Sunday, December 17, 2006

10 things I didn't know until last week

1. Doris Day enjoyed such a squeaky-clean image that she was referred to as ‘the professional virgin.’
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2. The mandolin gets its name from the Italian word for ‘almond’ (mandorla) because of the supposed resemblance of its shape to the nut.
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3. In competitive swimming, the backstroke is the only stroke that’s not started by a dive.
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4. A retronym is an adjective-noun pairing generated by a change in the meaning of the noun, usually because of advances in technology. Eg. Silent movies were simply known as movies, until  talking movies came along - forcing the retronym, silent movies. Black and white television was simply television until color television came along - thereby creating the retronym ‘black and white television.’
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5. The China Syndrome - an anti-nuclear power movie about a nuclear plant that almost blows up and the ensuing cover-up - was released on March 16, 1979 just 12 days before America’s most serious reactor accident at Three Mile Island on March 28, 1979.
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6. Although surrealism was primarily an art movement, the term itself was coined by the poet Guillame Apollinaire in 1917.
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7. The word ‘sinister’ meaning ‘suggestive of evil or harm’ is derived from the latin word for ‘left’ (the opposite of ‘right’) - sinistre.
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8. Although Mark Twain wrote in his autobiography that The Adventures Of Tom Sawyer (1874) is the first novel whose manuscript was typed using a typewriter, careful research has proven that he got it wrong. That honour goes to Twain’s Life On the Mississippi (1882.)
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9. The phrase ‘the American Dream’ was coined by writer and historian James Truslow Adams in 1931 and was originally intended to depict equality across class borders.
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10. A phillumenist is a collector of matchboxes or matchbox labels.
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About:
Iqbal Mohammed is Head of Innovation & Strategy at a digital innovation agency serving the DACH and wider European markets. He is the winner of the WPP Atticus Award for Best Original Published Writing in Marketing & Communication.

He blogs about #innovation, #technology and #marketing at misentropy.com. You can reach him via email or Twitter.