Dinger, dinosaur mascot for the Colorado Rockies baseball team, isn’t just named “Dinger” because it’s a cute name. In baseball slang, a “dinger” is a good hit—usually a home run.
Molly Brown is called “The Unsinkable Molly Brown” because she was on the Titanic! It sank, but she didn’t. I had always assumed that she just had an undauntable spirit, which she did, but I never knew about this Titanic stuff.
The word “audience” is related to the word “audio”. I suppose that it referred, originally, to listening only, and that its meaning has extended to reading and watching.
That thing at the bottom of a urinal isn’t salt! God only knows why salt would be there, but that’s what I always thought it was.
The Border Collie is so named because they came from the border of Scotland and England. Yeow! Saw this on an episode of Win Ben Stein’s Money.
If you hold a contest such as a gunfight it is most fair to hold it at high noon so that no one has to look into the sun.
Thanks, Robert.
The dog Lassie was so named because she was female (the character, as opposed to the canine actor). It’s “lassie”, a diminutive of “lass”, a Scottish term for a woman. I grew up with the tv show, and so, to me, “Lassie” always meant the dog. What did I know about U.K. dialects?
In the novel Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea, 20,000 leagues doesn’t refer to depth! A league is about three miles, so 20,000 leagues is 60,000 miles. The earth is only 8,000 miles in diameter. The 20,000 leagues refers to distance travelled while submerged, not depth.
Thanks to an episode of Saturday Night Live for this one.
Pine nuts come from pine cones? You mean like in pine trees? Hey, I never saw a pine nut before I ate one on a pizza.
There’s an arm exercise called an “upright row”. You have both hands together, with dumbbells in them, and you lift them from your navel to your chin. Somebody pointed out the other day that this is like rowing a boat.
Well, I suppose that it is. How often to I go rowing? I thought it had to do with your hands travelling in a straight line, like rows & columns.
The name “figure skating” comes from the figures that skaters draw in the ice, e.g., a figure eight. That never occurred to me until I saw it on tv.
The phrase “riding shotgun” always meant, to me, riding as a passenger in the front seat of a car. While watching the movie The Magnificent Seven I realized that you ride shotgun on a stagecoach, to act as a defense against hostile people & animals.
The product name Water Pik is a deliberate misspelling of “pick”, like a toothpick. That is, it’s a water version of toothpick. I know what a toothpick is, and I know what a Water Pik is, but hadn’t put it all together.
While reading the novel Household Gods, which takes place in the Roman empire of ~200AD, I realized that “nitpicking” is the act of tediously removing the eggs, or nits, of lice from the hair. Back in pre-shampoo days, heads were commonly infected with lice, and this was the how one would to combat them.
The movie Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man’s Chest
concerns the Flying Dutchman. Here’s the question:
Why is it the Flying Dutchman?
I always assumed that it, well, flew, through the air,
like an airplane would fly. Well, no, of course not. The word
“fly”, in this context, means
“to move, pass, or spread quickly”,
as in “time flies”. It means that the
Flying Dutchman is fast.
I’ve known since childhood that semiconductors are doped with silicon
and germanium, and I know that several elements are named in honor of
countries, but I never realized that the element
germanium
is named after the country
Germany!
I realized this when I heard a song about Germanium
on The Geologic Podcast.
“From the surface of the Earth, escape velocity (ignoring air friction)
is about 7 miles per second, or 25,000 miles per hour.” That's not a
velocity, that's a speed.
A velocity is speed & direction.
Germanium
January 3, 2008
Escape Velocity
Feb 2, 2008