“Aye!” said Nancy, “If you listen to sea yarns, young shaver, you’ve got to sort out what’s yarn and what’s spindrift.” (Worzel Gummidge and the Treasure Ship, Barbara Euphan Todd. Spindrift is "windblown sea spray", says the Free Dictionary. Nancy is a ship’s figurehead.)
@naomirwolf: I was excited to see the new season of Curb Your Enthusiasm but sadly the formerly compelling cast all look desiccated and grayish-yellow now, and have that ‘what’s-the-point’ vibe of the multiply vaccinated. Sad for the cast; but also, what a blow this all is for the arts, including for comedy. (@Hardley76 points out “They’re just older”.)
@DesigningMind: Couldn't stick with it...the whining got to me. Now they are REALLY whining as I'm sure they are all vaxed and losing health, friends and co-workers left and right... but mostly Left.
@CuriousBunnie12: "Mothers of the past always had an army of female family members to help them raise babies" is becoming one of those random ahistorical exaggerations touted as fact, along with "peasants worked less than modern people" and "everyone died at age 26".
Her parents died when she was three months old, in an age when the average lifespan was 50, even in the developed world. (christandpopculture.com on Anne of Green Gables. Average life expectancy at birth again?)
@wylfcen: The origin of the word “heathen” is funny to me. It’s derived from “heath,” meaning wilderness or wasteland, since Christianity originally spread in the cities, leaving heathens disproportionately in rural areas... so it was an Old English way of calling people “backwoods.”
@wylfcen I love how Anglo-Saxons would ‘adapt’ foreign words. The Old English word for a pearl was meregrot ‘sea pebble’. They took Latin margarīta (“pearl”) and then bent it into the native words mere ‘sea’ + grot ‘pebble’, so it was simultaneously a loanword and pure native English.
Acne is caused by modern junk food – you never see people with acne in old photographs. (Via Twitter: Photos that were kept were carefully selected, and in the 19th and early 20th centuries they were airbrushed – the Photoshop of its day.)
@mere_rain: American self-mythos valorizes go-getting badass protagonists. It's part of the lie that everyone should be able to pull themselves up by their bootstraps.
@NatalieKelda: Yep! I'm sure that has a lot to do with it. The whole mentality of "every person for themselves" influences so much media and cultural values but that's not how we think in other countries. In Denmark it's quite literally the opposite. (Her publisher complained that her central character “didn’t have agency”.)
@richmondie: "Romantic love is a bourgeois construct invented by poets in the 18th century. Before that all marriages were arranged."
@JustinSadur: I can't believe this rot ever got any traction. It just doesn't pass the smell test. It's one of those things people mindlessly repeat to sound smart and "above it all."
All Old Masters were “mainly created by studio assistants”. @super_claude: What about Dumas (I think it was him) who got his assistants to write the filler bits of his novels?
@lauren_wilford: The best case for exercise I currently have is that experiencing your body being able to do something it could not do before is a visceral, undeniable message to your subconscious that change in your life is possible. (See many claims, eg: I bicycled up Mount Everest to prove to myself that I could do anything I put my mind to.)
@MarkHay55822123: On the site of King's Cross Station there was once a huge rubbish pile, one of several in the area. The main constituents were ash and clinker from innumerable coal fires. The material was likely sold for brick making to rebuild Moscow after 1812. (Sometimes it's "foundations of St Petersburg. See Dickens' Our Mutual Friend.)
It’s not illegal to fly over Antarctica, the Nazis didn’t establish a base there, and the continent wasn’t a ‘flourishing land’ in the 1500s. (Says fullfact.org.)
Plato divided the soul into three parts: the logistikon (reason), the thymoeides (spirit, which houses anger, as well as other emotions), and the epithymetikon (appetite or desire, which houses the desire for physical pleasures). (Wikipedia. Freud was not the first to divide up the human soul/psyche/mind/spirit.)
@NicholasPegg: It’s always adorable when twits reveal that they seriously think Great Britain means “Fantastic Britain”. It just means “large Brittany”. The 12th-century historian Geoffrey of Monmouth referred to the island as “Britannia major”, as distinct from Brittany, “Britannia minor”. “Great Britain” was first used 1000 years before Geoffrey of Monmouth by the Greco-Egyptian scholar Ptolemy, for whom it meant “Large Britain”, as opposed to “Small Britain”, which was what he called Ireland. Of COURSE he didn’t mean “Fab Britain”. That would be ridiculous. (Or does it mean mainland Britain, including the islands?)
@RigelRilling: "The bad parts of New World colonization" denial was national policy within living memory, and "post-Roman pre-Enlightenment progress" denialism was the stuff of textbooks before that.
@QuetzalThoughts: As an immigrant, some American racial stereotypes still leave me baffled. Why is it such a joke that Black people enjoy fried chicken & watermelon? It's so confusing since everyone eats these foods to the point that I have no idea how the premise even took off.
@Ken67547214: Food bigotry has always been a thing in the US, lobsters were hobo food until they weren't.
@AndrewLivingst2: Because watermelon and fried chicken were supposedly routine meals or snacks for slaves living on 19th century farms.
Others add:
It’s just an observation. Add grape soda to the list. Slaves were allowed to raise chickens and grow watermelon. Both are popular in the American south and “are widely considered to be low status as a result”. “They used to make fun of Mexicans for eating tacos.”
Something to do with a “watermelon grin”? Wikipedia has an entry on the "Watermelon stereotype".
@soulmeaning: Energy, vibration and frequency is encoded in your words, and this happens without your conscious awareness. And people "receive" and decode that energy easily.
@uncle_deluge: My favourite nationalist conspiracy theory is that Japan influenced the world to spell Korea with a K rather than a C ("Corea") so it came after Japan in alphabetical order.
@PrettiestFrog: So one of my co-workers apparently believes that people in Europe don't get to pick where they live. He claims its assigned to them by the government and that's why the US is better. This is a teacher.
@meaning_enjoyer: "Thinking for yourself" is a psyop to prevent people from doing just that. There is a massive amount of thinking outsourced to culture, language, etc.
@urbanponds101: With the arrival of the ice I’m wondering who will be the first to rehash one of the silliest myths going - ‘add a tennis ball to your pond to stop it from freezing over’. Don’t do it!
@ded_ruckus: Buddhism is 110% a religion. This "not a religion" meme came about solely in order to make ideologically secular Westerners feel better about "practicing" the mangled pieces of Buddhism that became trendy in the West.
@70s80s90sKids: Liquorice Allsorts. They were invented by accident in 1899 when a Bassett’s sales rep tripped up, mixing up samples of sweets.
@mermaidwrites: Do you ever dream you die? I heard if you dream that you die you will die in real life.
@made_in_cosmos: My parents are reluctant to talk about their childhoods, but from what I've put together and read about rural life back in the day, it seems less like "people used to raise children in COMMUNITY" and more like "nobody really paid attention to kids, except for older kids".
@garicgymro: Some people really seem to want "Welsh" to have once meant "foreign" or "foreigner”.
@germany_iam: I still remember when, after one month of cold, the Kinderarzt prescribed "Zwiebelsaft". Take some onion, put it in honey and leave to rest. Then drink the liquid.
More here, and links to the rest. All this and more in What You Know that Ain't So.
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