Received Ideas in Quotes 38

Yes, yes, yes.

A teacher at my school once gave a lesson about the naming of 16th century children – how each new baby might be christened John, even if it was a girl, because infant mortality rates were so high and the ancestral name must be preserved; this was supposedly proof that the parents felt no grief. We learned that widows conveniently wed their neighbours, widowers married dtheir wives’ sisters, that halfwit children were suppressed, and all of it with nothing but brutal pragmatism. As a student, I remember a professor insisting that romantic love did not exist until the Renaissance, when it was invented; that mothers and fathers did not develop parental feelings for their young until it was obvious that they were survive infancy, and other contrved academic hypotheses. Only consider Dante’s love songs to Beatrice or Ben Jonson’s lament for his beloved son, dead at seven. (Laura Cumming, On Chapel Sands. She also questions the idea that we don’t really have childhood memories: they are constructed from stories our parents told us.)

Lord Elgin did not "pinch" the Elgin Marbles. A parliamentary inquiry in 1816 concluded they'd been obtained legally. He acted with the full knowledge and permission of the legal authorities of the day in both Athens and London. He preserved them for posterity. (Toby Young)

The idea that we can all rise above our circumstances – however difficult – through a programme of self-improvement. (Guardian)

“People only use 10% of their brain” is materially false but spiritually true. (@nosilverv)

In order to keep Genghis Khan's burial a secret, a frequently recounted tale by Marco Polo states that all 2,000+ people who attended his funeral were executed. The executioners were then killed by members of his escort, who eventually took their own lives when they reached their destination. (@Morbidful)

Weren't snails in medieval manuscripts supposed to represent the French? I know rabbits symbolized the peasantry. (@THERI0NdotAI)

The term "legging it" comes from the method of moving a boat through a canal tunnel, which was commonly used in the 18th and 19th centuries. Boatmen would lay on their backs and walk on the roof. (@Knowledgepoint)

My wife will never drink the ‘bad’ water from the bathroom tap only the kitchen tap, because, probably poisoned or something. FYI no one has had a loft tank since the 70s. (@richard_gosler)

Kitchen water “tastes better”. (@Thelandofark)

Used to be necessary when we had lead pipes. You didn’t want the water that had been soaking up the lead overnight. And yes, I still do it. (@pamatluing)

And NEVER drink from the bathroom tap because your Mum told you 60 years ago that there’s always a dead bird in the water tank in the attic. Still applies without an attic. (@HalcyonNash)

Water is pumped to a tank in the attic so that we'd be ready in case Napoleon invaded and set fire to our houses. And you should never drink from the hot tap. We were told that only the cold tap in the kitchen produced drinking water ("from the mains").

My most liked comment on Instagram is on a Wizard of Oz fan site in which I carefully explain that “Friend of Dorothy” as a euphemism for “gay man” did not begin with Judy Garland and Oz… but with the satirist Dorothy Parker who often invited openly gay men to her parties. (@RevDaniel. The first explanation is the true one.)

Have you ever found a silver nail?! It was a tradition of using a single silver nail for the wooden ships built in India at the Bombay docks for the British. (Aadil Desai)

There is a legend that there is an underground route from the ice cave at the base of Mt Fuji extending all the way to Enoshima Cave in Kanagawa Prefecture 60 miles away. The ice cave only takes 15 minutes to walk through. (@shinobu_books)

Summer vacation was invented by Yankees (evil) solely to oppress southern children and to make them fat by letting them out of school only during the months that the climate is inhospitable so they stay inside. (@JosephFrogman. Usual explanations for summer holidays are "coincided with parliamentary terms, children were needed to get in the harvest".)

Trying to find a source for this "72 genders" myth and there is a book like that (the list is ridiculous), but the claim that it is taught in schools seems to come from a story about one speaker (not a teacher) at an Isle of Man school, which was amplified by Miriam Cates. (@Dorianlynskey)

Henry VIII had syphilis. His personality changed for the worse after a jousting accident. (stevenveerapen.com)

Your "self" is not a homogeneous thing. It is an amalgamation of various sub-personalities which have their own likes, dislikes, motivation, fears, goals. (@T_Durden_69)

Kit Kat bars are recursive. The filling is made from damaged Kit Kats. Some bars get broken while they're being made, and instead of throwing them out, the company crushes them up and that's what's inside of a Kit Kat bar: it's literally crushed up Kit Kats. (@Rainmaker1973. The candy bars are chocolate covered wafer fingers.)

Sumptuary laws were mostly to prevent people from imitating heraldry or the king, they were specific to specific cases and weren’t made to oppress the populace. (@muhowastaken)

My dad said that when he went back to Serbia during the summer it was really hot on the buses, but that when he tried to open the windows everyone would yell at him because they though the breeze would kill you. (@Liv_Agar.. Others add: And in Turkey. Rest of Balkans, Italy – colpo d’aria. Germans “open their windows in the winter for inscrutable metaphysical reasons”. In UK sitting in a draught would give you a stiff neck. In Albania it’s ice in drinks. Might make sense if the ice was made from dirty water.)

Not Serbian but family is from the Balkans and this is extremely common. "The wind will go through your bones, you'll get sickness later in life",  if it's windy and you don't have a jacket on. (@GroovyAlexJ)


Did anyone, ever, anywhere, literally hide behind the sofa when the Daleks came on Dr Who in the 1970s and 1980s? I know I didn't, mainly because our sofa was pushed back against the wall. (@davidmbarnett)

Hi, I’m a writer and before you ask, no you wouldn’t have heard of anything I’ve written, I get my ideas from my head and no you’re not going to write a book one day be honest. (@LevParikian)

Europeans took over the whole world to get spices only to use absolutely none of it in their own food. (@0xdumptruck. Have you tried this penne all'arrabbiata?)

The Normans were not Nordic, appeared MidEast, intro’d complex feudal tax system, conquered rest of Europe then organized Crusades back to their origins and still spoke ME languages. Most of them were via Khazaria, where upper class vanished and reappeared in France. (@cuisineillum. And we know what that means.)

There's an urban myth that DNA tests are not allowed in Israel. I believe that's an error - maybe an Israeli can confirm that for me. The myth goes with the convoluted argument that Palestinians are Israelites but Israelis are Polish, which runs and runs, contrary to empiricism. (@GillianLazarus)

Scrubber: originates from the women who worked in the early East London furniture industry. (@dmtoft)

Wild how many people use quantum mechanics as an excuse for reality being broken, truth being unknowable, and logic being limited. If your model of reality conflicts with reality, then update your model. Logic and reality are working fine. (@sirtobiaswade)

Gazing back at the last decade, I'm reminded that the status of any mega-brain cultist think tank is at its highest precisely before its crank theories meet reality – at which point it disintegrates faster than a salad vegetable. (@StephenMcGann)

Turns out if you let yourself want what you want*, everything is amazing (* instead of supposed-tos, shoulds, “if I were a good person, I’d…”s, rules, everybody else’s opinion, what’s "sane", what’s "reasonable", what you have worked out intellectually, etc.) (@metaLulie)

To detect any intelligence at all in a pigeon you have to give it a test designed for worms. (RK)

Paris is called the city of light because it was a very early adopter of streetlights, because the streets of Paris had been super dark and sometimes plagued by packs of wolves. (@annevclark)

Constable's The Hay Wain is an important work but it’s based on an unrealistic vision of rural life by a man whose lived experience of country life was very different to the majority of the time. It’s in the public interest to emphasise it doesn’t reflect the reality of the time. (@commuteandchill. The picture shows a hay cart being driven into a river to soak the wooden wheels so that they swell to fit their iron tires. Painter John Constable never airbrushed out those who worked on the land, operated sluice gates or herded sheep.)


Western morals and values have been predicated on theft, plunder and ethnic oppression since their inception in the Middle Ages. (@NobleQAli)

"Conquest was invented by white people in the Middle Ages" is an actual thing people think. (@wil_da_beast630)


Before you dismiss novels as a waste of time, consider that you would literally not have an inner life right now if interiority had not been invented by English novelists in the 18th and 19th centuries. Doesn't seem like such a waste of time now, does it? (@John_Attridge)

I've heard everything from the Council of Nicaea WROTE the Bible, to Nicaea INVENTED JESUS by combining several pagan deities, especially Zeus & Serapis. Some even claim the JEWS controlled the Council and forced the addition of the Old Testament to the Bible. (@ThomasDierson)

The bird we call a turkey, Turks call “Hindi” (Indian). In India it’s called “Peru”. In Arabic, it’s “Greek chicken”. In Greek it’s “French chicken” and in French – “Indian chicken”.

The idea of the Macbeth potion ingredients being herbs is a hoax perpetrated by a US Wiccan in the 80s. (Adrian Bott)

I like to think that Mrs Beeton would have thoroughly approved when avocados were first introduced to the UK in 1968. They were marketed as "avocado pears", and allegedly people served them as a dessert. With custard. (@Attagirls)

In the 11th century, a Byzantine princess shocked Venice by eating with a fork. A bishop declared her behaviour an insult to God. (@qikipedia)

Rebeca is a great story. There’s a tendency to assume that “old”, “classic” books can’t be page-turners. (@TOMMEAD1987)

Why is there a B at the end of your thumB? Why does an H haunt the word gHost? Why the hell is there an L in couLd? One single invention is to blame: the printing press. (@robwordsYT)

Talking to a kid and it becomes clear to me that something happens after being a child (socialisation?? where they get inducted into the 'group-mind' and repeat the same thing as everyone else as each nods in agreement. (@nosilverv)

The legend of this strange structure at Christchurch Priory states that a certain Mrs Perkins (d. 1783) had a fear of being buried alive, so she requested this mausoleum be placed near the entrance of the school so that if she returned from the dead the schoolboys would hear her! (@InDamnatio)

While eating a gelato on our last trip to Rome I spotted the facade of S. Andrea della Valle was missing an angel. Pope Alexander VII found fault with Ercole Ferrata's 1st angel. The furious sculptor declared that if the Pope wanted a 2nd angel he would have to carve it himself! (@InDamnatio. If you look at the church from above on streetview, you can see that the nave and façade don’t quite match up, and there is nowhere for an angel to perch on the other side.)

Wasn’t there a belief (not sure when exactly that prevailed) that to show your teeth when you smiled was a sign of madness? (@amijudjes)

I’m not sure. I do know that Victorian women were advised never to smile when being photographed lest they be thought promiscuous. (@TheAttagirls. Exposures were long, and it's hard to sustain a smile.)

Smugglers' sign on the wall of St Dunston's Church, Snargate, in Romney Marsh, Kent. A painted ship meant a building was a good place to stash contraband. (@david_castleton)

The boy at Pye Corner was erected to commemorate the staying of the Great Fire, which, beginning at Pudding Lane, was ascribed to the sin of gluttony when not attributed to the papists as on the Monument, and the boy was made prodigiously fat to enforce the moral. He was originally built into the front of a public-house called The Fortune of War which used to occupy this site and was pulled down in 1910. (JP. He’s a gilded cherub and not particularly fat.)

All of those wonderfully redundant phrases such as “wrack and ruin”, “goods and chattels”, “will and testament”, “hue and cry” etc arose from the unification of two legal systems: Norman French and Anglo-Saxon. The linguistic redundancy ensured that all possible parties agreed and understood the law by using both the Anglo-Saxon term (usually the first) and the Norman French term in parallel. (Quora. Cease and desist, null and void, free and clear, signed and sealed, law and order. These are known as "legal doublets".)

Rosa Bonheur (1822-1899), French painter, obtained a police permit to wear men's clothes as accepted female fashions were so restrictive. She was so popular that girls were given dolls dressed in trousers to mimic Rosa’s unconventional style. (@womensart1. The dolls were probably tailors' mannequins dressed in the latest styles.)

Fun Fact: in real life, when you put a frog in water and slowly boil it the frog will absolutely jump right out when the water gets too hot. (@rob_mcrobberson)

People have different learning styles. Facts prevent understanding. Teacher-led instruction is passive. The 21st century fundamentally changes everything. You can always just look it up. We should teach transferable skills. Projects and activities are the best way to learn. Teaching knowledge is indoctrination. (All myths, according to Daisy Christodoulou.)

Few people will actually take the trouble to find out the truth. Most simply accept the first story they hear, without any critical test whatsoever. (Thucydides, The Peloponnesian War, 1.20)

Thinking about claims of pubs with Spanish Armada timbers. Of ca. 120-40 vessels, 2 were captured in Channel (1 sunk, 1 reused at Chatham), 5 lost at Gravelines, 1 off Scotland, the rest off Ireland. Only 1 wrecked off Devon. Its timbers must be spread thin across all those pubs. (@jpwarchaeology)

In Iceland, you are not allowed to name your baby Viking. (@qikipedia)

Parents will really be like "Drills and rote memorization? That pales in comparison to my strategy, instilling a lifelong love of learning", and then not instill a lifelong love of learning. (@tweetsbenedict)

The origin of the word “etiquette” was supposedly the “ticket” of entrance to court ceremonies in France, on which rules of court behaviour were written. (Vogue’s Book of Etiquette, 1951)

The thistle became a Scottish emblem after invading Danes attempted to creep up on the Scottish army in the middle of the night. Fortunately they were woken by the yell of a Dane scratched by a thistle. (@NinaAntonia13)

The London fog was caused by the finer quality coal being sold off to pay for the colossal national war debt. The U.K. population had to burn the low grade coal, hence the smog. (@maskcempt. It was a combination of smoke from power stations and private houses, and fog from the river.)

People with shellfish allergies consistently react to ground coffee because all ground coffee has a non-zero amount of ground-up cockroaches which cross-react with shellfish allergies. (@zeta_globin)

Mulling spices, a blend traditionally including cinnamon and cloves, are used to flavour heated wine or cider during the Fall and Winter. The recipe varies back into antiquity with peppercorns and herbs initially used to mask souring wine. (@wingandthorn)

Steeped in intriguing history this pub certainly has a colourful past. Once under the ownership of the Church of England, it was rumoured to be an upmarket brothel. (Warringtonhotel.co.uk. Looks like a distorted version of the story that brothels on the South Bank in London were owned by the Church.)

The first of the annual "National Trust cancels Christmas" stories came in yesterday. GB News said we’ve dropped Santa Claus from our grottoes in favour of Mrs Claus. (@celiarichardson.bsky.social)

Someone just explained to me that when the chicken crosses the road in the well-known joke it is killed by a car and dies, which is why it crosses over ‘to the other side’. Whaat?! I thought it just crossed over the road. (@drhingram. People tell the same story about the little piggy who went to market.)

When I was at school a gang of 5 boys were tormenting a Jewish boy.Whilst not Jewish myself, I told the gang leader that whilst his fellows might beat me up, if they did not leave the boy alone I would make sure I broke his nose. They never bothered the boy again. (@White1939D. Violence never solved anything.)

The Tarte Tatin is a pastry in which the fruit is caramelised in butter and sugar before the tart is baked. It was created accidentally at the Hôtel Tatin in Lamotte-Beuvron, Loir-et-Cher, France, in the 1880s. (@wikivictorian)

In 1924, a cellist playing in her back garden duetted with a nightingale. The BBC, who recorded it and made it a sensation, admitted 98 years later that it was faked. The nightingale was a bird-impressionist called Madame Saberon. (@qikipedia)

A lot of people's idea of intelligence is really informed by a fictitious model of some Sherlock Holmes type character who never makes mistakes. (@visakanv)

Columbo's "Just one more thing" trick was devised when the creators were typing up the pilot script and just didn't feel like retyping a whole scene to add a couple of plot setup lines because it was late and they were tired. (@RodneyMarshall)

They were retyping the stage play, not even the pilot. (@herlinghetti)

More here, and links to the rest.