Linguist Dr. Erica Brozovsky (previously at Neatorama) makes us feel a little better about mispronouncing words. First, we are not alone, and there are quite a few words that the majority of us mispronounce, which over time will lead to our way of saying them becoming correct. That's how language evolves, after all. And second, there are common and logical reasons why we don't just intuitively know how to pronounce a word. The rules for English have more exceptions than it has rules, so even native speakers can't keep up all the time. Then there are times when a mispronunciation actually communicates what you mean better. For example, I know how to pronounce schadenfreude, because I looked it up, but it always comes out scootin fruity. You may laugh, but you also know what I'm saying.

While watching this video, I realized that I don't ever recall hearing anyone say the word "dour" out loud, correctly or incorrectly. I don't even use it, but when reading it, I imagined it pronounced "dower." That's a word that we have plenty of other, easier terms we can use instead, like stink-eye or RBF. The comments under the YouTube page for this video are full of amusing stories of mispronunciations. -via Geeks Are Sexy

Last year, McDonald's decided not to put their Filet-o-Fish sandwiches on sale for Lent, and people were upset. This year, they are on special at two for $6, which is underwhelming for those of us who used to buy them for 35 cents. Besides, if you can only eat one before they cool off, you are out of luck. But on Fridays during Lent, you should be able to find a community fish fry somewhere to pick up a full meal of fish, potatoes, hushpuppies, and cole slaw served piping hot to raise funds for churches, charities, or community organizations, especially in the Midwest. What was once seen as a sacrifice, giving up meat on Fridays, is now a treat and a beloved tradition that brings people together. In fact, there are so many fish frys that several cities have fish fry maps or lists shared online, that can direct you to a fish fry nearby. Read about the tradition of community fish frys and how to find one at Atlas Obscura.

(Image credit: Steve Snodgrass)

Bookworms read all kinds of literature, and over time they can recognize certain authors just by the way they put words together.  But it takes a literature expert or linguist to see exactly how an author's language is different from the next talented writer, and to explain it to the rest of us. This talent has even been used to solve crimes. For example, Jane Austen wrote in a very different style from previous novelists in that she used what linguists call "free indirective speech." It's a technique for connecting the narrator with the character and the reader all at the same time, yet separating them all enough to allow the freedom to critique that character. Even if you're a Jane Austen fan, you might not have ever noticed this, and even if you did, you probably couldn't explain it as well as Nerdwriter1 does. It's one of the many devices that gives an author a distinct voice and a distinct feel for the way she tells a story. -via Kottke

There are plenty of riddles in literature and pop culture, not to mention in dad jokes and those lists your aunt sends by email. Most have an answer that will make you laugh or groan, but some have no answer at all, or at least no answer that makes sense in the real world. In Lewis Carroll's book Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, the Mad Hatter asks Alice, "Why is a raven like a writing desk?" Alice tries to answer, but she doesn't know. It turns out that the Mad Hatter doesn't know, either. In the more than 150 years since the book was published, plenty of people have come up with plausible but not-so-funny answers, and even Carroll explained it (nonsensically) at one point. But the fact that there is no answer is there to illustrate that the Hatter is, indeed, mad.

But that's just one example. Read about the raven and the writing desk and four other literary riddles that can't be solved because there is no definitive answer at Cracked. 

A best man's speech can be fraught even if it's your brother giving it, because you never know what he's going to say. At this wedding, captured by Tali Joy Photography, Dave's little brother is the best man. The speech is intended as a thank you for taking the fall for the younger brother's frustrated screwup twenty years ago when they were young boys. However, the twist is that the groom had no idea what really went on all those years ago, and why he was in trouble. The look on his face when he realizes what really happened is priceless! Several of his friends from back then were there and remembered the exact incident. Yet this was the perfect time to set the record straight, since the statute of limitations has surely passed. A good time was had by all. -via Laughing Squid

Long before Pepper Anderson, Maddie Hayes, Dana Scully, and Olivia Benson solved fictional crimes, there were real women opening doors in the crime-fighting arena as detectives. On the one hand, it was unseemly work for a lady, as were most professional careers before the 20th century. On the other hand, women made great undercover officers and spies because no one paid all that much attention to them. They were few, but they opened the door to generations of detectives to follow.   

Kate Warne talked the Pinkerton Agency into hiring her, and proved her mettle by single-handedly foiling a plot to assassinate Abraham Lincoln as he traveled to his inauguration. Antonia Moser learned her craft from a master detective, then lived with him as his lover, then competed with him when she opened her own agency. Maud West (shown above) was a master of disguise and was so good at it she showed the newspapers, knowing she'd never be recognized. Read about these women and more, seven in all, who became detectives when such work was considered out of reach of most women. -via Nag on the Lake

Wayne Kusy is a shipbuilder, but he builds neither seafaring ships nor small models, not even tiny ships in a bottle. His preferred material is toothpicks! Actually, that's his only material besides glue and some accessories. And his ships are big, and have gotten larger over time. Kusy has been building ships out of toothpicks for 50 years now (in his spare time, as he does have a regular job), and his latest accomplishment is a 25-foot-long model of the Queen Mary made of more than 815,000 toothpicks. That project took five years. He's also built replicas of the Titanic, the Lusitania, and the America, all containing many thousands of toothpicks each. Kusy does commissions, in case you want a model of your own boat made of toothpicks. You can see the time-lapse of a shipbuilding project that he referenced at his website, as well as other projects he's done.   -via Geeks Are Sexy

You might think that Outerbridge Crossing is called that because it is the most remote bridge in New York City, or maybe because it is the southernmost crossing in New York state. But it was named after Eugenius Harvey Outerbridge, the first chairman of the New York Port Authority. They might have named it Outerbridge Bridge, but then thought better of it. You might think that Baker's chocolate is called that because it is the preferred chocolate used by bakers. Wrong- it's made by a company founded by Walter Baker. And you might assume that Main Street is used as a name because it's the main street, but in San Francisco, the street was named for Charles Main. It was only appropriate.

In science, Southern blot is a process used in sequencing DNA. There is also Northern blot, Eastern blot, and Western blot. However, they were not named for Dr. Blot. Southern blot was named after biologist Edwin Southern, who developed it. When the other methods came along, they were named in sequence after Southern blot. There are other surprising things that were actually eponyms, meaning they were named after people, although you will be forgiven for thinking they were just named for what they are. Roland Crosby compiled a list of them with links to the story behind each name. Even when the inclusion in a list seems like a stretch, the stories are all rather interesting. -via Metafilter, which gives us even more of them.

(Image credit: Jason Eppink)

In the 1850s, New York City was looking for a new hangman. The profession came with a real drawback in that when people knew his identity, they didn't want to be around him. So another hangman retired, and a young man who had worked at a slaughterhouse took the position. He worked for the city for decades, and became known as Monsieur de New York.

This guy took his work seriously. He designed a new gallows that killed quickly and thoroughly, and kept improving upon it. Although public hangings were no longer done, any execution inside the walls of the justice system were standing room only as the public clamored to get a restricted number of tickets. Monsieur de New York put on a show, dressed nattily for the occasion, and acted as a master of ceremonies. His reputation grew, although no one knew who he was. He preferred it that way. As the executioner's fame grew, he was enlisted to carry out federal executions, design gallows for other departments across the country, and even lent his name, or pseudonym, to U.S. Grant's presidential campaign.

Although several men claimed to be Monsieur de New York, and others were accused of that identity but denied it, we still don't know who was the celebrity executioner of New York. Read about Monsieur de New York's work and fame at Atlas Obscura.  

To make a 15,000-egg omelet, you will need a 13-foot frying pan, a fork lift, a bunch of concrete mixing paddles, 70 liters of duck fat, and a battalion of chefs to break all those eggs. Oeuf! It happens on Easter Monday in Bessières, France, as it has for the past 50 years, as the pièce de résistance of a three-day festival. Once the giant omelet is ready, it will be given to festival attendees free of charge. The Festival of the Giant Omelet takes place in several places throughout the year, including the US! The American celebration is in Abbeville, Louisiana in November. But the biggest and best-known is the Easter festival in Bessières. These events are sponsored by the Brotherhood of the Giant Omelet, who have yet to update their page for 2024. Sometimes they go by the Knights of the Giant Omelet (Confrérie Mondiale de Chevaliers de l'Omelette Géante). Oeuf! -via Boing Boing

Silk is one of the strongest natural fibers on earth. Spider silk is stronger, but extremely hard to produce commercially. We learned about the first bulletproof vest that was made of silk and failed because it was biodegradable, but that very property makes silk a great tool for medical care, like sutures that do not have to be removed. Scientists have figured out how to purify silk down to its essential fibroin protein that can be reshaped for many uses.  

Imagine a vaccine that could be delivered in a simple patch. The underside contains many tiny needles made of silk protein that pierce only the very top layers of the skin, and these remain after the patch is removed. Those tiny silk needles are embedded with the vaccine, which is released into the body as the silk degrades. Furthermore, embedding the medicine into the silk protein preserves it, so these vaccine patches can be stored at room temperature for years until they are needed. Larger silk needles can be used to deliver cancer drugs to a tumor without affecting the healthy tissue around it.

Silk can also be used to make support mesh used in surgery that never has to be removed after the patient heals. It can even be used as a biodegradable wrapper to keep food fresh. There are a host of other possible uses for purified silk protein you can read about at Works In Progress. -via Strange Company

(Image credit: RG72)

Many authors publish literary works under a pen name, to made their name easier to pronounce or remember, or to avoid being judged by past works, or, like yours truly, just to keep their professional life separate from their private life. It was a different story for Portuguese writer Fernando Pessoa. He took different pen names, or what he called "heteronyms," as completely different personalities, and wrote from the viewpoint of each personality. In other words, Pessoa created characters and then inhabited them, writing as if he were in the character's body, even if the writing itself wasn't about the character. It was a habit he picked up as a child, to unleash his creativity without revealing too much of himself. The strangest part of the story was that no one knew that these different writers were all one person until Pessoa passed died! Pessoa's unpublished writings were discovered after his death in 1935, revealing him to be 70 different authors.

Today is March the first, and if we were in ancient Rome, that would come with a "Happy New Year!" greeting. A couple of days ago, we learned that in the Roman calendar, they just doubled February 24th to have a Leap Day. That seems confusing and nonsensical, but you haven't heard the half of it. The Roman Empire had a real time trying to come up with a workable calendar. See, early calendars were decreed by absolute rulers instead of by astronomers and mathematicians, so correcting any anomaly was a political risk.

Ancient calendars only had ten months (304 days) because no one did any agricultural work in the midwinter. Yes, those days existed, but they just weren't counted. In 731 BC, King Numa Pompilius decreed two new months, but that only brought the calendar up to 355 days. No problem, they just added another month when needed, but that didn't work so well, either. A few hundred years later, the harvest festival was falling in springtime, so something had to be done. That fell to Julius Caesar in 46 BC. He created a new calendar for only one year that aimed to set everything straight, but it ended up being 445 days long!

That long year helped to set the calendar right by the seasons, but it wasn't perfect. In another few hundred years, it again had to be adjusted again. Read about the Roman attempts to create a calendar that made sense at BBC Future.  -via Damn Interesting

(Image credit: Leomudde)

The earth is surrounded by a cloud of space debris. We have been launching things into space for more than 60 years, and they usually just stay up there long after their job is done. They do fall apart and collide with each other, so that we have tiny pieces of metal, plastic, and paint orbiting the earth and posing danger to spacecraft and other satellites. Yeah, we've managed to even pollute space. So what can we do about it? Many ideas have been proposed, but they are difficult and expensive, and may be dangerous. But what about space lasers? Vox explains how lasers would work, and the pros and cons of launching such a program to deal with space debris. What could possibly go wrong?

Linguist Lorenzo Dow Turner studied the language of the Gullah Geechee residents of coastal Georgia in the 1930s. He recorded Amelia Dawley singing a song in another language that she was taught by her grandmother. No one knew what the song said, or where it came from, but it had been passed down through Dawley's family from her grandmother Catherine, who was kidnapped in Africa and enslaved on a coastal rice plantation in America in the early 1800s. A student from Sierra Leone recognized the lyrics in the recording as being of the Mende language.

Decades later, anthropologist Joseph Opala took a recording of Dawley's song to Sierra Leone. His colleague, ethnomusicologist Cynthia Schmidt, searched through villages in that country to find anyone who might recognize the song. In 1990, she finally found one woman, Baindu Jabati, in an isolated village called Senehun Ngola, who sang a song she learned from her grandmother. It was the same song. Her family had preserved it for hundreds of years.

Since the song contains about 50 words, it’s “almost certainly the longest text in an African language ever preserved by an African American family,” says Opala. “By comparison, [Roots author] Alex Haley was led to his roots in the Gambia by about five or six words in Mandinka.”

Through this song, Amelia Dawley's family was traced to a specific area in Sierra Leone. Dawley's daughter, Mary Moran, was 11 years old when the recording was made. She met Baindu Jabati in 1997, as seen above. Read how the preservation of a song in its original language led to the breakthrough in a family's history at Smithsonian.

(Image courtesy of Sharon Maybarduk)