Category: –

Sunday

Gum is old. In what is now Sweden, chewed gum made from birch bark has been discovered which dates to nearly 10,000 years ago.

Monday

Until the 1940s, nearly all chewing gum was made from the sap of a few of South American tree species. This natural gum base, called chicle, was eventually replaced by synthetic gum base, which makes up the majority of modern gums.

Tuesday

Being so soft and pliable, gum can take many different shapes when you buy it. Among these shapes: gum in the shape of a ball (gumballs), sticks, ribbons, tabs, chunks, cubes, cylinders, and dragée gum, which are the familiar pillow-shaped coated pellets.

Wednesday

While swallowing gum is not ideal, you can forget that old myth about gum living in your intestines for seven years. The bulk of it simply gets pooped out in a day or two like any other indigestible.

Thursday

In the world of chewing gum flavors, mint is king. Spearmint and peppermint lead the pack (no pun intended) as the most popular flavors, and mint varieties have reigned for several generations now.

Friday

The ideal recipe for bubble gum was discovered by an accountant for the Fleer gum company who liked to experiment with gum ingredients. Walter Diemer’s version had the best texture for bubble gum, but also set the color standard for decades, since pink was the only food coloring his gum factory had when he hit upon the right recipe.

Saturday

After cigarette butts, used chewing gum is the most littered item in the world, and because most modern gum has synthetic gum base, is largely non-biodegradable. So dispose of your gum properly!

Sunday

Originally, “graveyard” and “cemetery” were not interchangeable terms. For centuries, the deceased members of congregations were buried in crypts under their church or plots around the church in areas known as graveyards. However, as these filled up and populations grew, separate tracts of burial land unconnected with any particular church known as cemeteries became common.

Monday

A gravely ill person may seem closer to the grave, but notably, “grave” the adjective comes from the Latin “gravis” meaning heavy, weighty, and important, while “grave” the noun derives from Germanic with its current meaning: holes dug for the deceased.

Tuesday

East-facing graves are common around the world, so that the dead can face the rising sun or for various religious reasons both ancient and modern.

Wednesday

The Egyptian pyramids are among the worlds most enduring grave markers. They stand above tombs of pharaohs, but also included supplies for the afterlife and the journey to it, as well as pictures and information about life at the time of the pyramids’ building.

Thursday

Increasingly, burial plots are not full of bodies, but ashes. In the US, 63.3% of people are expected to choose cremation by 2025, up from a mere 3.6% in 1960. The location of burial spots for ashes (if they are buried at all) is less regulated, and thus far more flexible.

Friday

In some places, traditional burials are simply impractical. New Orleans, for example, is located below sea level where the Mississippi River meets the Gulf of Mexico, and hence floods frequently. Since coffins contain both bodies and air, they would often rise to the top of saturated soil, sometimes even floating around on floodwaters, creating an obvious (and gruesome) health hazard. Accordingly, New Orleans began to require either cremation or above-ground tombs for the deceased.

Saturday

The first use of the term “graveyard shift,” a work shift which typically begins at midnight, did not come from graveyards at all, but references to overnight shifts in mines. Besides both places being dark and spooky, there is no obvious connection.

Sunday

The term “earworm” is about 1,000 years old in English, but originally referred to the earwig, which people inaccurately believed crawled into human ears. Later the term applied to a moth larvae that damaged ears of corn and other crops, but in the late 1950s Germans began describing catchy “ohrvurm” tunes instead of agricultural pests, and the term has been popular in English since the 1980s.

Monday

To “keep an ear to the ground” means to be keenly scouting for something. This practice is often associated with listening for approaching horses, but in fact has been used for centuries by cultures all around the world to detect all variety of animals, people and things.

Tuesday

Earrings go way back. They weren’t just worn by pirates and Shakespeare, but Otzi the Iceman, the oldest known mummy ever discovered, who was sporting them about 5,300 years ago.

Wednesday

Some of the most famous ears in all of Hollywood (and the 22nd century), those of Star Trek’s Mr. Spock, were donated for permanent exhibit to the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum by the actor’s family.

Thursday

Between the time hearing aids were invented in the 17th century and electrified in the 20th, they were essentially just “ear trumpets,” designed to channel sound into the ear instead of amplifying it electrically. These large devices were sometimes made to be worn within hats, hairstyles, collars, beards, and in the case of royalty, inside of thrones.

Friday

Imagine if you could hear a friend calling to you from 2.5 miles away or more. An elephant could, but they don’t just listen with those massive ears. Packed with blood vessels, elephant ears also manage body heat and can cool by fanning, as well as asserting position when elephants spread their ears to show dominance. Notably, elephants also have very sensitive feet, and can talk with “seismic communication,” hearing other elephant noises and triangulating their location through ground vibrations.

Saturday

You don’t just hear the world through your ears, you balance your way through it. The inner ear contains the fluid-filled semicircular canals, and as this fluid moves around, hair-like sensors send signals to the brain to help orient and balance the body.

Sunday

Need to “let off (or blow off) some steam”? So did early locomotives when their boilers built up to dangerous pressures, hence the safety valve and origin of this term.

Monday

Sidetracks are where trains get diverted off the main line for whatever reason, and also the origin of the term for a diversion from a human goal.

Tuesday

The term “Hell on Wheels” has railroad origins, and referred to the transient, moving towns that followed the westbound construction of the US railroad, attracting business from the young railroad workers with saloons, gambling, and brothels.

Wednesday

While we now think of a “double header” as two consecutive baseball games, it previously referred to a two-engine train. That was not its first usage, though, since before that a double header was a type of firework.

Thursday

To be “railroaded” is to be hastily forced into an agreement or pushed through a process. This may refer to the speed of this new form of travel, the way early railroads were hurriedly and doggedly completed, or how they were sometimes built with minimum regard for private claims to the land they were built on.

“The Encyclopedia of Word and Phrase Origins” by Robert Hendrickson (Facts on File, New York, 1997).

Friday

Bumpers were on trains before cars, and “bumper to bumper” was not a traffic jam but the recommended way to efficiently store train cars.

Saturday

About 150 years before modern DJs spun and scratched and spun on record turntables, trains spun on the original turntables. These huge devices moved trains onto the right track, and are still in use today.

Sunday

Belts are old. The earliest known belt worn on a person was used in the Bronze Age, which was from about 1200-3300 BC.

Monday

In the US, the “Rust Belt” is an area which includes parts of Illinois, Indiana, Michigan, Missouri, New York, Ohio, Pennsylvania, West Virginia and Wisconsin, and by some accounts Iowa, Kentucky, and Massachusetts. The abundance of iron ore, coal, and navigable waters once made this region a powerful manufacturing center. However, beginning in the 1950s, foreign competition, increasing mechanization that replaced workers, increased labor costs, and other causes led to a decline in the region’s industries and population. The moniker began when presidential candidate Walter Mondale claimed his opponent Ronald Reagan’s trade policies would turn this area into a “rust bowl” (a reference to the “Dust Bowl” of Great Depression times), but “Rust Belt” ended up sticking instead. The US has many other belts, including the Corn Belt, Sun Belt, and Bible Belt.

Tuesday

Though the intermediate colors and symbolism vary among traditions, each martial art which uses a belt ranking system starts with white and ends with black (although there are degrees of black belt).

Wednesday

On a much larger scale, an asteroid belt circles our sun between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter. Although comprised of millions of space rocks of various sizes, the mass of all these combined would still be only 3% that of Earth’s moon.

Thursday

US federal government activities and politicking in the Washington DC metro area are often described as “Inside the Beltway” because this region is surrounded by interstate highways I-495 and I-95, which form a loop known as “The Capital Beltway.”

Friday

While lap-only seat belts were first invented for horse-drawn vehicles, it would be 51 years after the first Ford Model T arrived that the modern 3-point lap/body seat belt appeared in Volvos. By the time inventor Nils Bohlin died in 2002, his concept was estimated to have saved one million lives.

Saturday

Normally, one method of keeping one’s pants up is sufficient, so taking a “belt and suspenders” approach to anything indicates abundantly cautious.

Sunday

The convention of categorizing athletic players as “first string, second string, etc.” goes back to the medieval archer’s practice of carrying backup strings for their bow in case the first string broke.

Monday

Purse strings tighten or loosen the opening of a traditional pouch purse, so one who “controls the purse strings” has authority over finances.

Tuesday

Fabric merchants of old times marked flaws in their material for sale by tying a string to the imperfect spot. Hence to get something without condition is to receive it with “no strings attached.”

Wednesday

A person who “pulls the strings” controls people or events, often unbeknownst to others. This term originates with marionette puppetry, where characters were controlled by hidden puppeteers holding the strings.

Thursday

Stringed instruments go back to at least 2,550 BC, the date of the first known lyre found in 1929 in what is now Iraq.

Friday

String theory, in a very simplified sense, suggests that the various forces among subatomic particles could interact in a more theoretically cohesive way if the particles were conceptualized as vibrating strings instead of individual points.

Saturday

Unsurprisingly, strings are old. Man-made strings found in a cave in southeast France date back 90,000 years.

Sunday

“Prima facia” means “at first appearance / view.”

Monday

“In absentia” means “while absent.”

Tuesday

“Que sera, sera” means “whatever will be, will be.”

Wednesday

“Post mortem” means “after death.”

Thursday

“Rigor mortis” means “the stiffness of death.”

Friday

“Sine qua non” means “that without, not,” but can be better understood as “the essential thing.”

Saturday

“In vino veritas” means “in wine there is truth.”