxygen had kept him alive. After numerous surgeries and some rehabilitation, Hays recovered completely. In fact, he became a French celebrity: People traveled from afar to speak with him, and in the 1970s he went on tour with a (very souped-up) security coffin he invented featuring thick upholstery, a food locker, toilet, and even a library.

A version of this story originally ran in 2014; it has been updated for 2023.

In English, we have a few different ways to write the sound of a kiss: muah, smack, xxx. They get the idea across, but none of them imitate the actual sound of a kiss. Other languages have the same problem. In Thai it’s chup; in German, schmatz; in Greek, mats-muts; in Malayalam, umma; and in Japanese, chu.

There are two common elements in kiss words across languages. First, a kiss word will usually have a sound made by pressing the lips together (m, p, b), which approximates the lip pursing of a real kiss. In addition, or instead, it may have a sharp, “noisy” sound (ch, ts, k) that approximates the air intake “click” of a real kiss.

What’s needed for a true kiss sound is a way to represent the smacking sound caused by the intake of air through closed lips. Fortunately, linguistics has one.

The kiss sound is similar a bilabial lingual ingressive click. “Bilabial” because of the lips, “lingual ingressive” because the air intake is caused by a pressure drop in the mouth caused by action of the tongue (in other words, sucking), and “click” for the pop of release from the pressure change. There are languages in the Tuu and Kx’a language families of Southern Africa that use this sound.

The International Phonetic Alphabet, the standard for representing the sounds of the world’s spoken languages, has a symbol for it: ʘ. (There are also videos demonstrating how to pronounce it.) Technically, to show the way peoples’ lips protrude when they pucker up, the best way to write a kiss sound would be ʘʷ.

A version of this story originally ran in 2014; it has been updated for 2023.

It’s a big world of flora and fauna out there, and scientists need to classify and label it. They’ve come up with a lot of terms that are humorous on purpose (Ytu brutus, Inglorious mediocris, Roberthoffstetteria nationalgeographica, etc.) but there are a few that are perfectly innocent Latin or Greekisms that just happen to sound like something else.

Are you ready to get immature? Here are 11 naughty-sounding scientific names and what they really mean.

This genus of snails was named for their cylindrical shells that look like tiny sausages. It comes from Latin farcire, “to stuff.” A fartum is a stuffed thing, and a fartulum is a little stuffed thing, a.k.a. a tiny sausage. It would make an excellent science fair project topic for a second-grader.

Turdus is a genus of birds called thrushes (it means “thrush” in Latin). Maximus means “biggest” or “greatest.” This Turdus maximus, a.k.a. Tibetan blackbird, is a beauty, don’t you think?

The Colon genus of beetles originally got its name from kolon, the Greek word for “limb” or “joint.” While asperatum brings to mind inhaling, it actually means roughened, from the Latin asper, for “rough.” Just a rough joint here. No reason to giggle.

Bugeranus is a genus with only one species, the Bugeranus carunculata or wattled crane. Bugeranus comes from the Greek bous (“ox”), and geranus (“crane”). This wading bird is also known as Grus carunculata, a more widely used but much less funny scientific name.

The ochre-collared monarch is named for Arses, the ancient king of Persia. This bird lives in the islands (insulae in Latin) of Indonesia and Papua New Guinea. Isn’t it regal-looking? A real royal arses.

The pitch pine is a very sturdy pine tree native to the eastern U.S.

In Latin, an areola was a small open space, like a garden or courtyard. In botany, areolatus is used to describe patterns of small clearings or spots. The -anus suffix in Latin makes an adjective out of a place. If you’re from Rome, you’re Romanus. If you’re from Texas, like this spotted leafcutter, you are Texananus.

Behold the American robin, a migratory thrush. This Turdus gets around.

The Botryotinia genus name of these fungi comes from botrus, ancient Greek for “cluster of grapes.” The species name honors famous German mycologist Karl Wilhelm Gottlieb Leopold Fuckel.

We call this the giant stag beetle because it looks like it has horns. Dorcus is Latin for “antelope.” This Dorcus is not to be messed with.

The rufous-sided warbling finch may have some worries about its health (it is a threatened species), but hypochondria comes from the Greek for “under the ribs,” where this beauty has a lovely red marking. As for Poospiza, it comes from poa, ancient Greek for “grass,” and spiza, meaning “finch.”

A version of this story ran in 2014; it has been updated for 2023.

Pimentos start out in life as a variety of chili pepper called “cherry peppers.” Small and red (hence the name), they are sweeter than bell peppers and very mild.

Most people use pimento as a garnish, either in the center of a green olive or mixed into cheese. Green olives fresh off the tree are bitter in flavor, so they are traditionally cured in brine before packaging. Even then, their flavor is more palatable when a touch of something else is added, and in the U.S., the most popular “something” is pimento.

Until the early 1960s, pimentos were sliced and then stuffed into olives by hand. The Sadrym company of Seville, Spain, introduced the first automatic olive-stuffing machine in 1962, and is the largest manufacturer of such equipment today. In fact, most pimento-pushing machines are still made in Spain, despite the fact that the favorite olive insert in that country is anchovy.

The most modern machines use a mixture of mashed pimentos combined with mixture containing a binding agent like gelatin or guar gum that is formed into large sheets and then sliced into strips and fed into the stuffer on large rolls. The stuffing machine—which must be very precisely calibrated—first cuts a plug the size of the pit in one end of the olive and pushes the pit out using an X-shaped punch on the opposite end of the fruit. Then the pitted olive moves to the next station, where a strip of pimento is cut and injected into the cavity. Higher-end brands, meanwhile, still hand-stuff the sliced pimentos directly into the olives.

A version of this story originally ran in 2014; it has been updated for 2023.

As the home of some of the greatest works of art produced by humankind, the Sistine Chapel in Vatican City is a popular tourist destination (to put it mildly). If you’ve been one of the 4 million annual visitors to the famous landmark, you’ve probably learned of one aspect of the room filled with Michelangelo’s beautiful, biblical frescoes that tends to come as a surprise to first-time guests.

There’s no photography or video allowed in the Sistine Chapel.

Yes, despite the rules that encourage quiet contemplation of the fantastic, eye-popping art that adorns nearly every inch of the walls and ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, visitors to the chapel will find their experience peppered with terse shouts of “No photo! No video!” from security guards. The prohibition against photography has been in place for several decades, and while many assume that the no-photography rule is in place to prevent the flashing of cameras from affecting the art, the real reason dates back to the restoration of the chapel that began in 1980 and took nearly 20 years to complete.

When Vatican officials decided to undertake a comprehensive restoration of Michelangelo’s art in the chapel, the price tag for such an endeavor prompted them to seek outside assistance to fund the project. In the end, the highest bidder was Nippon Television Network Corporation of Japan, whose $3 million offering (which eventually ballooned to $4.2 million) was unmatched by any entity in Italy or the U.S.

In return for funding the renovation, Nippon TV received the exclusive rights to photography and video of the restored art, as well as photos and recordings of the restoration process by photographer Takashi Okamura, who was commissioned by Nippon TV. While many initially scoffed at the deal, the high-resolution photos provided by Nippon offered a hyper-detailed peek behind all of the scaffolding that hid each stage of restoration, and eventually won over some critics of the arrangement.

As a result of the deal, Nippon produced multiple documentaries, art books, and other projects featuring their exclusive photos and footage of the Sistine Chapel restoration, including several celebrated collections of the photographic surveys that informed the project.

The ban on photography within the chapel remains in effect despite the waning of the terms of Nippon’s deal. In 1990, it was revealed that Nippon’s commercial exclusivity on photos expired three years after each stage of the restoration was completed. For example, photos of Michelangelo’s epic depiction of the Last Judgment were no longer subject to Nippon’s copyright as of 1997, because that stage of the restoration was completed in 1994.

For the record, Nippon has stated that their photo ban did not apply to “ordinary tourists,” but for simplicity’s sake—lest some professional photog disguise themself in Bermuda shorts and a fanny pack—authorities made it an across-the-board policy.

The “No photos! No video!” rule remains in place for the Sistine Chapel (though as some recent visitors can attest, its enforcement isn’t exactly strict). Given the damage that can be caused by thousands of camera flashes going off in the chapel each day, it’s no surprise that Vatican officials decided not to end the ban when Nippon’s contract expired.

After all, the chapel houses some of the greatest art in the world—and a gift shop stocked with souvenir photos.

A version of this story ran in 2019; it has been updated for 2023.