Received Ideas in Quotes 11

Believe it nor not!

Unreplicated psychology experiments:
Power posing will make you act bolder.
Smiling will make you feel happier.
Self-control is a limited resource.
Revising after exams can improve your earlier performance.
Exposure to aging-related words will make you walk more slowly.
Washing hands will wash away guilt.
A portrait with staring eyes makes customers more honest.
Being reminded of money makes us selfish.
(BPS Digest, digested)

A horse's 'canter' is a shortening of 'Canterbury pace', the gentle rate at which medieval mounted pilgrims made their way to the shrine of St Thomas à Becket at Canterbury.

It was tradition for the bride's father to provide enough mead to last the newly married couple through their first month of marriage. As mead is made with honey, this is where the word 'honeymoon' comes from. (@AlysWestYork "Moon" meant "month".)

Apparently, Catholic children tend to say haitch, so it was used by Protestant children to identify Catholics. (SP)

Knock on wood: Sailors knocked ship's biscuits on the table to shake out the weevils and now we knock on wood for luck. (And I thought it was because the Druids worshipped oak trees.)

The facade of Principal Hotel, Russell Square. Designed by Charles Fitzroy Doll it's supposedly what gave us the phrase “all dolled up!" (@Look_UpLondon)


What are the "cockles of your heart" and why do they need warming? In the Dutch language, the word for fireplace or heater is "kachel" and the word for home or hearth is "haard". There is an old Dutch saying "eigen haard is goud waard", meaning your own home is worth gold. Of that, make what you will. (Ben Hewitt, Lismore)

The origin of this phrase could be "cochleae cordis", a Latin medical term referring to the ventricles of the heart, or cockles, a type of mollusc, which can be heart-shaped. (Ben Cooper, Abbotsford smh.com.au)


The idea that Martin Luther King won by sitting back and waiting for moderates to become outraged by what they saw on TV was written into the history books by white moderates after his death to ensure that no one could repeat his success. (frank furtschool @kulturalmarx)

Hey, Medievalists! John Milton called your entire period "a dreary tale of battles between kites and crows". (Adam Roberts @arrroberts)

The Wizard of Oz was in fact a satire of the French Revolution. The Tin Man, the Scarecrow, and the Lion represented different members of the royalty, and the various witches were somehow opposing factions. (Straightdope.com question Straightdope says: “The story I got about The Wizard of Oz was that it was an allegorical treatise on the Populist movement in the U.S. in the 1890s.” Also, the Yellow Brick Road equals the gold standard, the Tin Woodsman the ordinary working man, the Scarecrow the Midwestern farmer, the Cowardly Lion politicians in general and specifically William Jennings Bryan. Dorothy is the “Little Guy, naive but feisty”. The Emerald City is Washington DC, the Wiz is the president. The Wicked Witch of the West represesnts the “malign forces of nature in the American West”. The winged monkeys are the plains Indians. “Our heroes learn they should look within themselves rather than to the government for the solution to their problems. The End.”

In shocking new research, archaeologists discover that Indigenous people knew how to do stuff before encountering Europeans. This challenges previous theories that Europeans were responsible for all technological developments in human history. (@adamgaudry)

The Victorian groat (coin representing four pennies) was "also called a Joey , after the MP Joseph Hume, who recommended the coinage for paying cabbies because the minimum cab fare was fourpence and it was common to pay them with a sixpence, twopence of which they usually kept as a tip." (Via Facebook. According to George Orwell, a Joey was a threepenny bit.)

Mental health problems are not: A bandwagon. Fashionable. A fad. A celebrity trend. (Matt Haig. Distressingly, people with severe depression are still being told to "change their mindset", "adopt a glass half-full attitude" and "go for a brisk walk".)

A study I was told about where someone is blindfolded and told they will have their arm burnt by a hot poker. Instead, an ice cube is placed on their arm but it still blisters as though burnt due to the power of the mind. When I looked deeper into this "study" I couldn't find any details at all. ... The story may have originated in a novel called The House of Sight and Shadow by Nicholas Griffin. (@Ashles3000 Earlier mentions in print involving a fake bloodletting in which the subject died, says @ULTweets. And Agatha Christie tells of a story of the girl who goes to the doctor with a painful arm. The doctor says "I'm going to have to pass a red-hot poker down your arm. Just shut your eyes – believe me, you'll be cured." He dips a glass rod in water and runs it down her arm. She takes off the blindfold. "Oh, it's much better, doctor, but it did hurt!" Her neuritis was cured. And blisters appeared on her arm where the glass rod had passed.)

My favourites are the strangers scolding you for "poisoning yourself with medication somethingsomething just eat kale BIG PHARMA". (yrna @SailorSoapbox)

All politeness paradigms are designed to preserve and perpetuate existing relations of social power and prestige, including any race, ethnicity and gender inequalities. (@RoseLemberg)

The reason women's clothing doesn't have pockets is that male politicians around the time of the French Revolution were afraid women were carrying and distributing seditious and/or erotic writings. (Via Twitter)

So Carole Cadwallader accepted a prize named after a racist, sexist, homophobic elephant-killer? Wow – congrats! (@piersmorgan)

Orwell literally wrote about how brutal and traumatic elephant hunting was, using it as a metaphor to condemn racism and white supremacists. "When the white man turns tyrant it is his own freedom that he destroys.” Orwell (James Wong ‏@Botanygeek)

A cab driver told me if he saw any of those Remainers or Tory sell-outs he’d spit in their face or something worse. This is not the first time I’ve heard this angry language. The betrayal Theresa May has inflicted will cause more angry division than ever before and who could blame them. (Steven Woolfe MEP)

My uber driver, who is also my six year-old daughter and a veteran of three world wars, delivered a powerful monologue about not disrespecting the flag! (@PatBlanchfield)

More here, and links to the rest.