Spring Heeled Jack was a bat-winged criminal who menaced Victorian London, always leaping out of the clutches of the police. Eighty years later he returned – a relative had found the suit. (From Reddit)
There was a time when schoolgirls used the Robertsons enamel badges to indicate that they had lost their virginity and there was a bit of a scandal about it and that was a part of the reason that the badges were stopped. (Teacup@cix. cixonline.com)
From what I understand (and was told by a schoolgirl friend back in the 60s) this originated in a novel, the fiction was then scandalously denounced by the prurient press, and thereafter many schoolgirls (my friend among them) took to wearing the badge as a joke/challenge/protest. (Timbotee@cix)
Fingerprinting was originally a product of British colonialism in India, of course, a way of documenting illiterate indigenous labourers. (@paulrogers002. This site claims it was the first British use of fingerprinting – or handprinting – in 1858. The science is much older.)
Explanation for Rossendale’s black-face coconut dance: The dance, which marks the return of spring, is believed to trace its roots to Moorish pirates who settled in Cornwall and became employed in local mining. As more mines and quarries opened in Lancashire in the 18th and 19th centuries, a few Cornishmen are said to have headed to the area, taking with them mining expertise and the costume of red and white kilts, breeches, bonnets and blackened faces. (Would the Cornish take kindly to Moorish pirates? And why would the pirates darken their own faces?)
One theory about the partridge in the pear tree is that it represents Christ on a cross and was originally a catechism song for 16th century Catholics, who were unable to practise their faith publicly. (Lara Maiklem)
"First they laugh at us, then they fight us, then we win.” Gandhi? Africa Check turned to the Mind of Mahatma Gandhi, the "encyclopedia of Gandhi's thoughts", and could not find the quote. The closest quote we could find is from a convention of the Amalgamated Clothing Workers of America held on 15 May 1918 in Baltimore in the US. "First they ignore you. Then they ridicule you. Then they attack you and want to burn you. And then they build monuments to you," Nicholas Klein, a US labour activist, told the trade union convention. (Via JP, africacheck.org)
Some departmental building at Leicester was sliding down the hill towards another. However, that second building was sinking. Calculations suggested that the first building would pass safely over the second. (JP)
On Twitter, someone asked: What should everyone experience? The answers were mainly “pain, severe pain, loneliness, unrequited love”. (Others were “loving and being loved”, but also getting out of your home town, visiting another country, being on your own in another country. The responders seemed to dwell in a reality of small towns that nobody ever leaves, monocultural social groups, and lives lived communally.)
When Joan Lindsay submitted Picnic at Hanging Rock for publishing her editor convinced her to leave off the final chapter in which a solution is given. (Scott Wallace Baker)
Denver Airport: Its layout is an occult symbol. There is a demon horse statue which [insert myth here]. Hides a giant underground city where the rich and powerful will survive the apocalypse. (The demon horse is known as Blucifer.)
I once heard there are secret tunnels under the city of Liverpool containing railway lines and pristine, never used steam trains. Ready for if the sh*t hits the fan and all the power goes out, coal-powered emergency transport. (Reddit)
Reply: There are tunnels underneath Liverpool, the Williamson tunnels. They don't have steam trains in, at least I don't think so! But they are fascinating, they were ordered by an eccentric tobacco magnate and he was adamant about them being built a very particular way and wouldn't reveal their purpose.
Brian May, Johnny Depp etc: A famous actor/pop star lives in a mansion in your area and has been spotted in Tesco’s.
Think [the swan breaking your arm story] was used in an experiment to see how fast and how far a "fact" can spread. Back in the early ish days of the super information highway. (Reddit. The story is far older.)
When the electrical substation at London’s Brown Hart Gardens was opened in 1905, an urban myth was soon floating around about the new construction, saying that the reason for its large green door and the large domes was because it was built so that Queen Victoria could house her ‘pet elephant’ there! (Niki Shore. The entrance to the gardens is a huge baroque construction with a dome.)
It’s said that indentured servants in Maine in the 18th century lobbied to be fed lobster no more than twice a week. (Aerial America. Repeat for salmon and oysters.)
When they sold Curzon Street premises previously occupied by MI5 in 1990s to developers, the bidding packs referenced a basement. Developers bought, MI5 moved out, and they found seven levels of basement with tunnel connections to the underground! (@simonhcbenson)
What Oxford Street has become: a tawdry sewer of tourist tat shops and American candy stores. (Oliver Wainwright, Guardian. That's the impression you'd get if you glanced down the street from Tottenham Court Road. This is why snobs keep lobbying for the street to be pedestrianised – read "gentrified".)
Was asked to look at some supposed "ritual marks" "witch marks" at a church today. All of it looked like graffiti from the last 200 years. (@odavies9)
Today’s received idea is: 40% of men lose their Y chromosome by age 70.
Web says: More than 40% [of men] experience some loss of Y chromosomes in their blood cells by age 70.
I had a woman knock on my door to tell me I’d been targeted by dognappers and pointed out some spray paint on the path by my house. It was Virgin Media installing the internet. (Reddit)
According to Larry Siedentop’s book Inventing the Individual, the Ancient Greeks lacked the modern concept of free will. In historical terms, it’s a recent habit, he says, to imagine a separate, interior event of “willing” that precedes action. Homeric Greek has no word for “intention”. For the Greeks, Siedentop suggests, human agency was shaped not by individual will but “by the structure of society”. It makes more intuitive sense if you think how much of life happens on “autopilot”, just going around doing things without ever really consciously deciding to. Friends have pointed me towards the psychologist Julian Jaynes who argued (not uncontroversially) that consciousness itself is a “learned behaviour”, the product not of biology but culture. The Homeric Greeks — and you begin to wonder whether the poor blokes had any mental faculties at all — did not experience consciousness the way we do. What we call consciousness, they experienced as verbal hallucination or the voices of gods. Nonsense perhaps. But a useful prompt to open-mindedness about human nature and a reminder of how little about ourselves we can take for granted, marooned as we are in the 21st century, so distant from most of the other humans who have ever lived. (James Marriott in the Times, Sept 26 2022. Yes, it's nonsense. Marriot's argument is an example of "Yes Bernadette's visions weren't genuine but they drew many back to the Church", or "Yes it was all made up but it tells an important truth". If what you really want to do is tell an important truth, why not make up your own fable?)
Honestly, this kind of thing is so nuts I have trouble believing anyone seriously believes it. I think if you're leftist intelligentsia it's just become The Thing To Say about Britain. (@mrianleslie, on the idea that “the British” define themselves by the Empire, for which they are nostalgic. Perhaps it's a way of establishing credentials: Look, I don't think the Empire was a Good Thing.)
While the exception doesn't prove the rule, the exception also doesn't overturn an overwhelmingly accurate generalization. (@emethias. It does if your generalisation was "All swans are white".)
If some people asserted the earth rotated East-West and others asserted it spun West-East, there would always be a few well-meaning people to suggest that the truth probably lay between the extremes or else the globe did not rotate at all. (Via the Web, paraphrase)
Bob’s your uncle? One suggested origin is Robert, Marquess of Salisbury, who as Prime Minister in the 1890s promoted his nephew, Arthur Balfour, to be Leader in the Commons. (@BaronChristina)
Former Rep. Michele Bachmann claims that the Bible was "the number one book that was referenced" by the Founders when creating this nation, which is why the Declaration and Constitution were based largely on scripture. None of that is true. (@RightWingWatch)
Were the earliest humans naturally egalitarian communists, who somehow lost those tendencies when agriculture took off? Widespread, appealing and wide of the mark. (@koenfucius)
Soon after Dr. Hordes came to New Mexico, he talked with many Hispanics who reported that their families light candles on Friday night, avoid pork and that children play a gambling game with a wood top called "put in and take out." Dr. Hordes was able to explain to them that ancestors may have been Jewish. They have hid the fact for so long that, over the generations, they forgot. (Everything2.com)
These [long clay pipes] are sometimes nicknamed churchwarden pipes due to the sheer length of stem, allowing the warden to open a window in the vestry, stick the pipe out into the fresh air and puff away on his foul-smelling tobacco without upsetting the vicar. (@liz_lizanderson)
While academics have dismantled much of Philippe Ariès' theory, many of his beliefs persist... It has been said too often that there was no feeling for childhood – that childhood was a time in life that had to be passed as quickly as possible to become an adult, and then you fully 'exist'. (bbc.com, 2022)
According to Wikipedia, during World War II René Magritte painted and sold fake Picassos, Braques and De Chiricos. He also forged banknotes. (Fernand Léger just painted Corots – allegedly.)
Visitors to St. Edmund’s church, Southwold will recognise this 18th century tomb close by the porch, but have you wondered at this depression on the side of the roof slab? It is made from the fine-grained stone perfect for whetting the blades of knives, scythes and, we are told, the cutlasses of the excise men! (Geoffrey Munn)
Overheard in the library: “They keep a preserved rat from bubonic plague times down here.” Sir, we absolutely do not. (Queen's College Library @QueensLibOx)
Tom Daley has blamed “colonialism” for anti-gay laws across the Commonwealth. In a BBC documentary, the Olympic diving champion visits “the most homophobic countries in the Commonwealth” and says the experience taught him “where homophobia stemmed from in the first place, and it is a legacy of colonialism”. However, said The Telegraph, some historians argue that the persecution of gay people long predates colonial expansion around the world. (The Week)
The Wright Brothers' first successful flight was initially reported in Gleanings in Bee Culture, which scooped the Daily Mail and other better-known publications.
Along with everything else which provides humans with pleasure or convenience, indexes have at times been considered Bad For You. As 21st century harrumphers worry “Is Google making us stupid?”, so their ancestors declared that indexing marked the end of true learning. (Mat Coward, Fortean Times 2022)
"Boilerplate" (unchanging slabs of text) comes from the fact that heavy steel plates were used in stencils for large stamped print runs. (@weird_hist 2017)
Usually white Americans just say “I’m Irish”, and when you check their genealogy they’re mostly British and/or German with a bunch of partial European roots (Irish, Dutch, French, Italian, etc). For Black Americans, the default answer is to say “I have ancestors from Ghana and Nigeria”, while they have partial African roots from all over the African West Coast. (ethnicelebs.com)
Figures on a heraldic shield should face the viewer’s left, because that was the shield-bearer’s right, and it was his perspective, not the eye of the beholder, that mattered. (Fastcompany.com. When you’re behind the shield, you can’t see what’s painted on the front of it.)
One of my most favourite times in a pub in Glastonbury was the moment when I saw a lady set fire to a newspaper. Landlord came up to her, looked at the newspaper and said "Ah, The Daily Mail, carry on". (Claire Morris)
Roy Ellis Many years ago during a guided tour of Battle Abbey, Hastings the guide referred to a tile found nearby as 'half baked', due to the centre being a darker colour caused by faulty firing. Hence the phrase 'half baked'. I have never been able to find evidence to verify the truth of this. (Guidelore tends to include a “hence the phrase”.)
"The University of Oxford's colour is blue because of the Virgin Mary, who is the patron saint of the University." A totally made-up fact, overheard from an Oxford tour guide outside my office window. Truly the summer vacation is upon us! (Kieran Hazzard @RadicalEIC)
As a preacher myself I know you don’t always quote the sources of your anecdotes, or perhaps get them right. (George Featherston gives away trade secrets in the Fortean Times, Jan 2022)
So the guy who started the whole 'Terfs buy up the front row at trans comic's EdFringe gig and deliberately sit stony faced' has deleted his lies, admitted he wasn't there, customers who were noticed nothing but a rather thin audience. But the comic has sold many more tickets. (@urcrazytoo)
In 2022, there were several first-person accounts of women in public toilets trying to eject women with short hair. They're as real as the women who shout abuse at men who hold doors open for them. (These stories get believed, while evidence of men m*sturbating in women’s toilets is thrown out.)
More here, and links to the rest.
Many more in my book What You Know That Ain't So.
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