1. The United States of America has never had an official language.
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2. The ‘Standard’ SMS tone on a Nokia cellphone is Morse code for ‘M’ (message). The ‘Special’ tone option when receiving SMS (text messages) is actually Morse code for ‘SMS’. Similarly, the ‘Ascending’ SMS tone is Morse code for ‘Connecting People’ - Nokia’s slogan.
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3. The Memphis Mafia is the name given to Elvis Presley’s closest male friends.
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4. The IAU nomenclature standards state that features on Saturn’s moon Phoebe are to be named after characters in the Greek myth of Jason and the Argonauts.
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5. A cheese lover is called a turophile.
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6. The red skyline in the Edward Munch painting ‘The Scream’ was inspired by red twilights caused all around the world by the 1883 Krakatoa volcanic explosion in Indonesia.
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7. Australia sits on its own tectonic plate while Greenland is geologically a part of North America - one of the reasons why the former is classified as an island continent and the latter isn’t.
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8. Papua New Guinea boasts the highest level of linguistic diversity in the world with approximately 830 languages for around 5.4 million people. That’s about one language for every 6,500 residents.
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9. During World War II, baseball commentators on radio were prohibited from mentioning anything about the weather, lest enemy interceptors find out too much about American weather.
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10. Economics gets its name from Oikonomikos - a book by a 4th century BC Greek named Xenophon.
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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.