Faces from 16th/17th century German stoneware bottles (Bartmann jugs) were called "Bellarmines" in England, supposedly due to their resemblance to the staunchly Catholic Cardinal Bellarmine. It's said Protestants liked to smash the bottles to see his face in pieces, but most of what we find on the foreshore is more likely to have been smashed accidentally in homes and taverns, where Bellarmines were used every day. (Mudlarking author Lara Maiklem. Picture by Liz Anderson.)
Not everyone did any science or took any notice at school, have never read a book, and don't care. People guess and just pass it around until it becomes the received wisdom. This has not happened because of the Internet, it has always been like that. I was stunned one day when my ex informed me that he always knew if a kid was from a gypsy family as they had bags under their eyes. He was pretty smart in lots of ways, but he was in reality undereducated (something he concealed from me for some years.) He had loads of erroneous ideas about things. It simply isn't programmed into some people's brains that you can actually find out stuff if you make a tiny effort. Google is a foreign country to billions of people. (Rhiannon Georgina Daniel via FB)
Irritating to hear a prime-time, much trailed @BBCRadio4 programme (Alice Roberts' Bodies) perpetuate the old pseudo-historical myth that religion put "an intellectual stranglehold" on science during the Middle Ages. (@Seb_Falk)
Ah what is that I hear on the radio? An axe grinding? No, it is the phrase "Ecclesia abhorret a sanguine" to prove the medieval church forbid human dissection because it hated science. Let me spend 12 minutes researching that oh. “It is a literary ghost. It owes its existence to [François] Quesnay, the uncritical historian of the Faculty of Surgeons at Paris, who in 1774, citing a passage from Pasquier’s Recherches de la France (“et comme l’eglise n’abhorre rien tant que le sang”) translated it into Latin and put it into italics. No earlier source for this sentence can be found. Quesnay himself quote a register from the archives of the Surgeons of Paris, in which it was stated that “at the time of Boniface VIII (1294-1303) and Clement V (1305-14) a decree was put forth at Avignon and confirmed by the council of Philip le Bel that surgery was separated from medicine.” No such decree can be found in the register of Boniface VIII, whilst among the ten thousand documents contained in the register of Clement V only one refers to medicine, and that concerns itself with studies at Montpellier. (Medieval canon law on medical and surgical practice by the clergy, Darrel W. Amundsen. See also Andrew Dickson White, A History of the Warfare of Science with Theology, 1896. He propagated the idea that the Victorians forbade anesthesia in childbirth because women ought to endure the "curse of Eve".)
A historical fallacy I sometimes see people falling into is the assumption that medieval and early modern people who died for expressing heterodox beliefs died for the right to express heterodox beliefs. (@DrFrancisYoung)
Another fallacy is that executed people's beliefs were always "right" in the word's modern sense. (@Annibal97783312)
Another fallacy is that religion is a system of beliefs. It's fundamentally an activity. (@crowley_gavin)
The other thing people often don’t grasp is that mediaeval/early modern people really believed what they said, it wasn’t a cynical cover for misogyny/the patriarchy/socio-economic self-interest. (@EliotWilson2)
Would you believe that every generation claims kids don't play outside anymore and they said this about 90s babies? (author Kaitlyn Greenidge @surlybassey)
Society is creating a new crop of alpha women who are unable to love. (Fox News 2017)
All roads in Boston, Mass., were originally cow paths. This explains the curving layout – unlike New York’s grid plan. (Via Twitter)
New hats were expensive and hard to come by during WWII. Hatpins were a must-have item to secure your hard-won hat. (Daily Mirror. You pinned your hat to your updo to stop it falling off. The hatpin's heyday was the years 1890-1910, an era of big hair and even bigger hats.)
An ex-miner told me that when he was young someone from Swinton (where we lived) would generally not be able to understand someone from Bolton (eight miles up the road). (Via the Internet.)
South Australia didn't have convicts, so they sound more like New Zealanders than the rest of us. (@Plantagenet00)
The Eye of the Needle (a perforated pyramid), one of the Wentworth Follies, was built to win a bet. (Gareth Hughes. "The second Marquess of Rockingham claimed he was able to 'drive a coach and horses through an eye of a needle'," says Wikipedia. "A firing squad execution took place here, as there are musket-ball markings on the eastern side," adds Historichouses.org.)
Tove Jansson’s original drawing of a moomintroll was a caricature of the philosopher Immanuel Kant. (@qikipedia)
Most people's minds can't be changed by logic and facts because most people are simply not wired that way. For good or bad, emotion and charged images are what govern around 90% of people. (JN via FB)
In my time there were occasional newspaper reports about Russian military people learning languages by playing tapes while they slept. It seemed a most appealing energy-saving prospect, but it may never quite have taken off. (@AodhBC)
Young women went blind making lace because bright light made the threads brittle, so they had only a candle for light. (@pammalamma. There are many paintings and photographs of women sitting in the sun making bobbin lace.)
Many surprising fashions in dress have arisen from the fact that a famous man or woman tried to conceal some infirmity. (Jean Cocteau)
19th century doctors adopted the white coat to look like more reputable biologists and chemists. (@SamoBurja)
Employers have to fill a quota of Black and minority ethnic employees. (No, says a lawyer.)
The Molendinar Burn that supplies Tennant’s Brewery in Glasgow passes through the Necropolis, an ornate Victorian cemetery. This is what gives Tennant's its unique taste. (Gareth E. Rees, Unofficial Britain)
In 1960s sectarian Liverpool, only Catholics usually had middle names. My Dad came from a staunch Protestant family and insisted I didn’t have one. (@Stephen_L12. Catholics take a name on Confirmation and some may use this as a middle name.)
I heard a story when cassette walkmen were becoming popular in the 80s. Cassettes being listened to on the London Underground were being wiped. The magnetic fields from the train motors were much too small to affect magnetic tape. (PD)
I find that a lot of anti-socialist sentiment boils down to a basic belief that people are lazy and won’t work hard unless they are suffering. I think most people would do amazing things if they weren’t in dire straits constantly. (@IsicaLynn)
"Personality disorders" do not cause sex offending. Nor do "attachment disorders". Nor do "bad childhoods". Can we please stop teaching students, professionals, the public and even the sex offenders themselves that they do? (@DrJessTaylor)
In Dorset, red-painted direction posts mark a route for guards taking prisoners to Poole, for transportation to Australia. The posts were painted red because the guards were illiterate and couldn’t read signposts, says a Facebook poster. "The red signpost on the A31 at Winterborne Zelston marks the turning for the barn where prisoners were lodged. There's a more romantic explanation: A highwayman was being chased along the road, and was shot down at the signpost. His blood stained the post so the authorities had it scrubbed off. The next morning, the post was red again, so they tried painting it with the same result. In the end, they gave up and it has been painted red ever since." A killjoy interjects: "These cast-iron signs were all erected by county councils, which didn’t come into existence until the 1880s/90s, long after transportation to Australia had ceased."
Modern life and technology inhibit imagination, particularly the mind's capacity to dream. (Thomas de Quincey, 1845)
I'm sure you're sensible enough to not run to the GP at the first sign of a cold and demand antibiotics unlike some people! (JE)
The German air force bombed Leicester thinking it was Birmingham. (WUR)
A friend carved names in York Market. He had multiple spellings of Chardonnay, and Shivaughn was another favourite. But the absolute winner was Kadasha, which they wanted cut as: Ka-a. (MJ)
When people began travelling from the south to the Lake District, travellers were overwhelmed by the majesty and awe of the hills and were given frames with which to peek at small areas at a time. (Via FB. They were probably using a frame to select a “picturesque” view, either to turn it into a watercolour, or to see landscape as if it was a picture.)
There is still a widespread idea that scientists "cling to beliefs", that they hate being wrong, and won’t give up on arguments or ideas. (@TetZoo)
It is believed that marble regenerates itself in quarries, and quarrymen declare that the wounds they inflict on mountainsides close over of their own accord. If this is true we can be optimistic that our resources for sumptuous living will never be exhausted. (Pliny, 36.125)
Am I happy? I don’t really know what that means. Life is exciting, totally fascinating, it’s magical, but I don’t really see happy as part of the deal. It’s right up there with God. “Happy” and “God” and things that are so beyond our ability to even comprehend. (Diane Keaton. Celebs seem unable to give the answer “no”. Perhaps their PR people won’t let them.)
We have received reports that horse owners have found a plait in their horse's mane and believe their horse may be marked to steal. In Cheshire we are not aware of any thefts linked to a horse's mane being plaited. (Cheshire Police RuralCrime @CheshPolRural It happens naturally, says another policeman. People used to think their horses’ manes were plaited by fairies or witches.)
There’s a theory that comedians do better at straight acting than conventional actors do at comedy. (Peterviney.com)
A 1953 book on psychosomatic illness gives the causes of skin conditions: need for approval, hypersensitivity, guilt, ambivalence, hostility (repressed), inferiority and anxiety. Period pains are caused by: fear of male aggression, anxiety, dissatisfaction with female role, self-centeredness, disgust with excretions and need for love. (Women were also told that the pain would go away once they had children, and all the above became something everybody just "knew".)
I heard a story that mummies were used as train fuel. It was during railway expansion in Egypt, they found so many mummies so they thought it was a great idea to used them as locomotive fuel due to lack of trees in the desert. (@kadin_kumala)
When they were digging Sloane Square Underground Station they forgot the buried River Westbourne was there, and it started flooding all the tunnels, so it now flows in a rather ordinary grey-green iron box over the top of the tracks. (Alexander Ritchie via FB. If it was buried, it must have been flowing through a pipe.)
Japanese women don't have menopausal symptoms because there is no word in Japanese for menopause. (Via FB)
Jelly babies were invented in 1864 by an Austrian immigrant working at Fryers of Lancashire, and were originally marketed as "Unclaimed Babies." By 1918 they were produced by Bassett's in Sheffield as "Peace Babies," to mark the end of World War I. (It's in Wikipedia – it must be true.)
"Candyman" was a term of abuse in Newcastle in C19 after itinerant sweet-sellers took money to act as bailiffs and eject striking miners and their families from homes. (@byzantinepower)
Thomas Aquinas asserted that women are inherently subordinate to men and that this subjection existed even before sin and is not a result of the fall, but is part of the created order and for their own benefit. (@NoHolyScripture. Was he reflecting current ideas, or did he influence them?)
Well recall Thatcher hiring a voice coach to flatten out upper-class vowels she'd cultivated at Oxford. (@HuishHugh. Workingvoices.com suggests that she lowered the pitch of her voice and tried to sound "warmer". It describes her original tones as "strangulated Received Pronunciation". But youtube maintains that she hired a coach from the National Theatre.)
More here, and links to the rest.
What You Know that Ain't So
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