Times subhed: Challenging myths is often derided as lefty navel-gazing... (The story explained that the BBC is hiring a debunker.)
That which has always been accepted by everyone, everywhere, is almost certain to be false. (Paul Valéry)
It is not the consciousness of men that determines their being, but, on the contrary, their social being that determines their consciousness. (Karl Marx/Friedrich Engels)
In the absence of sophisticated knowledge, platitudes and homilies rush in to fill the void, many of which obscure far more than they illuminate. Folklore and anecdote are elevated to equal standing with data and evidence. Everyone’s an expert, because everyone knows somebody who has been through [alcoholism]. And nothing in this world travels faster than a pithy turn of phrase. (Dr Lance Dodes, a retired professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School, on Alcoholics Anonymous)
“Magical thinking” is often used as a way of dismissing critical thinking that shows how the systems we built can be changed. What’s really irrational though is the mistaken belief that those systems are inevitable or permanent. (@OmanReagan)
Galor also follows Weber in suggesting that Protestantism was crucial to the development of modern capitalism, and that the most important invention of the Enlightenment was the idea of progress itself. (Steven Poole in the Guardian)
"People saying publicly that they have been cancelled haven't been cancelled" is the new "an anarchist organisation is a contradiction in terms" or "the survival of the fittest is a tautology". (MD)
The Seattle "no". Everybody thinks they’re the society that doesn’t say no.
My grandparents considered Georgian architecture dull (and likewise the music of Bach). (JP)
Melton Mowbray pork pies were designed to be taken out hunting. (Countryfile)
It’s pretty funny that there isn’t an Italian word for accountability. (@leonardocarella)
Is it true there isn’t a single bridge crossing the Amazon River? (@GordonWhistance)
After the revocation of the Edict of Nantes, Huguenot carpet weavers were smuggled to the British Wilton carpet factory in wine barrels. (Antiques Road Trip)
As for the old idea that everyone has a perfect double somewhere, that’s all a lot of mallarkey. (Simon Templar in The Saint)
Might be apocryphal but I've heard that the croissant was made to mock the crescent moon in the Ottoman flag. (@Matt_laza)
DO cook potatoes in their skins, this prevents their goodness dissolving into the water. (Wartime advice. Just post-war, we were told that "The goodness is next to the skin".)
Love how Esme says “skew-whiff”. It derives from ‘skew weft’, fabric woven out of alignment … so very appropriate to describe wonky sewing #SewingBee. (@celiahart. It's just one of those words like jamboree and copacetic.)
One writer makes a claim (usually without citing their sources), and all subsequent histories repeat it, perhaps with slight variations, until it becomes accepted as fact. A corgi enthusiast in 1946 writes a poem in the style of Longfellow’s Song of Hiawatha about fairies riding corgis, and several decades later it has mutated into an ancient Welsh “legend.” Lots of what someone with a casual-to-intense interest in dogs might know about the history of individual breeds isn’t supported by historical evidence—pugs, for example, probably did not come from China. (slate.com)
“Chip hats” were made of wood chips. (JK. Wikipedia says straw hats were made of straw. Wiktionary says a chip hat is "a cheap kind of hat, made of strips of the leaves of a Cuban palm tree". Another dictionary says that "chip" consisted of strips of wood, palm leaves, straw". In Hungary they use "thin strips of poplar wood". There'll be a youtube video.)
In the early 60s, colleagues at Berkeley thought architect Christopher Alexander “violated the conventional wisdom that beauty is subjective and to talk about it is overly sentimental”. (Guardian obituary 2022-04-04. You couldn’t discuss what paintings were about, either.)
Did you know there are more injuries during storms with girls’ names than boys’ because some people imagine the girl storms are somehow less fearsome and therefore they take more risks? (Robert Crampton, Times, 2022-02-22. Swiftly debunked by fullfact.org.)
The 16th century hymnodists knew setting psalms to music would make them easier to remember, but were afraid that if the music itself brought pleasure it would distract from the message, so they wrote deliberately terrible music. (@IdUnchained)
Grinling Gibbons’ work very often included carvings of peapods. A myth states that he would include a closed pod in his work, only carving it open once he had been paid. If the pea pod was left shut it supposedly showed that he had not been paid for the work. (Wikipedia)
The pips in “raspberry” jam are made of wood – the confection is made of marrow and beetroot.
[In Victorian England] unnecessary state intervention was condemned as immoral, as destructive of personal character. (Todd Endelman, The Jews of Britain)
She just told him the silly things they suggest you should say. That it is just as nice to be adopted because it shows you really were wanted. There’s a lot of silly slop like that. (Character in Agatha Christie’s Elephants Can Remember)
If you swallowed chewing gum it would wrap around your heart and kill you This lie was peddled by your parents who didn’t want you chewing gum because they considered it common. (Daily Mash)
For women the best aphrodisiacs are words. The G-spot is in the ears. He who looks for it below there is wasting his time. (Isabel Allende. News reports stress that the new “Viagra for women” works on the brain. Add “For women, sex is all in the head.”)
Socialism: impracticality. levelling-down, drain on the taxpayer, not worth thinking about. (What to say about socialism, via RK)
As to periwiggs, for nobody will dare to buy any haire, for fear of the infection, that it had been cut off of the heads of people dead of the plague. (Samuel Pepys, 3 September 1665)
Said to be statistically the most depressing day of the year, you might have seen a lot online today about Blue Monday. Perhaps surprisingly, however, the whole idea was made up for a travel company PR campaign back in 2005, and is based on really zero scientific evidence. (James Wong)
The Royals have an interesting arrangement with those on whom they bestow their crest. The story is told that QEQM was very fond of a certain cigarette, and bestowed a Royal Warrant on WD & HO Wills, or whoever it was. When the next batch appeared along with an invoice, the private secretary made it very clear that it must have been sent by mistake and under no circumstances would it or any future bill be paid. (RC)
Crossed swords are a Masonic symbol, says Ru on The Antiques Road Trip. If the points were up, we were at war, and vice versa.
Sailors were widely agreed to have one of the most treacherous working environments and so they developed many superstitions. One was to wear hooped golden earrings as this was supposed to stop evil spirits entering the body through the ears. (@NonFictioness)
Stories are told that the many sexualised carvings that can be found in [medieval] ecclesiastical architecture must be the result of anti-establishment stonemasons creating a visual joke on their patrons because they went unpaid for a job. (Dr James Wright, triskelepublishing.com)
More here, and links to the rest.
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