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I don’t know about you guys, but I am fascinated by the etymology of both words and nursery rhymes. But whenever I hear a new story about the origin of a nursery rhyme or tongue twister, I rush to find out more information because while they’re so interesting, many of these stories simply aren’t true.
That’s why I was so excited to share these two cool true stories of tongue twister origins with you, along with a quick explanation of why a few common etymology stories you’ve probably heard already aren’t actually true.
We all know that Peter Piper picked a peck of pickled peppers, but who the heck is Peter and why should we care if he’s got pickled or fresh peppers? As it turns out, this story is far more interesting than the simple tongue twister we’re all familiar with.
First off, it’s important to know a little history about the spice trade. You see, a long, long time ago, all spices were referred to by the generic name of “peppers.” They were also incredibly expensive and the companies who ran the spice trade would go out of their way to keep the supply low by rubbing the seeds with lime before selling them so they couldn’t germinate if planted. The practice was called “pickling.”
As for Peter Piper, he was actually a French pirate and horticulturalist named “Pierre Poivre” (which has become Anglicized into Peter Piper). Pierre was known for raiding spice stores so he could grow them in his garden in Seychelles and hopefully make spices more affordable and accessible for the average European. The rhyme comes from the fact that there were at least a few occasions where Peter Piper picked pickled peppers that wouldn’t grow in his garden.
Personally, I never thought much about the girl who sold seashells by the seashore. But as it turns out, the woman who was made famous in this terribly difficult tongue twister is actually quite the scientist.
Mary Anning enjoyed collecting seashells and fossils ever since her dad taught her how to dig up fossils when she was a little girl. The duo then sold their specimens to beach tourists and she became so famous in this role that Terry Sullivan eventually even wrote the famous tongue twister about her.
Then, in 1811, Anning’s brother noticed a skull sticking out of a cliff near her home. Mary was fascinated by the skull and started digging it out the ground, soon finding a massive skeleton of what she believed was a crocodile. As it turned out though, the giant croc was actually a dinosaur that later was named Ichthyosaurus. As this occurred at a time when most people still didn’t believe in dinosaurs, it was kind of a big deal.
Mary was proud of her discovery and went on discovering more and more dino skeletons, including fossils for a Plesiosaurus, a Pterodactyl and a Squaloraja. These days, many people credit Mary Anning with founding modern day paleontology –and you thought she was just a seashell dealer.
Of course, not all nursery rhyme origins stories are to be believed. Here are a few very untrue, but widely-believed stories about nursery rhyme origins:
more …
Poor Greece. First it was the whole debt crisis, then came this pestilence of frogs:
Greek officials say a horde of frogs has forced the closure of a key northern highway for two hours.
Thessaloniki traffic police chief Giorgos Thanoglou says "millions" of the amphibians covered the tarmac Wednesday near the town of Langadas, some 12 miles east of Thessaloniki.
"There was a carpet of frogs," he said.
What’s next? Locusts? Well, whatever it is, it probably can’t be as bad as what happened to Australia.
Link (Photo: AP/Alpha TV)
If you think you’ve got problem, just think of Australia and you’ll surely feel a bit better. See, they’ve got a little locust plague problem. How little? Oh, the size of Spain or so:
Millions of the quick-breeding and fast-moving insects have damaged crops and caused havoc in country towns by infesting parts of Queensland, New South Wales, Victoria and South Australia – covering an area of approximately 500,000 square kilometres (190,000 square miles), roughly the size of Spain.
Hundreds of thousands of hectares of crops of early sown wheat and barley as well as pastures and gardens have been eaten by the “widespread infestation” of the native Australian pests, which break out annually and are the bane of the Australian agriculture industry.
However this year’s outbreak could potentially be worse than the devastating plague of 2004 – when locusts swept through eastern Australia damaging an area twice the size of England – because of recent rainfall across drought-affected inland Australia.
Link (Photo: Murty Colin)
The outbreak of swine flu, first in Mexico then cases all over the world, has gotten a lot of people worried. And for a very good reason: despite the existence of scarier diseases caused by exotic viruses like Hantavirus and Ebola, influenza still reigns as the number one infectious killer in modern times.
Unlike regular seasonal epidemics of the flu, there are also rare but deadly pandemics, i.e. cases of influenza that spread on a worldwide scale and infect a large proportion of the human population.
While it's important not to panic (the swine flu appears to be highly treatable with conventional antiviral drugs), a review of past pandemics will elucidate why authorities are responding quickly to this outbreak. Here's a quick summary of the 5 deadliest pandemics in history:
The
very first pandemic in recorded history was described by Thucydides. In
430 BC, during the Peloponnesian war between Athens and Sparta, the Greek
historian told of a great pestilence that wiped out over 30,000 of the
citizens of Athens (roughly one to two thirds of all Athenians died).
Thucydides described the disease as such "People in good health were all of a sudden attacked by violent heats in the head, and redness and inflammation in the eyes, the inward parts, such as the throat or tongue, becoming bloody and emitting an unnatural and fetid breath." Next came coughing, diarrhea, spasms, and skin ulcers. A handful survived, but often without their fingers, sights, and even genitals (Source)
Until today, the disease that decimated ancient Athens has yet to be identified.
In 165 AD, Greek physician Galen described an ancient pandemic, now thought to be smallpox, that was brought to Rome by soldiers returning from Mesopotamia. The disease was named after Marcus Aurelius Antoninus, one of two Roman emperors who died from it.
At its height, the disease killed some 5,000 people a day in Rome. By the time the disease ran its course some 15 years later, a total of 5 million people were dead.
In
541-542 AD, there was an outbreak of a deadly disease in the Byzantine
Empire. At the height of the infection, the disease, named the Plague
of Justinian after the reigning emperor Justinian I, killed 10,000 people
in Constantinople every day. With no room nor time to bury them, bodies
were left stacked in the open.
By the end of the outbreak, nearly half of the inhabitants of the city were dead. Historians believe that this outbreak decimated up to a quarter of human population in the eastern Mediterranean. (source)
What was the culprit? It was the bubonic plague, caused by the bacterium Yersinia pestis. This outbreak, the first known bubonic plague pandemic in recorded human history, marked the first of many outbreaks of plague - a disease that claimed as many as 200 million lives throughout history.
After the Plague of Justinian, there were many sporadic oubreaks of the plague, but none as severe as the Black Death of the 14th century.
While no one knows for certain where the disease came from (it was thought that merchants and soldiers carried it over caravan trading routes), the Black Death took a heavy toll on Europe. The fatality was recorded at over 25 million people or one-fourth of the entire population. (source)
It's interesting to note that the Black Death actually came in three forms: the bubonic, pneumonic, and septicemic plague. The first, the bubonic plague, was the most common: people with this disease have buboes or enlarged lymphatic glands that turn black (caused by decaying of the skin while the person is still alive). Without treatment, bubonic plague kills about half of those infected within 3 to 7 days.
In
pneumonic plague, droplets of aerosolized Y. pestis bacteria
are transmitted from human to human by coughing. Unless treated with antibiotics
in the first 24 hours, almost 100% of people with this form of infection
die in 2 to 4 days.
The last form, septicemic plague, happens when the bacteria enter the blood from the lymphatic or respiratory system. Patients with septicemic plague develop gangrenes in their fingers and toes, which turn the skin black (which gives the disease its moniker) Though rare, this form of the disease is almost always fatal - often killing its victims the same day the symptoms appear. (Photo and Source: Insecta-Inspecta)
We haven't heard the last of the bubonic plague. In 1855, another bubonic plague epidemic (named the Third Epidemic) hit the world - this time, the initial outbreak was in Yunnan Province, China. Human migration, trade and wars helped the disease spread from China to India, Africa, and the Americas.
All in all, this pandemic lasted about 100 years (it officially ended in 1959) and claimed over 12 million people in India and China alone.
Emergency military hospital at Camp Funston, Kansas (Image: National Museum
of Health and Medicine, Armed Forces Institute of Pathology, Washington
D.C.) via PLoS
Biology
In
March 1918, in the last months of World War I, an unusually virulent and
deadly flu virus was identified in a US military camp in Kansas. Just
6 months later, the flu had become a worldwide pandemic in all continents.
When the Spanish Flu pandemic was over, about 1 billion people or half the world's population had contracted it. It is perhaps the most lethal pandemic in the history of humankind: between 20 and 100 million people were killed, more the number killed in the war itself (Source)
The Spanish Flu actually didn't originate in Spain - it got its name because at the time, Spain wasn't involved in the war and had not imposed wartime censorship, thus it received great press attention there.
Recently, scientists were able to "resurrect" the virus from a well-preserved corpse buried in the permafrost of Alaska.
An exhumation of a mass grave of plague victims in Venice, Italy yielded the skeleton of a woman who was probably considered a vampire in her time. She was buried with a brick in her mouth. The skeleton was found by Matteo Borrini of the University of Florence.
At the time the woman died, many people believed that the plague was spread by “vampires” which, rather than drinking people’s blood, spread disease by chewing on their shrouds after dying. Grave-diggers put bricks in the mouths of suspected vampires to stop them doing this, Borrini says.
The belief in vampires probably arose because blood is sometimes expelled from the mouths of the dead, causing the shroud to sink inwards and tear. Borrini, who presented his findings at a meeting of the American Academy of Forensic Sciences in Denver, Colorado, last week, claims this might be the first such vampire to have been forensically examined. The skeleton was removed from a mass grave of victims of the Venetian plague of 1576.
(image credit: Matteo Borrini)
