Category: Bazaar News

For at least 500 years—and maybe more—pigeon fanciers have bred wonderfully bizarre-looking pigeons. Today, there hundreds of breeds and colors, and, just like cats and dogs, there are competitions to see who most closely matches their “breed standard.” Here are some of the gems of the fancy pigeon world.

These flashy birds are probably the most recognizable and well-known of the fancy pigeons. Their peacock-like tails, prominent chests, and curved necks are a hit in bird shows and fairground livestock shows around the world.

They serve more purpose than just flashiness, though. Racing or homing pigeon breeders often keep fantails at the front of the dovecote while they’re training their new prospects. The highly visible fantails guide the young ones home like a beacon. Some fantail breeds have less erect tail feathers (such as the Garden Fantails) and are much more capable in flight than the Exhibition Fantails. All of them are missing the oil preening gland at the base of their tails though, so they can be prone to get cold when they get wet.

Possibly one of the oldest breeds of pigeon bred for its looks (in addition to its utility as a food source), the Scandaroon is believed to date back to the time of Alexander the Great. They have large, downward-curved bills, which are covered by a large wattle (knobby fleshy covering) on top, their eyes are bright and accented, and surrounded by well-developed ceres (a fleshy red ring). They’re part white, or piebald, and larger than your average street pigeon.

These were named because of their “mane,” which resembled the cowls of Jacobin monks back when the breed first gained popularity. These days, the mane of most Jacobin types is so pronounced you can’t see the head of the pigeon from the side.

Aside from their giant mane, these are slender, shapely creatures, with long legs, a slim tail, and an upright posture. The birds who are most “showy” and who like to fluff up their feathers and strut are highly valued in competition.

More Articles About Pigeons:

These breeds are the earliest known pigeons to be bred solely for ornamental purposes, and not for meat. The curly top flight feathers appear to be almost lacy, but come at the expense of effective flight. While they’re able to fly much better than chickens, and can fly “normally” to escape predators or get out of a rut, they have to expend more energy than your average pigeon.

This factor, along with their larger size, means these birds generally prefer to walk or run, rather than fly. These fancy feathers also mean that the frillback breeds have no water resistance and are highly susceptible to cold if wet, like the fantails. The frillback mutation is autosomal dominant, so if one parent has just one copy of the gene, there’s a 50/50 chance that the offspring will have frilled feathers. The dominance of this gene means that the frill trait has been transferred to some types and families of other fancy breeds.

All pigeons inflate their crops (an organ in their throat that grinds up food) while strutting in front of others, but the croppers take this to the extreme.

Their crops are highly developed, and they love to puff their chests out when they’re in play, and not just when they’re trying to find a mate. Despite what looks like a top-heavy bird, the fact that the crop is filled with air means that they’re not going to tip over at any moment.

Most Croppers have been bred to have a long back, stand up straight, and for their tendency to puff up. Some have other body shapes, but all are bred with the inflatable crop in mind. These breeds actually have more vertebrae and a larger ribcage than the Rock dove. Croppers are also some of the more affectionate pigeons, known to bond and play with their handlers.

Bred to look like their namesake, the “Hen” breeds, such as the small German Modena and the massive King Pigeon, look much like chickens on stilts. Their short tails are upright, and their plump bodies and necks curve in such a way that they look more like poultry than pigeons. The larger members of this family are generally ground-dwellers and not prone to fly off, and are often allowed outside in chicken-like coops.

This is one of the most striking “color” breeds. Their iridescent bodies and contrasting wings create an impressive sight, and it’s not hard to see why this breed was the most popular fancy pigeon in Germany and the Rhine for decades.

While the color specifications for the breed standard have changed over the years, the body type has remained largely the same: a stately, large bird, with a well-formed head and proportionate beak. There are many color breeds out there, and they’re some of the most popular “starter” pigeons.

This diverse group of breeds is showcased primarily for their odd vocalizations and calls, and is known as the “voice” pigeons. Some of the breeds sound trumpet-like, while others make drumming or laughing sounds, but all have sounds that differ from your average pigeon.

Though their sounds are important, they’re also judged on looks. Some, like the Arabian trumpeter, look like a fairly standard pigeon. Others, like the Bokhara trumpeter, look like their head was chopped off and they squished another pigeon beneath their ostentatiously-feathered feet. (An English trumpeter is featured above.)

One of the most popular and prized show birds in the Victorian era was a “performance bird”—the Almond Tumbler. Like other Tumblers, the birds were originally bred because of their curious flight patterns. After flying very high up, they do a series of very fast, very impressive back flips, before flying straight up again. Of course, this bizarre flight would make them prime prey for hawks and falcons, but for their breeders, the most brilliant feathers and fastest spins are exactly what’s wanted for the next generation.

One family of this breed, the Short-Faced Tumblers (of which the Almond Tumbler is a member), is loved for its very “dainty” look, but this look is at the expense of beak length; the tiny beaks of the family (and the Short-Faced types in other breeds and families) mean that they can no longer effectively feed their young, and the squabs must be hand-raised.

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

When traveling, you might notice some signs on the highway that read “speed limit enforced by aircraft.” Those signs may conjure images of the cops scrambling a team of jet fighters to take a driver with a lead foot off the road. In reality, it’s a little less exciting.

Take Pennsylvania, for example. Certain lengths of highway that are known to be trouble spots for speeding are targeted by the State Police Aerial Reconnaissance Enforcement (SPARE); other states will have their own names for similar programs. Those targeted stretches of road are marked with start and finish lines at a set distance from each other. Two officers—a pilot and a spotter—cruise over these stretches in a small fixed-wing aircraft (other states may use helicopters as well).

When a vehicle crosses the start line, the spotter uses a specially designed stopwatch (some police departments also use VASCAR systems) to clock the car’s speed through the enforcement zone. If they determine that a vehicle is speeding, the officers in the plane radio another officer on the ground, who pulls the vehicle over and issues a ticket.

Scanning for speeders from the above isn’t as common as it once was, thanks to improved technology like radar and Lidar. Budget cuts have also taken a toll on the practice. “We don’t necessarily set up as many specific speed enforcement details as we did 10 or 15 years ago, predominantly because of the advent of Lidar,” Jim Andrews, a California Highway Patrol pilot, told KQED. “But there are still circumstances where we are definitely valuable, where traditional ground enforcement may not work.”

Several states have severely reduced or essentially abandoned their operations. But that doesn’t mean you should ignore those “speed limit enforced by aircraft” signs when you drive past them. Depending on which state you’re passing through, there’s still a chance someone may be clocking your speed from the sky.

A version of this story originally ran in 2013; it has been updated for 2023.

Nothing says summer like heading to an amusement park. Whether there are long lines or not, going to one can be a chance to experience new thrills and heights (literally, in some cases) just for the pure fun of it.

But you might wonder: Where exactly do all these rides come from? Below, we’ve put together the history of some of the most beloved carnival rides of all-time, including the log flume, bumper cars, roller coasters, and more.

The Ferris wheel made its debut at the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago. At least that’s what George Washington Gale Ferris, Jr. always said. One year earlier, William Somers designed and built three wooden wheels—each measuring 50 feet in diameter—in New York and New Jersey. Both men owed a debt to the similar, yet awkwardly named, wooden “pleasure wheels” invented in 17th century Bulgaria.

Patented in 1914, the first Whip was made for Coney Island. The attraction—which tamely slings riders around an oval—is rare nowadays, but you can find original models scattered around some old-school parks.

Carousels with wooden horses were first used to give horseback riding lessons to Turkish and Arabian cavalry members. When crusaders returned to Europe, they brought the device back with them. The spinning attraction became especially popular in France, where 17th century riders tried to pierce a target while moving at high speed. The power source? Actual horses!

The giant, revolving ride that moves around, up, and down in a wave-like fashion was originally a German attraction known as the Trabant. American innovators brought a bigger and better version stateside and the rest is history.

The ride that launched a thousand stomach-aches sprang from the mind of woodworker and waterslide maker Herbert W. Sellner in 1926. It made its debut at the Minnesota State Fair one year later. The story goes that Sellner experimented with the ride’s design by placing a chair on his kitchen table, making his son sit in it, and then rocking the table.

Although the first patent went to LaMarcus Thompson in 1885, he wasn’t the first person to make a roller coaster. Modern roller coasters descended from “Russian Mountains,” winter sled rides that were popular in 17th century St. Petersburg. (Situated on icy hills, the sleds topped out at 200 feet!). Meanwhile, in the States, a Pennsylvania mining company constructed a “gravity railroad” in 1827 to move coal. But on slow workdays, they charged thrill-seekers to take it for a spin.

The Twist. The Gee Whizzer. The Grasscutter. The Scrambler (as it is officially known) goes by many names. This frightening but fun ride was first produced in the UK in 1959. Since then, each decade has given it a new name and pattern of motion, but the thrill’s the same.

People have been getting soaked on these flat-bottom boats since 1884. J.P. Newburg invented one that ran along a greased wooden track down the side of a hill in Rock Island, Illinois. It splash-landed in the Rock River and was tugged back to shore by an attendant. It’s been an amusement park staple—and a great way to cool off on summer days—ever since.

It’s easy to imagine someone looking at a carousel and thinking it may be too tame. What if we took out the horses, replaced them with swings, and raised the whole thing a few hundred feet? Now we’re talking! Although swing rides were popularized in the 1970s, they’ve been around for decades; postcards of California’s Idora Park show a wave swinger as early as 1908.

First seen at the UK’s Blackpool Pleasure Beach in 1906, the ride is a high tower with a curling slide nestled against it. Customers climb stairs inside the tower before riding down to the bottom.

Invented in 1933, the Loop-O-Plane ride consists of two “plane” compartments on either side of a tower that act as counterweights as they loop around one another. It was originally a flight simulator—the Cuban government even ordered some to train their pilots—but it didn’t really take off until civilians jumped in for a quick, fun ride.

Electric cars may seem like a modern advancement, but we’ve been driving them—and more importantly, crashing them—for a century. There’s some dispute over who invented the road-raging carnival favorite, but one thing all scholars can agree on: how difficult early versions were to steer.

The modern log flume has been around since the early 20th century, albeit in more sedate versions. Old mill rides used tracks to guide boats through dark tunnels and over a few bunny hills. But as rollercoasters became wilder, those old mill rides had one direction to go: wetter. The splash-intensive modern versions first began surfacing in the early 1960s.

Unmarried couples of the late 19th century needed a place to canoodle in public. Love—or, at least hormones—found a way with the boom of so-called carnival “dark rides.” As couples wound through the Tunnel of Love by water or tracks, they were treated to alternating moments of romance (to set the mood) and fright (to encourage an arm over the shoulder).

Until the 1970s, mechanical bulls were strictly used to train cowboys and rodeo competitors. Early practice bulls were basically large barrels suspended from four ropes (people could jostle the barrel by tugging on the ropes or using a pulley mechanism.) The mechanical version, however, was popularized by a Texas businessman who wanted to make his bars more popular; the 1980 honky-tonk drama Urban Cowboy (which starred John Travolta and Debra Winger) helped make them even more trendy.

A version of this story was originally published in 2013 and has been updated for 2023.

German is known for its extra-long compound words. When Mark Twain complained that some German words were “so long they have a perspective,” he was thinking of words like Freundschaftsbezeigungen (“demonstrations of friendship”) and Generalstaatsverordnetenversammlungen (“general states representatives meetings”).

Long German words were in the news in 2013 when many sources reported that Germany had “lost its longest word” because the European Union removed a law from its books called Rindfleischetikettierungsüberwachungsaufgabenübertragungsgesetz (“the law for the delegation of monitoring beef labeling”).

But Germany had not in fact lost its longest word, because the process for forming these words is an active, productive part of the language, and the potential exists for creating words even longer, if so needed in the moment. How does that process work?

This lively animation takes you, step by step, through what’s involved in creating Rhababerbarbarabarbarbarenbartbarbierbierbarbärbel, a completely valid (and probably never before uttered) word.

The video is in German, but that shouldn’t deter you. The artwork makes it pretty clear what’s happening, meaningwise. Here are a few clues to help you follow the steps:

1. There’s a girl named Barbara.
2. She is known for her rhubarb cake.
3. So they call her “Rhubarb Barbara.”
4. To sell her cake, she opens a bar.
5. It is frequented by three barbarians.
6. They have beards.
7. When they want to get their beards groomed they go to the barber.
8. He goes to their bar to eat some cake, and then wants to drink a special beer.
9. You can only get his special beer at a special bar that sells it.
10. Where the bartender’s name is Barbie.
11. She’s the Barbie of the bar where the beer of the beard barber for the barbarians of Rhubarb’s Barbara’s bar is sold. But all in one word.
12. At the end, the barbarians, the barber, Barbie, and Barbara all go to the bar for a beer. You might need one too after this. Prost!

Now that you know how really long German words are constructed, read up on some laugh-out-loud German insults, from Bananenbieger (“banana bender,” a person who can’t seem to focus) to Hosenscheißer (or “trouser-pooper”—a coward).

A version of this story ran in 2013; it has been updated for 2023.

There was nothing understated about the ’80s, and the scents of the decade—both designer and drugstore—definitely reflected its brashness. Big hair, boxy shoulder pads, and power suits had nothing on the big, powerful, and melodramatically potent perfumes that made a grand entrance long before their wearers.

“The American woman has acquired a taste for eaux de toilettes and colognes that are unusually strong and lasting,” The New York Times reported in 1988. What The Times didn’t mention was that many men’s fragrances had become equally brazen.

It wasn’t only the robust perfumes themselves that gave shape to an era, but also the controversy of their names, the decadence of their ad campaigns, and their ability to spark rabid loyalty in consumers (so much so that one celebrity was even buried with a bottle of his favorite eau de ’80s.) Here are 11 bodacious scents that were the quintessence of the post-Me Decade.

Yves Saint Laurent debuted Opium, a “warm floral” fragrance with notes of cloves, rose, myrrh, and sandalwood, in 1977. For its launch party, the fashion house rented a ship called the Peking to sail New York’s harbor—with Truman Capote as its captain—draped in rich red, gold, and purple, while an enormous statue of the Buddha rounded out what the media would describe as an “Oriental theme.” The Los Angeles Times reported a Studio 54-like atmosphere: “More people were snorting cocaine in the bathroom than ingesting 13,000 oysters, clams, and mussels on the disco deck. People were actually having sex on a lower deck.” Diana Vreeland was on board the ship, and model Jerry Hall, who began dating Mick Jagger around the same time, was the face of the ad campaign.

Despite the perfume’s heady air of sex, drugs and glamour, not everyone wanted to join the party. Offended by the name, a group of Chinese Americans formed the American Coalition Against “Opium” and Drug Abuse and boycotted the perfume, claiming that Yves Saint Laurent was glamorizing drug use and showing insensitivity to the Opium Wars that took place in 19th-century China.

The controversy did little to curb the perfume’s market appeal, and the spicy, lingering scent became an ’80s powerhouse, paving the way for equally audacious perfumes. Opium hadn’t, however, experienced its last brush with controversy. Other groups would complain of Opium’s tawdry sexuality and glorification of drug use well into the 2000s.

Perhaps inspired by YSL’s envelope-pushing sexuality in its ads, Calvin Klein’s Obsession became synonymous with commercial eroticism. The first television ads, shot in 1985 by legendary photographer Richard Avedon, depicted a dystopic minimalist set and four tableaux in which different people describe their obsession with a beautiful woman. The faux poetry and melodramatic scenes would have become instant memes, had memes been a thing in the mid-’80s. According to Tom Reichert in his book The Erotic History of Advertising, Obsession launched not long after Klein’s divorce, during a period when the designer was admittedly engaging in “anything goes” promiscuity.

Teen fragrance Love’s Baby Soft went so far over the line of decency with its first ad campaign in the ’70s that you’d expect Chris Hanson to come out from behind the curtain.

But Love’s Baby Soft, sold at drugstores nationwide, managed to become a true ’80s power perfume among the tween (or “preteen,” as the age group was called back then) and teen set. It probably helped that the perfume itself smelled like the lid had blasted off an economy-size bottle of baby powder and heavily dusted the person wearing it. It also helped that by 1980, Love’s changed its ad campaign to depict tween girls hanging at an innocent party with tween boys.

Christian Dior’s 1985 perfume Poison had an immediately recognizable, indescribably heavy, and mutable smell like overpowering grape-flavored gum. (Officially, it had notes of orange blossom, plum, tuberose, jasmine, amber, and musk.) It was a scent that elbowed its way into a room, monopolized the conversation, and, maybe charmingly, overstayed its welcome. It could be deliciously intoxicating and nauseatingly headache-inducing. It could smell like the best combination of sex and danger, or it could smell like that aging aunt who flirted with all your boyfriends.

In a 1972 trend piece about musk oil having recently become popular, Bernard Mitchell, then-president of Jovan, Inc., opined, “The scent will stay with you maybe four days. It doesn’t wash off when you swim or bathe.” Based on its potency alone, Jovan Musk was certainly positioned to transition from a mere patchouli alternative to an ’80s power perfume. Then the Rolling Stones entered the chat and Jovan Musk truly became a contender.

In 1981, Jovan paid the Rolling Stones $1 million to put the brand’s name on the tickets sold during the band’s “Tattoo You” tour of America. It was the first brand to sponsor a rock tour, and the practice soon became a music industry standard. “Here was early evidence of the Stones’ redoubtable refusal to let dignity get in the way of making cash,” wrote The Guardian rock critic Alexis Petridis in 2009.

Jovan didn’t stop at celebrity endorsements in its appeal to ’80s consumers; it also jumped on the sexy train. After creating an over-the-top 1984 commercial (above), Jovan hired Adrian Lyne, director of steamy ’80s blockbusters Flashdance, 9½ Weeks, and Fatal Attraction, in 1987 to create a commercial with the theme “What is sexy?” The question was answered with 29 provocative images in 30 dizzying seconds.

While garish sexuality was practically a guaranteed seller of scents in the ’80s, unabashed status was its own powerful market force. And nothing said status like Giorgio.

Bearing the name and signature yellow-and-white stripes of one of Beverly Hills’ most exclusive boutiques, the strong, sweet, and instantly distinguishable floral scent of Giorgio could be yours at only $150 an ounce. And the brand didn’t even have to pay for celebrity endorsement. Giorgio boutique owner Fred Hayman told The New York Times that, as soon as the perfume launched, Hollywood “tastesetters” began wearing it and telling others about it. The newspaper pointed out in the same 1986 story that the perfume was now everywhere: “Farrah Fawcett wears it, Jacqueline Bisset wears it, even Michael Jackson wears it. It has become so recognizable that doormen and cab drivers have been known to call out ‘Giorgio’ when women wearing it walk by.”

Not everyone in New York took a nose full of Giorgio with the same good humor as the city’s doormen and cab drivers. Restaurateur Richard Lavin of Lavin’s Restaurant and Wine Bar banned the perfume specifically (along with any patchouli-scented substances) from his 39th Street establishment, telling the Los Angeles Times in 1986 that he had received letters of support from all over the country.

With designer perfumes like Giorgio having become so strong and so distinguishable that one whiff allowed for instant brand recognition, packaging mattered less and the market was flooded with olfactory copycats. Though designers tried to tamp down on imitators, they couldn’t because scents in perfumes can’t be trademarked.

One of the leading lines of mimickers, branded Designer Imposters by a Connecticut company called Parfums de Coeur, became a drugstore fixture. Among the first products were an Opium imposter called Ninja, an Obsession knockoff called Confess, and a Giorgio imitator whose aluminum spray can boasted the slogan, “If you like Giorgio, you’ll love Primo!”

If Designer Imposters was the mass market’s answer to the primo classiness of women’s designer perfumes, then Brut was its answer to those pour homme. Though the cologne initially launched in the early ’60s (Elvis was a fan), everything about Brut made it an ’80s power player. Brut champagne was the inspiration for its vibe as well as its bottle’s design (even though that bottle was sometimes part of a value pack that included soap-on-a-rope). It was strong in an eyebrow-singeing way. And it teemed with the promise of sex. “We all saw the TV ads. Joe Namath used Brut, and we all knew how Joe did in the babe department. Why, the poor man could barely walk,” joked journalist Rob Hiaasen in The Baltimore Sun.

Launched in 1985, Estee Lauder’s Beautiful stood conspicuously apart from other ’80s perfumes. Though it was strong (it was a blend of 1000 flowers, plus citrus and wood notes), it wasn’t as bold or sexually aggressive as scents like Opium, Poison, or Giorgio. And its ad campaign reflected its relatively prim attitude. Instead of featuring the naked bodies, stalking panthers and Garden of Eden images, Beautiful was all about weddings. Its TV commercials, like the one above starring a young Paulina Porizkova, always played on some variation of a bridal theme. The brand also staged “weddings” in department stores to promote the fragrance.

Though its message was comparatively square, the perfume found a fan in Andy Warhol. The year the scent first emerged, Warhol was, according to The New York Times, spotted at a party with a bottle of the perfume, spraying it liberally about the room. “It’s all in the name, you know. People can say you smell Beautiful,” he said. “I was thinking it might be fun to start my own perfume line and call it Stink.” Warhol was buried with a bottle of Beautiful when he died in 1987.

Beautiful wound up being ahead of the curve. A few years later, Calvin Klein introduced Eternity, a scent with a very different message from that of Obsession. “Spirituality … love … marriage … commitment. I think that is the feeling that is happening all across the country,” Klein said at the time.

Though the adult perfume market was morphing by the end of the decade, teenage fragrances remained the same. Debbie Gibson launched Electric Youth in 1989 to coincide with her same-named album, song, and music video. The perfume was just as strong as Love’s Baby Soft, only this one smelled like nuclear-level cotton candy. Gibson was one of the very first celebrities to have a perfume created specifically to complement the launch of an artistic endeavor, and today, it’s commonplace: Everyone from Britney Spears to Justin Bieber to Nicki Minaj have shilled signature scents alongside similarly themed albums.

Though it launched in 1982, designer Guy Laroche’s clean-smelling Drakkar Noir didn’t seem to get the same attention as heavier designer colognes like Obsession for Men or Giorgio’s men’s offering. But in the late ’80s, it seemed to be everywhere, possibly because, like Beautiful, it was a little subtler. While Joe Namath strutted about town collecting babes in the name of Brut, the Drakkar Noir man was an aloof type, attracting women with his quiet, brooding magnetism. It was a cool, mysterious, and sexy status scent that paired well with Lamborghinis and cigars.

A version of this story was published in 2013; it has been updated for 2023.

When Americans sit down with their families for Thanksgiving dinner, most of them will probably gorge themselves on the same traditional menu, with turkey, cranberry sauce, stuffing, and pumpkin pie taking up the most real estate on the plates. How did these dishes become the national “what you eat on Thanksgiving” options, though? Let’s take a look at the history of Thanksgiving foods.

It’s not necessarily because the Pilgrims did it. Turkey may not have been on the menu at the 1621 celebration by the Pilgrims of Plymouth that is considered the first Thanksgiving. There were wild turkeys in the Plymouth area, though, as colonist William Bradford noted in his book Of Plymouth Plantation.

However, the best existing account of the Pilgrims’ harvest feast comes from colonist Edward Winslow, the primary author of Mourt’s Relation: A Journal of the Pilgrims at Plymouth. Winslow’s first-hand account of the first Thanksgiving included no explicit mention of turkey. He does, however, mention the Pilgrims gathering wild fowl for the meal, although that could just as likely have meant ducks or geese.

When it comes to why we eat turkey on Thanksgiving today, it helps to know a bit about the history of the holiday. While the idea of giving thanks and celebrating the harvest was popular in certain parts of the country, it was by no means an annual national holiday until the 19th century. Presidents would occasionally declare a Thanksgiving Day celebration, but the holiday hadn’t completely caught on nationwide. Many of these early celebrations included turkey; Alexander Hamilton once remarked, “No citizen of the U.S. shall refrain from turkey on Thanksgiving Day.”

When Bradford’s journals were reprinted in 1856 after being lost for at least half a century, they found a receptive audience with advocates who wanted Thanksgiving turned into a national holiday. Because Bradford wrote of how the colonists had hunted wild turkeys during the autumn of 1621 and because turkey is a uniquely North American (and scrumptious) bird, it gained traction as the Thanksgiving meal of choice for Americans after President Abraham Lincoln declared Thanksgiving a national holiday in 1863.

Moreover, there were pragmatic reasons for eating turkey rather than, say, chicken at a feast like Thanksgiving. The birds are large enough that they can feed a table full of hungry family members, and unlike chickens or cows, they don’t serve an additional purpose like laying eggs or making milk. Unlike pork, turkey wasn’t so common that it seemed like an unsuitable choice for a special occasion, either.

While the cranberries the Pilgrims needed were probably easy to come by, making cranberry sauce requires sugar. Sugar was a rare luxury at the time of the first Thanksgiving, so while revelers may have eaten cranberries, it’s unlikely that the feast featured the divisive sauce. What’s more, it’s not even entirely clear that cranberry sauce had been invented yet.

It was not until 1663 that visitors to the area started commenting on a sweet sauce made of boiled cranberries that accompanied meat. Amelia Simmons suggested serving cranberry sauce with roast turkey in American Cookery, the first American cookbook, in 1796. After Ocean Spray developed its mass harvest techniques—which damaged a lot of the fruit—the company began smushing the cranberries into the jiggly canned delight you’ll find on many Thanksgiving tables today.

Neither sweet potatoes nor white potatoes were available to the colonists in 1621, so the Pilgrims definitely didn’t feast on everyone’s favorite tubers. And they certainly weren’t putting marshmallows on them.

Simmons’s cookbook did feature a recipe for “potato pudding” that mixed a pound of boiled potatoes with half a pound of sugar; a different cookbook published a recipe for candied sweet potatoes a century later. The Angelus Marshmallows company is to thank (or blame, depending on your preferences) for the strange combination of gooey marshmallows and creamy sweet potatoes. In the 1900s, his team hired Boston Cooking School Magazine founder Janet McKenzie Hill to create a recipe booklet starring marshmallows. Her recipe for “mashed sweet potatoes baked with a marshmallow topping” became a hit.

Green bean casserole comes not from an 18th-century cookbook, but from the back of a Campbell’s soup can. Dorcas Reilly, a Campbell’s test kitchen supervisor, devised the recipe in 1955. Her job involved creating recipes that used Campbell’s canned soups and other ready-made products as ingredients. Her idea for a green bean casserole that included the company’s cream of mushroom soup was included in a 1955 Associated Press story about Thanksgiving, and the dish has remained a part of many holiday feasts ever since.

It may be the flagship dessert at modern Thanksgiving dinners, but pumpkin pie didn’t make an appearance at the first Thanksgiving. The Pilgrims probably lacked the butter and flour needed to make a pie crust, and it’s not clear that they even had an oven in which they could have baked a pumpkin pie. That doesn’t mean pumpkins weren’t available for the meal, though; they were probably served after being baked in the coals of a fire or stewed.

Until the 18th century, pumpkin pie was actually more popular in Europe than it was in the Americas. Simmons’s American Cookery contained two recipes for “pompkin pudding,” which instructed readers to mix “stewed and strained” pumpkin with nutmeg, ginger, and allspice.

Sarah Josepha Hale, the so-called “mother of Thanksgiving” is responsible for pumpkin pie’s prominence as a Turkey Day dessert. Her novel Northwood included the dish in a description of Thanksgiving foods; Hale herself lobbied to make the celebration a national holiday.

A version of this article originally ran in 2008; it has been updated for 2023.

Solmization, the practice of assigning syllables to the different “steps” of the musical scale, originated in ancient India. Fast forward a few thousand years to 6th-century Spain, when Isidore, the Archbishop of Seville, lamented that “unless sounds are remembered, they perish, for they cannot be written down.” A Benedictine monk named Guido d’Arezzo, who was also a master of music, then began working on a system to prevent sacred tunes from being lost to history.

D’Arezzo was familiar with solmization, and noted that most of the Gregorian chants popular at that time could easily be learned by singers if they could see the tone progression up and down the scale and associate it with the sound. He assigned the notes of the scale—C, D, E, F, G, A, B, C—a syllable: Do, Re, Mi, Fa, Sol, La, Ti, Do. Yes, it actually is sol: it’s traditionally written that way when the tonic notes are spelled out, and often referred to colloquially as the Solfa or Solfège scale. That final L is hard to hear because of the la that follows.

Those weren’t just random sounds he chose. They came from “Ut Queant Laxis,” a well-known hymn in the Middle Ages that was chanted for vespers. Each succeeding line of the song started one note higher than the previous one, so Guido used the first letters of each word of each line: Ut queant laxis, Resonare fibris: Mire gestorum , Famuli tuorum: Solve, and so on. Ut was eventually deemed too difficult pronounce and was changed to do.

Did Guido d’Arezzo’s method work? Well, as Julie Andrews (via Rodgers and Hammerstein) put it in The Sound of Music, “When you know the notes to sing, you can sing most anything!”

A version of this story was published in 2013; it has been updated for 2023.

Bats are firmly rooted in Western vampire lore, but only three species out of some 1100 in the order Chiroptera actually have a taste for blood. Vampire bats are the only mammals in the world that live on blood alone, and the unique challenges of that diet make them some of the most specialized, fascinating, and downright weird animals in nature.

The common vampire bat (Desmodus rotundus), the hairy-legged vampire bat (Diphylla ecaudata), and the white-winged vampire bat (Diaemus youngi) are closely related and grouped together in the subfamily Desmodontinae. Their ranges overlap in parts of Central and South America, so, in what might be an effort to avoid competition with each other, the species go after different prey. The common vampire bat feeds primarily on the blood of mammals—ranging from tapirs to horses to the occasional human—and seems to have a preference for livestock animals. The hairy-legged vampire bat, meanwhile, lives almost exclusively on bird blood, while the white-winged vampire bat is more versatile and drinks from both birds and mammals.

Other bats with less grisly diets got a bad rap from European explorers in the Americas. The Europeans had heard stories about blood-drinking bats and encountered Native people and livestock that had been bitten in the night and, without any real knowledge of the animals’ diets, began labeling different bats as vampires willy nilly, usually applying the term to bigger and/or uglier ones. Bats that lived on insects or even fruit were assumed to be vampires thanks to their appearance, and the association stuck when they were scientifically described and saddled with names like Vampyrum spectrum and Pteropus vampyrus. Meanwhile, when a naturalist finally got his hands on an actual vampire, D. rotundus, no one one believed his assertions that it drank blood, and he made no mention of it in his description.

When the bats feed, they use their teeth to shear away hair or feathers from a small spot and then cut into their victim’s flesh with their sharp incisors. (According to zoologists at Chicago’s Field Museum, even the teeth on old, preserved bat skulls in museum collections are sharp enough to cut someone handling them carelessly.) Rather than actively suck the blood from the wound like their namesakes, the bats let the physics of capillary action do the work. They lap at the blood and specialized grooves on their lips, tongues, and/or roof or their mouths suction it up. A protein in the bats’ saliva called a plasminogen activator prevents the blood from clotting and keeps it flowing freely while they drink.

The white-winged vampire bats have a few tricks for feeding on domestic chickens without startling the birds. Sometimes, they’ll approach a hen and mimic a chick by nuzzling up to her brood patch. This featherless section of skin on the hen’s underside is densely packed with blood vessels and is used to transfer heat to her eggs or chicks during nesting. The vessels make an easy target for the bat, and if the hen thinks it’s her baby cuddling up to her, she’ll sit on the bat to give it access to drink. Other times, the bats will climb up on a hen’s back, mimicking the touch and weight of a mounting rooster and sending the hen into the crouching stance they take before mating. The bat can then shimmy up to the hen’s neck for a bite and she’ll stay in that position until the bat hops off.

White-winged vampires will also take their meals in the trees instead of the barnyard. While a bird roosts on a branch, the bat sneaks up on it from below, crawling along the underside of the branch and staying out of sight. Once it’s directly underneath its prey, the bat bites the bird’s big rear-pointing toe and drinks its fill.

D. ecaudata also feeds in the trees, but doesn’t bother with subtlety like its cousin. They’ll often land directly on a bird and hang from its body upside-down with their feet while biting around the bird’s cloaca, the all-purpose entrance and exit for the intestinal, reproductive, and urinary tracts. The maneuver is helped by the bat’s calcar, a bony spur that comes off the ankle bone. It’s absent in some bats and underdeveloped in others, but the hairy-legged vampire’s protrudes noticeably and is used by the bat like an extra digit to help it hang on.

It has evolved to be as nimble there as it is in flight. While most other bats are awkward crawlers, the common vampire can move with a quick run-like gait or hop along the ground, supporting its weight on its hind legs and using its wings and elongated thumbs to steer and push off the ground. This comes in handy for chasing after prey on the move and for jumping out of the way if it needs to.

Feeding for common vampires is often risky, given that their preferred victim, the domestic cow, is several thousand times larger than they are. They usually bite cows on the area of the leg just above and behind the hoof, since the skin is relatively thin and the blood vessels run close to the surface. One step backwards, and a bat could be squashed if it hadn’t figured out how to run or make impressive three-foot leaps into the air.

Their energy needs require them to consume half their body weight during each 20- to 30-minute feeding session. Their bodies have adapted to lighten that load, and their stomach lining rapidly absorbs much of the blood’s water content and sends it to the kidneys so it can be excreted. The bats can process their meal so quickly that they may begin disposing of it before they’re even finished with it, and start urinating just a few minutes into the feeding.

Mother bats regurgitate previously drunk blood for their offspring until the babies are old enough to hunt on their own. Other related bats and even unrelated ones have also been observed puking blood up for one another in a reciprocal arrangement. If a bat can’t find a meal one night, one of its roost-mates may share some of its meal. In the future, the bat who was fed is highly likely to return the favor. If it cheats, or takes a blood donation without ever giving back, it may find that it gets the cold shoulder the next time it needs help.

They also have a well-developed senses of smell and heat-seeking faces—their wrinkly, leaf-shaped noses are loaded with nerves that are, in turn, loaded with proteins that are sensitive to the infrared radiation given off by warm-blooded animals. They also have finely tuned hearing and specialized neurons that react only to the sound of breathing. They can even distinguish the breathing sounds made by different individuals, and may be able to remember the unique sonic components of an individual animal’s breathing, allowing them to return to the same reliable source of blood night after night.

Animals that are adventurous eaters learn to avoid potentially toxic foods through trial and error. They try something new, get sick, and then avoid those flavors in the future—a process called conditioned taste aversion. But vampire bats don’t seem to learn from experience.

In experiments [PDF], biologists have given vampire bats and their fruit- and insect-eating cousins treats seasoned with different, unfamiliar flavors, and then induced vomiting. At their next few meals, the bats were given the choice between their normal food and food flavored with the same seasonings from before. While the other bats avoided the flavors they associated with getting sick after the first meal, the vampires dug in to both flavored and unflavored blood.

The researchers think that the vampires either lost the ability to make these associations because their diet doesn’t present a variety of flavors and it wasn’t needed, or maybe that they had to lose it early on in their blood-drinking history to make the diet viable.

A version of this story was published in 2013; it has been updated for 2023.

There’s something to enjoy about every season—though that’s sometimes hard to remember when scraping ice off your car in January or sweating through your sheets in July. If you can’t appreciate the weather they bring, you can at least delight in the etymology of each season’s name. Here are the origins of the official titles of the four seasons.

Before spring was called spring, it was called Lent in Old English. Beginning in the 14th century, that time of year was called “springing time”—a reference to plants “springing” from the ground. In the 15th century this got shortened to spring-time, and then further shortened in the 16th century to simply spring. 

Summer came from the Old English name for that time of year, sumor. This, in turn, came from the Proto-Germanic sumur-, which itself came from the Proto-Indo-European root sam-. Sam- seems to be a variant of the Proto-Indo-European sem-, meaning “together/one.”

The origin of fall as a name for a season isn’t perfectly clear, though it’s thought that it probably came from the idea of leaves falling from trees (particularly the contraction of the English saying “fall of the leaf”). It first popped up as a name for a season in late 16th century England and became particularly popular during the 17th century, at which point it made its way over to North America. Autumn, meanwhile, came to English via the Old French autompne, from the Latin autumnus. From here, things get murky, but it’s thought autumnus probably came from an Etruscan word and is possibly related to the Latin augere, meaning “to increase.” 

Calling the season autumn first occurred in English in the 12th century, though was a rarity until around the 14th century. It then began to pick up steam and became common in the 16th century—about the same time fall popped up as the name for the season. Before the season was autumn or fall in English, though, it was called “harvest.”

Winter, meanwhile, derives from the Proto-Germanic wentruz. This, in turn, probably comes from the Proto-Indo-European wed, meaning “wet,” or wind-, meaning “white.”  Either way, the Proto-Germanic wentruz gave rise to the Old English winter as the fourth season of the year, and the name for the season has stuck around ever since.

Incidentally, you may also wonder why the seasons are called seasons. The word season in this context comes from the Old French seison, meaning “sowing/planting.” This in turn came from the Latin sationem, meaning “sowing.” Initially, this referred to actually sowing seeds, but later, as with the Old French seison, it shifted definition to refer to the time period when you sow seeds, so literally “seed-time.”  Season in this sense in English popped up around the 13th century. It was also around this time that season was first used to refer to seasoning food—in this case from the Old French assaisoner, meaning “to ripen.”

Additional Source: Barnhart Concise Dictionary of Etymology

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 ran in 2013; it has been updated for 2024.

The Weekly World News existed because the owner of the National Enquirer switched to color printing, but he didn’t want to throw away a perfectly good black and white press. Eddie Clontz was the managing editor for the Weekly World News during much of its run. He had a philosophy for his newsroom: “Don’t fact check yourself out of a good story.” The WWN took each ridiculous claim it was presented with as unshakable truth (you can still get your bizarre “news” fix at WWN’s website). And every now and then, amid Bat Boy’s wild antics and Grandma’s trips to heaven to play bingo with Jesus, there were truths. Eight Weekly World News headlines that turned out to be true are listed below.

Suffering a serious spider bite, Kathy Williams underwent an emergency tracheotomy at the Welborn Hospital in Indiana. The sterilizing solution swabbed over the upper part of her body and face caught fire when, according to the News, a spark from a cauterizing device lit her into “a ball of fire.”

Twenty-one years later, Kathy’s ordeal would again be mentioned in The Southern Illinoisan, when another woman died from what is termed “a surgical flash fire.” The article confirms that “Kathy Williams of Harrisburg… suffered second- and third-degree burn from a 1988 flash fire over the top half of her body, including her face, in what was to have been a common surgery.” The article mentions that Kathy settled out of court.

Genitals start neutrally, the same for both boys and girls. As the pregnancy progresses, the chromosomes of the fetus begin to shape the same basic flesh into vulvas or scrotums, penises or clitorises. Ambiguous genitalia occur when this development is not finished. Steve Hammond was born with XY chromosomes, making him male. But his testicles were recessed and his penis was what the doctors of his day deemed too small to allow him a happy male existence. So they did what was fashionable. They told his parents to raise him female. (For a truly devastating tale of how bad of an idea this is, read about the life of David Reimer.)

“Linda” Hammond knew she was different. She never grew breasts or menstruated and she was the strongest woman at the shipyard she worked at. Linda thought she was a hermaphrodite and was deeply ashamed, never seeking medical help until age 25. When a doctor revealed to Steve that he was a man, Steve set about making himself a life, which can be read about both here and in his book, Looking Beyond the Mountains.

Now, be savvy. This is NOT Hog-zilla, though many will try to pixelate you into thinking it is. But Hog-zilla was real. He was a crossbreed of a domestic Hampshire pig and a wild boar, and he was killed in 2004 by a Georgian man named Chris Griffin. Hog-zilla wasn’t edible and was too expensive (and horrid) to have stuffed, so his killers gave him a proper burial. And it was a good thing, because that allowed Dr. Oz Katz and his father, Dr. Eliahu Katz, to exhume the remains and prove the monster of myth had truly existed. He was, however, only 8 feet long, not 12. Still utter nightmare fodder. One of the rare times all those exclamation points the WWN uses are justified.

Ivan Lester McGuire was 35 years old and a veteran of over 800 skydiving jumps when he fell to his death in April 1988. He was hoping to launch a career as a skydiving photographer, and jumped hooked into a special camera to film another team of jumpers. His co-workers, like Ivan, did not notice he had not put on his parachute. ”We are all preoccupied with doing our own job,” said Paul Fayard, owner of the Franklin County Sport Parachute Center who flew the plane Ivan jumped from. It was likely the excitement of suiting up with the complicated photography gear that distracted Ivan. The police recounted that he at one point reaches for his rip cord and comes up empty handed. The rest of the video is just the ground approaching at 150 miles per hour.

The photo does not go with the article, though it somehow makes it better to think it does. 55 year old Barbara Louise Jones knew something was wrong with her, but she was too scared to go to a doctor. Her mother had died a difficult death from cancer, and Barbara’s fear was more powerful than her logic. She hoped avoiding a diagnosis meant avoiding cancer. But when she was forced to retire early due to exhaustion, and was unable to drive a car over her own distended abdomen, she went. And she did have cancer. A 130-pound malignant ovarian tumor adhering to the walls of her abdomen, stretching her skin “paper thin.” The incision to remove it was 4½ feet. The tumor was fully removed, and Barbara was expected to have a full recovery. A later obituary for a Barbara Louise Jones of the same age and location lists her death date as July 2010.

Hormonal IUD’s were, not so long ago, a crazy futuristic fever dream thought up by Finnish doctors. Doctors had been experimenting with copper IUD’s for some time, but Jouni Valtteri Tapani Luukkainen’s original T-shaped Levanova-R was the first to use progesterone to such success. The progesterone thickens the mucus inside the uterus so sperm can’t get through to do their job, and the device can safely remain inside a woman for up to five years. Levanova-R is now called Mirena, is owned by Bayer, and is one of the most popular and reliable forms of birth control available.

Mary Carolyn Morgan did, in fact, give birth. To a human. She is also an honest to goodness lesbian. In 1981 she became the first openly gay woman in America to be appointed as a judge. She now sits on the San Francisco County Superior Court.

Honestly, Hal tried to do it right. He got his 15-year-old girlfriend, Wendy, pregnant when he was 13, so he married her. They moved into the trailer behind his parent’s house. Wendy left him a year later and took their baby, Heather, with her. So Hal fought for custody, and lost. Hal’s dad Herbert defended his son. “The judge here simply did not consider the merit of the case,” he said. “He would not separate the tradition of always granting custody to the mother from today’s reality that I have a responsible son.” And Hal did have a point when he told reporters, “It seems there is just no justice in this world, because I have done absolutely nothing to lose my baby girl.”

Hal was ordered to pay $30 a week in child support, which he could not afford as state law forbade children his age from working. Love was still in the cards for Hal, though. The following year he married his second wife, 14-year-old Catherine, who soon gave birth to baby Ashley. Hal was surprised at the pregnancy, and said he’d been too shy to procure condoms. As of 1986, he vowed to keep fighting for full custody of Heather. 

There are plenty of misconceptions about pirates, from their pet parrots to walking the plank to whether they actually say arrrr. People may assume pirates wore eye patches just to look totally badass. But the eyewear most likely had nothing to do with a missing eye, and everything to do with being able to see—specifically, above decks and below them.

Jim Sheedy, a doctor of vision science and director of the Vision Performance Institute at Oregon’s Pacific University, told the Wall Street Journal that while the eyes adapt quickly when going from darkness to light, studies have shown that it can take up to 25 minutes for them to adapt when going from bright light to darkness, which “requires the regeneration of photo pigments.”

Pirates frequently had to move above and below decks on their ships, from daylight to near darkness, and Sheedy says the smart ones “wore a patch over one eye to keep it dark-adapted outside.” When the pirate went below decks, he could switch the patch to the outdoor eye and see in the darkness easily (potentially to fight while boarding and plundering another vessel).

Though there are no first-person sources from history that state this as fact, there’s no question that keeping one eye dark-adapted works. MythBusters tested this hypothesis in their pirate special in 2007 and determined that it was plausible (only the lack of historical sources kept it from being confirmed).

As at least one military manual for pilots pointed out, “Even though a bright light may shine in one eye, the other will retain its dark adaptation, if it is protected from the light. This is a useful bit of information, because a flyer can preserve dark adaptation in one eye by simply closing it.” Even the FAA recommends that “a pilot should close one eye when using a light to preserve some degree of night vision.” 

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 2013; it has been updated for 2024.

We’ve all heard someone use the term 86 in reference to doing away with something. There are a few schools of thought behind where the saying came from. Some have more legs than others—such as those of the restaurant industry—but to this day, there is still no official etymology. Here are a few possibilities.

Regardless of whether it was the first to coin the phrase 86, the restaurant business in the 1930s was one of the main incubators for its usage and development. Believed to be slang for the word nix, it was initially used as a way of saying that the kitchen was out of something, as revealed in Walter Winchell’s 1933 newspaper column that featured a “glossary of soda-fountain lingo” used in restaurants during that time. It later evolved into a code that restaurants and bars used when they wanted to cut someone off, because they were either rude, broke, or drunk, as in “86 that chump at the end of the bar.”

This possible origin stems from the Prohibition era at a bar called Chumley’s located at 86 Bedford Street in New York City. To survive, many speakeasies had the police on somewhat of a payroll so that they might be warned of a raid. In the case of Chumley’s, it is said that police would call and tell the bartender to “86” his customers, which meant that a raid was about to happen and that they should all exit via the 86 Bedford door while the police would approach at the entrance on Pamela Court.

Until the 1980s, whiskey came in 100 or 86 proof. When a bartender noticed that a patron had drunk too much of the 100 proof, they would scale back and serve them the 86 proof. According to some theories, in bar lingo, that person would have been “86’d.”

Perhaps the birth of this phrase occurred in death? The last time you can be “86’d” might be when they put you under the ground, as most standard graves are said to be 8 feet long and 6 feet deep (though that last metric is not always true).

A version of this story ran in 2013; it has been updated for 2023.

Sometimes words move up in the world. Their meanings change with time, becoming more positive—a process linguists call amelioration. Here are some ameliorated words that were a pinch more negative back in the day.

In the 16th century, amaze was a verb defined as “to bewilder”; it could also mean “to terrify.” (It’s formed using the word maze, which dates back to the 14th century and meant “confusion.”) Not long after, though, amaze also came to mean “to surprise” or “to astound,” the meaning it still holds today.

From the 1400s up through the eighteenth century, to amuse meant “to cheat.” A somewhat early citation of the word’s current meaning can be found in a 1796 book from Mary Wollstonecraft: “Marguerite … was much amused by the costume of the [Danish] women.”

The first meaning of awe was “fear,” and eventually, the word came to define that feeling mixed with religious reverence—so when the suffix -some was added in the 1570s to give us awesome, it wasn’t used to refer to things that are super cool, as it is today. Instead, it meant “inspiring fear.”

As far back as the 1200s, boy was used to refer to a male servant or enslaved person. The word’s origins, and how it developed this meaning, are a mystery. (Fun fact: Girl, when it first appeared in the 1300s, was a genderless term for a child.)

In the 1200s, careful, from the Old English word carful, was an adjective used to express sadness and sorrow.

Today, when you’re dizzy, you’re giddy or literally off-balance—but as far back as the 800s, the word was used to refer to people who were foolish.

In the 1300s, one possible meaning of the word eager was a person who felt or acted angry. It came into English from the French aigre, which since the 12th century has meant “sour.”

These days, if you’re fond of something, you like it. But to be fond in the late 1300s meant something very different—you were foolish. The etymology of the word is unclear, but it may have its origins in the word fon, a noun for a foolish person as well as a verb that meant “to fool.”

Fun—which might also have its origins in the verb fon—originally meant “to cheat or trick.” Now it’s all about having a good time or indulging in a joke, occasionally at someone else’s expense.

If someone called you glorious in the late 1300s, it wasn’t a compliment: The word was used in reference to someone who was prone to boasting or otherwise being kind of a jerk. (In the 1700s and 1800s it could also be used to refer to a happy drunk.)

Way back in the late 800s, knight—which comes from the Old English word cniht—was another word for a boy, and around 950, it began to be used to refer to any male servant. It came to the military meaning we know today in the 1100s.

Meticulous, which comes to us via Latin and French, originally meant “fearful” or “timid” when it was coined in the 1540s. In the 1820s, it came to mean being a little too careful regarding details, in a bad way. Eventually, however, being meticulous became a positive thing.

Originally, in the late 1300s, mischievous (from the French meschevous) was used in reference to disastrous events or people who were miserable. It wouldn’t come to be used for someone who was charmingly naughty until the mid-1700s (and it meant actual, not-at-all-charming bad behavior earlier than that—from around 1438 onward).

In the 1300s, calling someone nice meant you were saying they were foolish or simple. The word came into English from the Old French nice, or “ignorant,” from the Latin nescius.

Pragmatic comes to English from Latin and French, and way back in the 1600s, it was a word that meant “meddling.”As William Strachey noted in 1612’s The historie of travell into Virginia Britania, “Ignorance … cannot … excuse a factious and pragmatique Tonge.”

The verb sophisticate means “to adulterate one substance with another,” so in the 1600s, something sophisticated was likewise unpure—it was often used to refer to foods or booze that had been tampered with. Its current meaning dates back to 1895.

These days, we use pretty to talk about something that’s attractive, but in the 1450s, to be pretty was to be cunning. It was formed by combining the very old word prat (a joke or trick) with the suffix -y.

Today, the word sustainable is often used in terms of how to maintain things like natural resources (like energy) or activities (such as farming practices), a meaning that dates back to the mid-1970s. But long before that, in the 1610s, sustainable was used to refer to something that was, in the words of Randle Cotgrave in 1611’s A dictionarie of the French and English tongues, “abideable.”

A version of this story ran in 2013; 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.

While mustaches are now a matter of choice (and occasionally worn tongue-in-cheek), a century ago a man’s facial hair was serious business. Mustaches and beards conveyed virility, age, and experience, not to mention the personalities of their wearers. Of course, the best complement to meticulous facial barbering was an elaborate uniform replete with medals, ribbons, sashes, epaulettes, daggers, and other military accoutrements. Here are a few of the finest.

The belligerent head of Austria-Hungary’s army had equally belligerent facial hair. Like a Valkyrie’s wings, the upswept ends warn of terrible vengeance.

The mercurial German monarch Kaiser Wilhelm II encouraged Austria-Hungary to attack Serbia in 1914. Another case of the upswept Teutonic look.

One of many Ottoman Empire officials to be assassinated, Minister of War Mahmud Shevket Pasha was gunned down in Constantinople on June 11, 1913. A full beard afforded no protection.

The minister of war who led the Ottoman Empire into World War I in 1914, Enver Pasha was a great admirer of all things German, as reflected in his grooming choices.

By the start of World War I in 1914, Franz Josef had been emperor of Austria and king of Hungary for 66 years, and he had the sideburns to match.

Russia’s ambassador to France, Count Aleksandr Izvolsky, was a Germanophobe who urged France to support Russia’s stand against Germany in July 1914. His mustache seconded the motion.

Redl was chief of Austrian military intelligence for years before being blackmailed into becoming a spy for Russia and then outed as gay, causing a scandal. After uncovering his treason, military officials suggested that Redl die by suicide, which he did.

George I was a Danish prince who became king of Greece in 1863. He was assassinated in Salonika in March 1913. This portrait enshrines his flying handlebar mustache for posterity.

A version of this story was published in 2013; it has been updated for 2023.

You may know that the South Pole sits on solid land and the North Pole is but a spot in the Arctic Ocean, but it’s probably difficult to imagine either pole as anything but a giant sheet of ice.

But if you’ve ever wondered what the land underneath Antarctica’s ice—the largest ice sheet on Earth—actually looks like, NASA and the British Antarctic Survey have the answer. Using satellite imagery, sensor records, and data collected by NASA’s Operation IceBridge, which surveys the world’s polar zones by air, the British researchers compiled a stunning map of the southern continent without its frozen mantle [PDF].

The image, dubbed Bedmap2, gives scientists a clear picture of Antarctica’s ice-free geology. It also reveals new topographical superlatives. According to a statement from the British Antarctic Survey, the continent’s new deepest point, located beneath Byrd Glacier, is an astounding 9416 feet (2870 meters) below sea level, about 1300 feet (400 meters) deeper than the previous record. It’s also the lowest point ever found on any of the planet’s continental plates.

“Before, we had a regional overview of the topography,” Peter Fretwell, a cartographer at the British Antarctic Survey, said in the statement. “But this new map, with its much higher resolution, shows the landscape itselfa complex landscape of mountains, hills and rolling plains, dissected by valleys troughs and deep gorges.”

A version of this story ran in 2013; it has been updated for 2023.

In 1837, the British cutter Lambton sailed to Ngatik (now Sapwuahfik), a tiny atoll in Micronesia. On orders from Captain Charles “Bloody” Hart, who hoped to take control of the valuable supply of tortoise shells he believed to be there, the crew massacred all the men on the island. They left behind some European and Pohnpeian crew members and made an Irishman named Paddy Gorman “chief.” The sailors claimed the widowed women on the island as their wives. Over the next few decades, other groups arrived. 

Today, the islanders speak a dialect of the Pohnpeian language of the region. But there is another language spoken on the island that is spoken only by men. Alternatively called Ngatikese Men’s Language, Ngatik Men’s Creole, or Ngatikese Pidgin, the language was described by Darrell Tryon, the late, well-known linguist of Austronesian languages [PDF]. The women and children on the island can understand the language (and according to some experts, women will use it jokingly), but it’s primarily used among men engaged in activities like fishing and boat-building.

Ngatikese Men’s Language developed from an English-based pidgin—one of many in the region—and the Ngatik dialect of Pohnpeian, but after an initial surge, it resisted further mixing thanks to the fact that Ngatik lies so far from the main shipping routes of the region. Today, it remains a sort of preserved historical crumb dropped from a passing ship. It is the echo of the voices of those 19th century sailors.

This makes it different from the other pidgins/creoles of the region, such as Tok Pisin and Bislama, which developed over a long period of steady contact with shipboard language, and have many features in common with each other. For example, many of those languages use something like blong or bilong (from “belong”) as a marker of possession, and bambae or bambai (“by and by”) as a marker of future tense. Ngatikese Pidgin uses kon ko (“going to go”) instead of bambai and possessive pronouns instead of blong (hi nihm, “his name” as opposed to Bislama’s nem blong em), features that make it more similar to the New South Wales Pidgin of the 1820s and ‘30s, now extinct.

Overall, the Ngatikese Men’s Language is more Ngatikese than English. Most of the words and grammatical structure come from Ngatikese. The English and English-based pidgin used by the European and Pohnpeian sailors eventually receded, but there remained this one strange little practice, this thing that men do, that preserves a piece of tragic history from another time.

A version of this story ran in 2013; it has been updated for 2023.

History tells us that Napoleon Bonaparte’s most upsetting defeat came at Waterloo. But it may have actually occurred eight years earlier, after the French emperor was attacked by a relentless horde of rabbits.

There are a couple versions of the story, but most agree it happened in July 1807. Napoleon had recently signed the Treaties of Tilsit, which ended the war between the French Empire and Imperial Russia, and in celebration, a rabbit hunt was organized by Napoleon’s chief of staff, Alexandre Berthier. He arranged an outdoor luncheon, invited some of the military’s biggest brass, and collected a colony of rabbits. 

Some say Berthier took in hundreds of bunnies, while others claim he collected as many as 3000. Regardless, there were a lot of rabbits, and Berthier’s men caged them all along the fringes of a grassy field. When Napoleon started to prowl—accompanied by beaters and gun-bearers—the rabbits were released from their cages. 

The hunt was on.

But something strange happened. The rabbits didn’t scurry in fright. Instead, they bounded toward Napoleon and his men. Hundreds of fuzzy bunnies gunned it for the world’s most powerful man.

Napoleon’s party had a good laugh at first. But as the onslaught continued, their concern grew. The sea of long-ears was storming Napoleon quicker than revolutionaries had stormed the Bastille. Napoleon tried shooing them with his riding crop, as his men grabbed sticks and tried chasing them. The coachmen cracked their bullwhips to scare the siege. 

After a bit, it seemed as though they had succeeded in fighting off the rabbits, and that the hunt could begin. But the rabbits were not done. 

General Paul Charles François Adrien Henri Dieudonné Thiébault described the scene in his memoirs: “[T]he intrepid rabbits turned the Emperor’s flank, attacked him frantically in the rear, refused to quit their hold, piled themselves up between his legs till they made him stagger, and forced the conqueror of conquerors, fairly exhausted, to retreat and leave them in possession of the field.”

Napoleon fled to his carriage—but even then, it didn’t stop. According to historian David Chandler, “with a finer understanding of Napoleonic strategy than most of his generals, the rabbit horde divided into two wings and poured around the flanks of the party and headed for the imperial coach.” The flood of bunnies continued—some reportedly leapt into the carriage.

The attack ceased only as the coach rolled away. The man who was dominating Europe was no match for a battle with bunnies.

It was Berthier’s fault. Rather than trapping wild hares, his emissary had bought tame rabbits from local farmers, “not aware that there could be any difference between one rabbit and another,” according to Thiébault. As a result, the rabbits didn’t see Napoleon as a fearsome hunter—they saw him as a waiter bringing out the day’s food. To them, the emperor was effectively a giant head of lettuce.  “The poor rabbits … had flung themselves on them with all the more eagerness that they had not been fed that day,” Thiébault wrote, adding. “The laughter which this revelation elicited may be guessed.”

A version of this story ran in 2013; it has been updated for 2023.