Tell me/ us an interesting fact we might not know. I’ll start.

Not all woods float; some are so dense that they sink – ebony and greenheart are two examples; there are others.

One other is the iron tree. The wood from the this is apparently also bullet-proof (caveat, Mario, who told me this, has a very small gun)
Here I am planting one with the mayor of Costa Rica, Mato Grosso du Sol, Brazil.

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Useless fact, the customs staff at Sao Paulo Airport do not know that there is a town called Costa Rica in their country and will try to get you to get on the wrong plane, to the other more famous Costa Rica.
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The leader of the third expedition to reach the South Pole was Sir Edmund Hillary, over 40 years after Admundsen and Scott.
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Only twelve people have ever walked on the moon.
Only four of them are still alive.
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HM Quenn Elizabeth II is the most senior living heir to Charlamane, through the Saxa-Coburg-Gotha line.

Useless fact, the customs staff at Sao Paulo Airport do not know that there is a town called Costa Rica in their country and will try to get you to get on the wrong plane, to the other more famous Costa Rica.

That’s confusing!

Lots of ‘sinkers’ in Australia. Tallowwood for one.
Here’s part of a 40m one we had to fell at the weekend.

i had no idea that potatoes can kill you until just now watching this

Chickens use their wings to create downforce when running to increase grip.

Wasn’t it originally ‘a norange’ as in the Spanish naranja and it evolved into ‘an orange’. Might be wrong, always possible.

Quite true. Many other ‘an’ words when through the same process, a napron, a nowl, etc…

Chickens use their wings to create downforce when running to increase grip.

on a similar note.

The fastest flying (As in sustained flappy flappy flight) bird in the uk is a duck (eider), it also has the smallest wing area:weight ratio (so it has to fly fast to generate lift.)

Payment on demand…on the nail is derived from (corn/grain) merchants in Bristol making their payments on the pedestals – referred to as nails – on Exchange Street.
To the best of my knowledge, they’re still there.

They sure are. They are outside the Corn Exchange, which has a clock on it with two minute hands. It shows London and Bristol time. Needed when high speed rail travel came.

If you were born in 1970, you were as close (in time) then to the First World War as you were to 2022.

I love these ones. When Top Gun was made, F-14s were closer to the end of active service Spitfires than they are to the production of F-35s now.

Chas and Dave play on “My Name is…” by Eminem

The phrase to pool some money comes from an old French game where people threw stones at chickens/poulet.

The English word for sky is derived from a Norse word for cloud.

Orientation means to face East. I’m less convinced about the maps story. Got a citation for that?

Think you’re right. I’m sure I had citations for it when I first heard it, but can’t find them now, and it seems Islamic maps mostly had South at the top. It looks more likely that the general use of orientate (ie, establish bearings, not specifically to East) might be from churches being built with the altar at the East end.

Quite true. Many other ‘an’ words when through the same process, a napron, a nowl, etc…

Hate to go all Buzz Killington on this one, but while metanalysis has happened (mostly before dictionaries, printing etc), this is a bit of folk etymology for which, amongst others, QI needs to hold its hand up. It didn’t happen with orange as the word made it to us by coming through France rather than directly from Spanish. I think oranges were originally known as pommes d’orenge and later just as orange in French. Now, newt, on the other hand has had it happen, just the other way round. 😀

It’s a hue of orange.

Sir Hugh of Orange was the only French knight on King Arthur’s round table… possibly.

If take all the oxygen molecules contained in the average person and spread them evenly around the world in a layer 100km up – they’d still only be 0.3mm apart.

For plenty of mind blowing facts and concepts about humans i can definitely recommend The Self Delusion by Tom Oliver.

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2020/jan/18/the-self-delusion-tom-oliver-review

 It didn’t happen with orange as the word made it to us by coming through France rather than directly from Spanish

Yeah Lots of these about. Also new and novel things were often attributed to far off places that were being discovered at the time Turkey (the Bird) is called that in the UK because Turkey (the country) was all the rage at the time. The French for Turkey is Dinde, which is a version of D’Inde – from the Indies…because that was fashionable at the time.

Robin Red Breast (the bird with the obviously orange chest) is one of the last birds commonly referred to it by it’s medieval name. They were fond of giving animals just regulars names. Jack, Jenny, Robin, etc.

Every day someone unwittingly does the longest poo in the world for that day.

Not strictly correct. On an average day I’m pretty sure loads of people do the longest poo for that day.

If you replaced every atom in 12g of carbon with a ping pong ball the ping pong balls would cover the USA to a depth of many 10s of miles. Over 40 I think

In the dialect of the North East asking to go home is identical to asking to go home in Danish

Many of the world’s rivers are, for exactly the same reason, called River River.

Really? You sure? Sounds like bollocks to me as with most of these totally made up origins of phrases. Someone invents it, it’s funny, smart arses repeat and so it goes on.

If you replaced every atom in 12g of carbon with a ping pong ball the ping pong balls would cover the USA to a depth of many 10s of miles. Over 40 I think

Talk about making a mountain out of a mole-hill…

The best dictionary definition of all time is the Chambers definition for litotes – affirmation by negation of the contrary.

So it’s not just “understatement” then?

I love these ones.

Since its removal, the Berlin wall has now been down for longer than it’d been up. (As of about four years ago.)

In the dialect of the North East asking to go home is identical to asking to go home in Danish

See also Yorkshire slang ‘laik’ meaning to play or skive off work. The modern Swedish word for ‘play’ is ‘lek’ as in lekplatz for playground.

Whilst we’re on linguistics, the Swedish for fire is ‘brand’ from where we get branding for marking cattle with a hot iron and also where we get the word brand meaning company identity.

Also, the Swedish for beach is ‘strand’. The famous street in London is so called because it’s the road that originally ran along the beach between the old Roman town of Londinium and the town to the West where the Saxons built their church and monastery, called Westminster. The Strand is no longer by the river of course as the land has been reclaimed over the years and the river is now something like 1/3 of its original width.

Not all woods float; some are so dense that they sink – ebony and greenheart are two examples; there are others. Don’t make a canoe from either of those woods.

Likewise, don’t try to make boats from steel or iron, they’ll sink too 🙂

In the dialect of the North East asking to go home is identical to asking to go home in Danish

The great vowel shift probably. It really didn’t make it past the north midlands, which is why Scots people still refer to their “Hoose” rather than their “House”, so pronunciation wise; Bite used to sound like bit, Boot used to sound more like Boat. Meet used to sound more like Mate

Also, many of the names of rivers in England are derived from Celtic roots, because the whole of Britain was Celtic at one point and the languges spoken in most of Great Britain were dialects of the langauge that would evolve into modern Welsh. This is why lots of places in England have Welsh names (although I’m not sure if they are in use these days) that aren’t necessarily related to their English versions. Some are, because the Saxons used the existing Celtic names. However many don’t have a Welsh name because a lot of places were founded by the Saxons. Apparently they planned out the settlement of their new land by setting up market towns that were a sensible distance apart across the country so people could get their goods to market and weren’t that far from a local government hub. And today if you drive around much of rural England on A roads you will see that it is very frequently about 10-15 miles to the next town, this is why. French départements are also organised so that no-one would be more than a day’s ride from their administrative hub but not necessarily their market as this was set up much later when bureaucracy was more of a thing, and more people had horses which is why départements are bigger than the separation between market towns in England.

Genetic studies show that the modern populations of Wales and Ireland are the closest to the original British population, however the whole of Britain is not that far removed from the people who originally settled here after the ice age. In other words, whilst Saxons invaded and brought language and government they didn’t bring that many actual people.

Magenta seems to be a weird exception to how our brains usually perceive colours that our eyes don’t have actual receptors for (i.e. colours other than red, green and blue). Usually our brains average the wavelengths we’re seeing and fills in an appropriate colour. E.g. if we are seeing light made up of red and green wavelengths we split the difference and call what we’re seeing yellow.

Magenta is a mixture of red and blue light, but the mid point between these wavelengths is green, so normally that’s what we’d see. Except that would mean things reflecting red and blue wavelengths would look green and our brains/evolution reckoned that there’s enough green things in the world already so we perceive it as another colour instead.

I only had this explained to me yesterday so I might have got it a bit wrong. Here’s what’s hopefully a better explanation: https://medium.com/swlh/magenta-the-color-that-doesnt-exist-and-why-ec40a6348256

Hopefully it’s true! 🙂

A full hard drive weighs more than an empty hard drive.

Robin Red Breast (the bird with the obviously orange chest) is one of the last birds commonly referred to it by it’s medieval name. They were fond of giving animals just regulars names. Jack, Jenny, Robin, etc.

The Wheatear is a good example descriptive naming. It isn’t named because it has ears that look like wheat, it’s because it has a white back end, and the Anglo-Saxons called it a White-Arse.

Not all woods float; some are so dense that they sink – ebony and greenheart are two examples; there are others. Don’t make a canoe from either of those woods.

Likewise, don’t try to make boats from steel or iron, they’ll sink too 🙂

I guess the second comment was a bit tongue in cheek? There is (was?) a boat local to me that is made from concrete.

I love these ones. When Top Gun was made, F-14s were closer to the end of active service Spitfires than they are to the production of F-35s now.

Spitfire left service in 1961.

Top gun 1986

F35 first flight 2006

What am I missing?

@donk I grew up in stony Stratford. My parents are still there.

Ride a “cock horse to Banbury cross”

Same cock hotel

A full hard drive weighs more than an empty hard drive.

This isn’t true. What is true is that a full USB drive (or SSD) weighs less than an empty one. No, wait, come back, I’m serious!

A traditional spinnydisc HDD stores data by magnetic polarisation. Imagine a platter full of microscopically small bar magnets. So when writing data nothing is added or removed to turn a 0 into a 1, they’re just spun around.

However, a solid state stores data by charging and discharging its cells. A zero is negatively charged, a one is discharged, so a drive full-formatted to all zeros will have infinitesimally more mass because of the extra electrons.

Top Gun might have been 1986 but the F-14 had been in service well before then…according to the ever accurate Wikipedia – 1974 – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grumman_F-14_Tomcat – however, doing a search in Google for “when did the f-14 tomcat enter service” returns the first result as 1972…

This thread is starting to put me in mind of the Hackenthorpe Book of Lies

Did you know…
that El Greco’s real name was E.L. Grecott?
Chuck Berry wrote many of Shakespeare’s plays?
the Everly Brothers turned down a knighthood?

The Hackenthorpe Book of Lies contains over 60 million untrue facts and figures

Did you know that the reason why windows steam up in cold weather is because of all the fish in the atmosphere?
Did you know that Moslems are forbidden to eat glass?
Did you know that the oldest rock in the world is the famous Hackenthorpe Rock, in North Ealing, which is 2 trillion years old?
Did you know that Milton was a woman?
Did you know that from the top of the Prudential Assurance Building in Bromley you can see 8 continents?
Did you know that the highest point in the world is only 8 foot?

This plane went into production in 1929.

They were flown and operated almost exclusively by women in the Second World War.

They also saw combat in the Korean War. It is the only biplane credited with a kill on a jet

The Exchequer (as in chancellor of) came about in Henry the firsts time when one of his clerics who looked after the crowns money had a large table with raised sides made and had squares not unlike a chess board drawn on and this was used to apportion the money’s received from the various sherrifs when due. The squares were given a nomination and money of that value put on the relevant squares which allowed quick and easy viewing of how much was raised from each party. The name stuck and the table became known as the Exchequer.

Many of the world’s rivers are, for exactly the same reason, called River River.

Really? You sure? Sounds like bollocks to me as with most of these totally made up origins of phrases. 

Apologies, not read the source comment above, but isn’t River Avon an example of this?

Every day someone unwittingly does the longest poo in the world for that day.

Not strictly correct. On an average day I’m pretty sure loads of people do the longest poo for that day.

How does that work? Surely one of them is the lognest, although we’ll never know which?

On the river thing,

Pendle Hill’s name comes from something like Penhull, which in turn comes from the Cumbrian Pen meaning Hill, and the (something, Old English?) Hyll when means Hill. So it’s literally Hill Hill Hill.

There’s another one somewhere which is Hill Hill Hill Hill, but I can never remember it.

The flanges on the wheels of normal trains are not what keeps them from derailing for the vast majority of the time.

The fact the wheel profiles are conical means the flanges don’t normally contact the rail, with exceptions normally being tight radius curves, a high degree of cant, switches & crossings and of course track or rolling stock defects.

I like all the language/etymology ones, though I’ll just stay that “strand” is also a common English word for beach. Also Turkish for Turkey is “hindi” from india. Anyway,

Dublin means Blackpool.

As in dubh llyn