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 (Judging
by reader response to droll things like Land o' Useless
Facts, The
Dead People Server, etc., it obviously behoves Bikwil to run
a segment of trivia oddments. Hence this new column. If you know some
Latin, or your dictionary gives derivations, you'll see why it has the
title it does.
Send
'em in, all those bits of trivia (any topic), wherever you find 'em —
your office's bulletin board, the Net, your local rag. None need be
original, of course, nor need the source be acknowledged. WTWM,
like other columns of its ilk elsewhere, will be unblushingly
plagiaristic, and therefore, no doubt, largely pseudonymous.
In
all likelihood, each time we run the column there'll be pieces from more
than one contributor, so if you only have one item, don't be deterred
— it'll appear sometime, just as soon as we have enough to fill a
page.)
The
first six miscellanea today were supplied by someone called Sockrates,
the last two by our regular verbalist Harlish Goop.
The
two longest words (12 letters each) that can be typed using only the
left hand are "stewardesses" and "reverberated".
The longest word
that can be typed using only the right hand is "lollipop".
"Skepticisms" is the longest word that alternates hands.
A duck's quack
doesn't echo, and no one knows why.
The San Francisco
cable cars are the only mobile US National Monuments.
The
"save" icon on the standard toolbar in Microsoft products
shows a floppy disk with the shutter on backwards.
The verb
"cleave" is the only English word with two meanings which are
antonyms of each other: adhere and separate.
The combination ough
can be pronounced in nine different ways, as the following passage
shows:
A
rough-coated, dough-faced, thoughtful ploughman strode through the
streets of Scarborough. After falling into a slough, he coughed and
hiccoughed.
The
name of the Spanish city Saragossa is a corruption of the words Caesar
Augustus.
The natives of
Newcastle and Manchester are known respectively as Novocastrians and
Mancunians. These words derive from the Latin forms of the city names.
Fair enough. "Glaswegian" (native of Glasgow), on the other hand, was
formed by analogy with "Norwegian", while "Liverpudlian" arose when someone
sometime facetiously substituted "puddle" for "pool".
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