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

Dublin means Blackpool.

The Dublin Tower is built on foundations of cotton wool, so it is.

The Dublin Tower is built on foundations of cotton wool, so it is.

Ribblehead Viaduct is built on a foundation (partially anyway) of wool. Stopped it sinking into the bog.

The centre of a flame is hollow.

Dublin means Blackpool.

Indeed, an anglicisation of Dubh Linn, literally Black Pool. Which is weird, as in Irish, the colour adjective (in this case Dubh) always comes after the noun. There aren’t really exceptions like in French (grand, petit, etc). Never quite figured that one out. I assume there’s a good reason somewhere.

If you’re expecting to see “Dubh Linn” on the signposts, you’ll be disappointed. The official Irish name is Baile Átha Cliath (Bol-yeh Aw-ha Klee-ya) which means town of the hurdled ford. 😀

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?

All depends when the big poos happen. Fair enough, if the first person to poo happens to be the totally largestest then it is indeed just thag ond person.

But say

Eric does 1.2kg at 08.00
Paul does 1.1kg at 09.00
Tim 1.5kg at 10.00
Paula does 2kg at lunchtime

Eric, Tim and Paula will all be doing the longest ( ok biggest) at the point they do it.

Like seb coe broke the 1500m record, but doesn’t hold it just now…

Or something.

Like seb coe broke the 1500m record,

Jesus that is a long one! What was he eating?

Pen meaning Hill

In Welsh pen means head, and when it appears in toponyms it’s the same. So for example Fan means ‘a high place’ and Pen y Fan means ‘Head of the high places’. It’s called that because there’s a string of hills, moors and mountains that starts in the West (near Carmarthen) and gets taller and taller until the last and tallest one – Pen y Fan. So it’s a bit more subtle than simply ‘hill hill’. As in English – there are many words that are applied to hills but they are (or were) all subtly different, and some that I think are regional. For example there are lots of ‘Ho’ in the South but not elsewhere, likewise tor.

Just found out that Ho is also common in the Channel Islands and Normandy as a suffix -hou but is still apparently from Anglo Saxon. Interesting.

Are turkeys from India/the east then? I assumed they were from the Americas where wild turkeys live. Ah, just checked Wiki and they are from the Americas, but it addresses the etymology.

Johnx2

Bastard, just choked on my coffee 🙂

the only biplane credited with a kill on a jet

TBF the PO-2 dropped a bomb on it while it (an F86) was parked.

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.

Remember “Laik” from when I was a kid. Spice for sweets, jumpers for goalposts etc etc.

Lek/laik/lake (variety of spellings in English) also gives the English word Lek – a site for male mating displays, mammals or birds.

“The term derives from the Swedish lek, a noun which typically denotes pleasurable and less rule-bound games and activities”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lek_mating#Etymology

So round where I live on the moors there’s more than one “Cock Lakes”, relating to where the grouse display. I assume.

Are turkeys from India/the east then?

No, in the same way that coffee wasn’t either. Ottoman and orientalism was just getting going as an art form, and damn near everything was labelled as Turkish or Ottoman or oriental. It was coming into fashion just on the very very start of what we’d recognise as a consumer culture in Europe (although it’s still quite a bit earlier than the Early Modern period). So it’s just a cover word for “Stuff that’s new and exciting”

Only twelve people have ever walked on the moon

Oo! Just to add to that, only twelve pilots ever flew the amazeballs Bell X-15 rocket plane.

One man did both… 😉

It’s a hue of orange.

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

I think he called himself Mr Brown so they didn’t realise he was French – might need to fact check that

also gives the English word Lek – a site for male mating displays, mammals or birds

Brilliant, didn’t know that thanks 🙂

When I worked in Sweden I spent some time discussing these things with the Swedes and of course they had no idea about obscure Yorkshire dialect words or the names of streets in London. They were also fascinated to learn about the islands in the Bristol Channel called ‘holm’ which is a Swedish word for island (there is apparently more than one).

Also, Swedish for snow is ‘snö’ which I think is the same as ‘snow’ would be pronounced in parts of Lancashire maybe? ö is a vowel as in the word ‘girl’ in RP English.

In Welsh pen means head, and when it appears in toponyms it’s the same. So for example Fan means ‘a high place’ and Pen y Fan means ‘Head of the high places’.

That’s interesting. So in Pen Y Bont – Bridgend – it’s using “head” as you would the head of a river (or ofc, a trail head).

So it’s a bit more subtle than simply ‘hill hill’.

But it’s not from Welsh, it’s from (presumably closely related) Cumbrian.

“The term derives from the Swedish lek, a noun which typically denotes pleasurable and less rule-bound games and activities”

Surely related, LEGO comes from “leg godt” which is “play good” in Danish.

I too got told off by my gran for laikin’ abeht when I was a kid.

Swedish for snow is ‘snö’ which I think is the same as ‘snow’ would be pronounced in parts of Lancashire maybe?

Sounds like t’other side o’t Pennines to me. Sheffield-ish.

The highest point on earth is 8480 feet lower than Everest

#oblatespheroid

That’s interesting. So in Pen Y Bont – Bridgend – it’s using “head” as you would the head of a river (or ofc, a trail head).

Yes, the English translation of ‘end’ presumably refers to the same thing because the two words are similar in many of their usages. Pen is also used for ‘top’ and ‘end’.

But it’s not from Welsh, it’s from (presumably closely related) Cumbrian.

Yes, except that the shared language from back then is called Cymbric, from where we get Cumbria and also Cymru and Cymry (which means Welsh people or more properly British people since Wales is an invention of Saxons, derived from something like wealas which means ‘foreigners’ or ‘people who talk funny’ in old Germanic. See also Wallonia in Belgium and others “The modern names for various Romance-speaking people in Continental Europe (e.g. Wallonia, Wallachia, Valais, Vlachs, the German Welsch, and Włochy, the Polish name for Italy) have a similar etymology” from Wiki)

Common and basic words are often old ones which means that they are often shared by related langauges from further back in time. I am wondering if it’s related to beinn in Gaelic?

Incidentally there are lots of place names in Southern Scotland that have Cumbric origins. That group of langauges was spoken across mainland Britain until the Gaels came from Ireland bringing Gaelic to Scotland and it eventually spread throughout Scotland for a time where it was then pushed back by Anglo-Saxon from the South).

Its possible you’ve haven’t been to all of the west of Scotland yet

Whilst this is true I’ve never heard of it being used by a west coaster. That covers an area from Stranraer up to Helensburgh and Glasgow.

I say it. A lot.

I love roasted cheese.

Case in point, by any measure you’re closer geographically to the east coast than the west.

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

And if you were born in 1983 that applied to 2021 and WW2

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?

All depends when the big poos happen. Fair enough, if the first person to poo happens to be the totally largestest then it is indeed just thag ond person.

But say

Eric does 1.2kg at 08.00
Paul does 1.1kg at 09.00
Tim 1.5kg at 10.00
Paula does 2kg at lunchtime

Eric, Tim and Paula will all be doing the longest ( ok biggest) at the point they do it.

Like seb coe broke the 1500m record, but doesn’t hold it just now…

Or something.

Nope, look back at the original statement:

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

The operative term being ‘for that day’ so as measured over the entirety of a calendar 24h period.

It’s also ‘longest’ which is a measure of length, not necessarily a pan cracker.

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

Geordie and Northumberian have many danish words in it, supposedly one of the languages still close to old English.

More time separates the T.Rex from Stegosaurus than from humans today. Also the Stegosaurus tail spikes are named after a Farside comic.

Geordie and Northumberian have many danish words in it, supposedly one of the languages still close to old English.

Makes sense given they’re about the furthest away from Modern English.

Stegosaurus tail spikes are named after a Farside comic

Aye, the Thagomizer.

I knew that Far Side one but didn’t believe it was true until now.

A thagomizer (/ˈθæɡəmaɪzər/) is the distinctive arrangement of four spikes on the tails of stegosaurine dinosaurs. These spikes are believed to have been a defensive measure against predators.[2][1]

The arrangement of spikes originally had no distinct name; cartoonist Gary Larson invented the name “thagomizer” in 1982 as a joke in his comic strip Far Side, and it was gradually adopted as an informal term sometimes used within scientific circles, research, and education.

From that Dimensions thread

Maths in Imperial is really screwed up as they seem to change the number base with every change in measurements.

Howe many yards in a mile? 1760.

Wow, strange number to choose and quite big. There must be lots of feet per yard right? No, 3

Oh, um and inches in a foot is…? 12 seemed about right

And smaller than inches is? Thousands of an inch of course.

Nothing bigger? Well, you could have 1/4 inch or 1/2 inch I suppose.

And you refer to those as 250 and 500 thousands of an inch normally, right? Sod off Jonny foreigner

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

Torpenhow Hill, between Cockermouth and Carlisle. But don’t ask a local where Tor-pen-how is, as they pronounce it Trepena.

The weight of sunlight beating down on earth every day ways about the same as an ocean going cruise ship.

Howe many yards in a mile? 1760.

Wow, strange number to choose and quite big

It’s all to do with multiples, so many of this in a that, rods and chains and perches and poles and furlongs and suchlike.

The Shadows track, Apache, was the driving force behind the invention of break dancing.

Case in point, by any measure you’re closer geographically to the east coast than the west.

By the only measure that matters, which is this bridge, I very much live in the west….

Canada is approximately 42 times the size of the UK but only has around 1/2 the population.
90% of whom live within 200 miles of the Canada-USA border.

The Welsh word for school is the same as the Welsh word for ladder.

Yorkshire folk are really a lost tribe of Welsh folk.

(This may well be an exaggeration but the history of Elmet is interesting)

The Shadows track, Apache, was the driving force behind the invention of break dancing.

Not really, just has a solid breakbeat in it and was heavily sampled in early hip-hop

Howe many yards in a mile? 1760.

Wow, strange number to choose and quite big.

Not really. A mile is eight furlongs; a furlong is ten chains; a chain is 22 yards. So small handy numbers but yes the base changes weirdly.

@funkmasterp

The incredible bongo band covered it in ’74-ish. NY sound system DJ cool Herc was the first to use two copies of the same track and mix to extend the track. This was at the request of some pals, who liked dancing to the cover. They were especially interested in the instrumental break (even though it’s all instrumental! 🤣🤣🤣). They called themselves break dancers…

A shake is an unofficial measure of time that comes from the early days of the nuclear (bomb) industry.
It’s 10 nanoseconds, and came from the phrase “two shakes of a lamb’s tail”.

I know the history of it and get where you’re coming from but breakdancing’s background has much more to it than that. Bit of an over simplification so not technically a fact. Existed before 1974 but gained popularity (and an official name) in the 70’s. I’d say helped to popularise or bring to the mainstream

Och, you’re a big spoil sport 🤣🤣🤣

I was freestyling it 🤣🤣

But you are correct, I suppose 🤣🤣🤣

If you unravelled the DNA in the nucleus of one of your cells and stretched it out it would be 2-3 metres long. The total combined length of the DNA from all of your cells when stretched out would be more than 5000x the distance between the earth and the moon. 🧬 🌍 🌙

I’ll edit my post for a 5mm silver Hope headset spacer! 😀