Received Ideas in Quotes 40

The Emperor is naked, there is no Santa Claus, I don’t believe in fairies and I loathe Big Brother.

There are no guidelines. It is perfectly ethical to ringfence parts of the discourse. There is no “evidence based” set of current ideas. There’s an official set. You can say anything apart from “human beings can’t change sex”. 

All minorities have a voice, everybody has a voice – apart from them, them and them. This is not contradictory. 

Optimism is official. You can’t say “Well, it never worked for me”, it’s so rude. Whatever group you belong to, you must shut up.

Optimism must not be contradicted because we need to give everybody hope. Ideas are tested on the probable outcomes of believing them. 

And Mark Twain invented the expandable bra strap. (It looks like he did, too.)


Medieval people regularly cleaned their mattresses, they actively combated fleas and were terrified of bad smells so did everything to  avoid them.

They had pillows. Blankets were washed more than once a year.
Livestock didn't live in the same room as the people, they lived behind partitions.
If you survived childhood you had a good chance of living into your 60s, 22 wasn't really middle-aged. Thatched roofs keep rain out very well.
They had curtains, especially around beds.
They had toilets, outhouses, seats over cesspits, not just buckets.
And no, they didn't toss it into the street.
There were strict laws against it and people had noses, they didn't want that filth in their streets.
There's no evidence for 'gardlyloo' till long after the middle ages.
Its not French for watch out below.
Streets weren't really open sewers.
They had gutters that were for liquid waste like grey water only. 
Public latrines were very common.
@fakehistoryhunt


New ideas are in fact a change in the brain. (@tathtrod)

Monet’s Poplars series almost didn’t happen because the trees were about to be cut down. So he purchased them until he finished painting, then sold them back. (@artistmonet. He had the train schedules changed so that he could paint them, too.)

Perhaps only great men have destinies. (Said a philosophy professor to me once.)

I keep saying the Bible not only has books missing but King James rewrote it in several versions for financial gain. The Vatican is responsible for so much of this evil. They just changed things to fit their narrative of dominance over humanity. (@PeggyDodson)

My English teacher in secondary school was Jewish. She told my class that when her dad came to England he didn't speak English very well, all he could day was I am a free man, so they recorded his last name as Freeman. (@Trixie696775)

The Three Wise Men of Gotham were feigning madness to avoid taxes. (Weren't there some long-sought Mafiosi who feigned Alzheimer's to avoid recognition?)

Reminds me of the apocryphal story of Bazalgette building London's sewers. He did all the maths to work out flow rates and required pipe sizes based on population size, then thought "hang on, we only get one chance to dig all this up". So he doubled every single diameter. (@GazTheJourno)

Archaeologists have found a real treasure: a medieval toy production site! Quite touching and another reminder that the old idea of medieval children being treated as adults and not having a childhood is nonsense. (@fakehistoryhunt. That was middle-class, mid 20th century children.)

Many people falsely believe that we all begin life as females, before hormones transform some of us into males. But the past few decades of genetics and embryology have debunked this. (@zaelefty)
 
William Holden, the lad just signed for the coveted lead in 'Golden Boy' (1939), used to be Bill Beadle. And here is how he obtained his new movie tag. On the Columbia lot is an assistant director and scout named Harold Winston. Not long ago he was divorced from the actress, Gloria Holden, but carried the torch after the marital rift. Winston was one of those who discovered the 'Golden Boy' newcomer and who renamed him—in honor of his former spouse! (George Ross of Billboard magazine, according to IMDb/Wikipedia. When it's common knowledge stars have changed their names, the studio's PR department puts out an origin story.)

Jeanette Helen Morrison said on TCM that Van Johnson was responsible for her stage name. While they were filming The Romance of Rosy Ridge (1947), he suggested she shorten her first name to Janet. He also thought that, since the film they were doing was a Civil War drama, Lee would go well as her last name. But then he suggested she spell it Leigh. (Via FB)

I have been told that when standard Lithuanian was formulated in the 19th century they purposely archaized it. (@razibkhan)

Ever immigrant to this country is here at our discretion. They are privileged to be able to live here. They have no right to, and our discretion can be waived whenever we want for whatever reason we want. (@reggiedunlopno4. There is no two-tier citizenship.)

Our local department store used to have ‘men only’ evenings before Christmas & Valentine’s Day when they could go and buy lingerie as gifts for the lady in their lives. One employee told me about 90% of it was returned by said ladies after the day. (@Dearkens.

In Tuvan language, spoken in the Republic of Tuva located northwest of Mongolia, the terms 'songgaar' (going back/future) and 'burungaar' (moving forward/past) suggest a unique perspective: the past is perceived as being ahead of them, while the future is seen as behind. (@FedeItaliano76. This either shows that we are advanced and enlightened now, or that the tribes know a thing or two and we should copy them.)

In schools, history teachers teach that the Catholic Church is bad because it hid the Bible for a long time. (@profSPedro)

Reality is what we make of it, how we interact with others, and how they react to us. There is no one singular way to exist in the world. (@rejserin)

We were talking about age gaps in marriages in the olden days. @Ingold321 has an answer: Rome-focus (their soldiers had huge age gaps because the military forbade marriage while enlisted), aristocracies, and the desire to present our own time as more enlightened in all ways likely extended the reach of the myth.

@ContraireSous adds that we’re looking at Roman society because “that’s the culture that ushered in monogamy”.

Couples have basically always been within 5 years of age. Some people genuinely believe age gaps were all like 15 years until 1970. (@CartoonsHateHer)

Why do judges break their pen after a death sentence? (@ChrisEjiofor5. Others add: Goes back to the Mughal era, “The pen just signed someone’s fate, it can’t be used again.”) 

My in-laws, for their entire lives, believed that if you get sunburnt you should rinse it with HOT water, in order to open your pores and allow the radiation to escape from your skin. They taught their children this. Imagine my husband’s relief when I told him this was insane. (@Katherine111594)

I grew up in a house like this.  Don't use ice in your drink, you'll get a sore throat. Imagine my surprise at how good ice cold water tastes when my husband debunked that myth. (@kellercre8s. It used to be that ice in your drink in the tropics would give you diarrhoea – possibly because the ice cubes were made with unboiled water.)

Ivy-leaved toadflax growing on an Oxford wall. Its 17th century name was ‘Oxford ivy' or 'Oxford weed’ because it was thought to have arrived from Italy via the packaging of a marble statue destined for an Oxford college garden. (@beatricegroves1)

The phrase ‘to wing it’ as in ‘to improvise’ comes from 19th-century theatrical slang where it meant ‘to study a part in the wings having undertaken it at short notice’. (@qikipedia)

For non-southerners, the Southern accent can be perceived as uneducated or “bad” English. Actually the Southern accent comes directly from British Received Pronunciation and aristocratic society. (Lingoda.com. The only thing the two accents have in common is non-rhotacism – posh Brits don't roll their Rs.)

Type was thrown into the Thames by apprentice compositors from the London School of Printing. Too lazy to distribute, or 'dis' the type back into the typecase, it was put in your pocket and dropped in the Thames from the nearest bridge. (Peter Stephens. Wouldn’t they eventually run out of type? Another theory: it was thrown down the drain. In reality, one of the creators of Doves type refused to share it with his partner, and threw it all into the Thames near Chiswick. Mudlarkers have been retrieving it ever since.)

A whelm is a wooden drain pipe, a hollowed out tree, whelmed down or turned with the concavity downwards to form an arched watercourse. It is where the words ‘underwhelmed’ and ‘overwhelmed’ come from. Lara Maiklem (Dictionary says it means "overturned".) 

I think it is more accurate to say a Votes for Women was won despite civil disobedience. The suffragists managed, during the Great War, to win back a lot of support lost by the suffragettes during their 1900s and 1910s campaign. (@WalkerMarcus)

Part brass rags: This expression is explained in W.P. Drury’s short story the Tadpole of an Archangel (1898): When sailors desire to prove the brotherly love... with which each inspires the other, it is their custom to keep their brasswork cleaning rags in a joint ragbag. But should relations become strained, the bag owner casts forth upon the deck his sometime brother’s rags; and with the parting of the brass rags hostilities begin. (19th century nautical slang)

I love this grafter (Lothrop Stoddard). He's the one who made up the whole "Africans have no word for maintenance in any of their 3,000 languages. (@RonBabylon. Stoddard was an influential racist in the early 20th century.) 

Trivia fact: in the Middle Ages women got married in red. When Anne of Brittany married the King of France she wore a white dress because white is the colour of Brittany. It became a trend because France was already the cultural trendsetter for the world.  (@pegobry_en)

I was always told “You are a Ship of Theseus, all your cells get replaced, you are an information pattern wave through matter”. Today I learned that most of your conscious brain is in fact the same set of neurons you were born with, aging with you for life, ditto heart and eyes. (@liron)

Robert Tombs said that Victorian Britain became the world's first urban nation, clearly forgetting that something preposterous like 80% of Early Dynastic Sumer's population lived in cities. (Basedwagnerite)

Freakonomics (2005) talked about baby naming and links to socioeconomics. They described new names like Oranjello and Lemonjello (pronounced le-MON-juh-lo and or-ON-juh-lo), but had to make a correction in subsequent editions because these turned out to be urban legends. (@paulmidler)

Before the invention of the lightning conductor, bell-ringers, including monks, were often struck by lightning while ringing bells in church towers. This happened because churches were the tallest structures in a village and also because the metal bells themselves attracted lightning. There was a widespread belief that ringing church bells could ward off lightning, making bell-ringing a particularly dangerous practice. (Google)

I’ve just been told that underneath San Francisco there’s an underground roller coaster. Apparently it takes 45 minutes to get through security and sets of multiple doors. (@TylerAlterman)

More here, and links to the rest.