The Wise Book of Whys (16 page)

Why Ambulances are Called “Ambulances”

The word “ambulance” ultimately derives from the Latin “ambulare,” meaning “to walk.” This gave rise to the French “hôpital ambulant,” essentially meaning “mobile hospital.” In the beginning, this didn’t mean as we think of it today, but was generally just used to refer to a temporary medical structure that could be easily moved, particularly early on referring to movable army medical hospitals.

“Ambulance
,” in English, first appeared around 1798, which also referred to these temporary hospital structures at first.

Mobile medical transport vehicles were also
being called ambulances in French around this time thanks to Frenchman Dominque-Jean Larrey and his “flying ambulance” (ambulance volantes). These ambulances were designed to get injured soldiers off the battlefield and to medical aid during battle, rather than waiting until the fight was over as was common before.

By the mid-nineteenth
century, the word (in English) extended to refer to any vehicle used to transport the wounded from battle fields to the military hospitals. One of the first instances of this was during the Crimean War (1853-1856). Shortly thereafter, during the American Civil War, such medical transport vehicles were known as “ambulance wagons.” The former, “ambulance,” name for mobile medical vehicles has stuck around ever since.

Why It’s Common to Yell “Geronimo” When Jumping Out of a Plane or
From a High Place

In the 1940s, the U.S. Army was testing out the feasibility of having platoons of soldiers parachute from airplanes rapidly. One of the first units to attempt to group jump out of a plane was located in Fort Benning, Georgia.

According to Major Gerard M. Devlin, they came up with the tradition of yelling Geronimo as follows: On the night before the group was set to make their first group jump, they all got together and went out for a night on the town, including goi
ng to see a movie and getting as drunk as possible afterward at a bar.

The movie they saw is reported to have been the 1939 film,
Geronimo
, though that isn’t known for sure. What is known was that it was a film featuring a character representing the Apache, Geronimo; so it’s assumed it was that film as the dates more or less line up.

In any event, while out carousing after the movie, a certain Private by the name of Aubrey Eberhardt was acting tough about the jump that was to happen the next day, making out that it wasn’t a big deal and he wasn’t nervous about it
.

His fellow soldiers called B.S. on him and one of them reportedly exclaimed
, “You’ll be so scared, you won’t remember your own name!”  To which he supposedly replied, “All right, dammit! I tell you jokers what I’m gonna do! To prove to you that I’m not scared out of my wits when I jump, I’m gonna yell ‘Geronimo’ loud as hell when I go out that door tomorrow!”

This is possibly in reference to the story that the Native American Geronimo was given that name by Mexican soldiers after incidents where Geronimo, showing complete disregard for his own personal safety, attacked armed Mexican soldiers with nothing but a knife, surviving each of those attacks despite being constantly shot at
. The name is thought to stem from the soldiers yelling and pleading to Saint Jerome for help as they faced Geronimo.

The next day, right after Eberhardt jumped out
of the plane, he kept his promise and yelled at the top of his lungs, “Geronimo!” and added some Native American mimicking war whoops, just for good measure. This tradition of making a ridiculous exclamation as loud as possible in the face of death right after jumping out of a plane (these early paratroopers didn’t exactly have the best survival rates) caught on with the rest of Eberhardt’s unit and they all began exclaiming, “Geronimo,” when they jumped.

Whether Major Devlin’s recollection of events is perfectly accurate or not, once training was complete, this practice had become so popular that when the Army christened the 501st Parachute Infantry Battalion in 1941, which was the first combat ready parachute unit, they put “Geronimo” on their insignia and most of the troops would yell it as they jumped from the planes
.

This caught on with the general public thanks to extensive news media cover
age of these parachuting troops -jumping out of a plane obviously being something of a novelty at the time.

Why Association Football is Called “Soccer” in America

It may surprise you to learn that “Soccer,” as a name for “Association Football,” was coined by the British. In fact, in the early days of the sport among the upper echelons of British society, the popular name for the sport was “Soccer.” Further, the sport being referred to as “Soccer” preceded the first recorded instance of it being called by the singular word “Football” by about 18 years

In the 1860s, as in most of history (wit
h records as far back as 1004 BC where in Japan an Association Football-like sport was played) there were quite a lot of popular “football” sports being played throughout the world and, of course, England. Many of these sports had similar rules and eventually, on October 26, 1863, a group of teams in England decided to get together and create a standard set of rules which would be used at all of their matches. They formed the rules for “Association Football,” with the “Association” distinguishing it from the many other types of football sports in existence in England, such as “Rugby Football.”

British school boys of the day liked to nickname everything, which is still somewhat common
. They also liked to add the ending “er” to these nicknames. Thus, Rugby was at that time popularly called “Rugger.” Association Football was then much better known as “Assoccer,” which quickly just became “Soccer” and sometimes “Soccer Football.”

The inventor of the nickname
is said to be Charles Wredford-Brown, who was an Oxford student around the time of Association Football’s inception, though the story behind this is most likely legend. The legend goes that in 1863, shortly after the creation of Association Football, some of Wredford-Brown’s friends asked him if he’d come play a game of “Rugger,” to which he replied he preferred “Soccer.” Whether that story’s true or not, around this time the name did indeed catch on amongst the masses.

In the beginning, the newly standardized Rugby and Soccer were football sports for “gentlemen
,” primarily being played by the upper echelons of society. However, these two forms of football gradually spread to the masses, particularly Soccer as Rugby didn’t really catch on too well with the lower classes.

As Soccer became the domina
nt football sport, this resulted in the name switching from “Soccer” and “Association Football,” to just “Football”; with the first documented case of the sport being called by the singular term “Football” coming in 1881.

From here, the game gradually spread throughout the world under the name “Football
.” The problem was, though, that a lot of other countries already had popular sports of their own that they called “Football,” such as the United States, Canada, Ireland, Australia, New Zealand, and South Africa, to name a few. In these countries, the name “Soccer” was and, in some still is, preferred for this reason.

Essentially, the most popular football sport in a given region, tends to be called by the generic “football
,” with others given a more distinguishing name.

Why
Certain American Football Games are Called “Bowls”

In 1901, the Roses Association sponsored a college Tournament East-West football game between Michigan and Stanford. In this game, Stanford quit in the third quarter, being down 49-0. For the next 15 years, this annual event stopped featuring football, and rather featured other events such as chariot racing. However, in 1916 the Roses Association decided to sponsor a football tournament once again, this time between WSU (then called “The State College of Washington”) and Brown. This game was held at Tournament Park in Pasadena, as were subsequent annual matches. Fast-forward five years and they had need of a stadium to play the game at since attendance for this tournament had swelled massively.

Myron Hunt was commissioned to design a stadium for this purpose
, which was completed two years later and named Rose Bowl. Like many other college football stadiums since, Rose Bowl was modeled after the design of Yale’s stadium, Yale Bowl, which got its name from the fact that it resembled a bowl, much like Rose Bowl. This tournament sponsored by the Roses Association was then named the “Rose Bowl,” after the stadium.

Gradually other cities and universities with football teams saw the money making opportunities and promotional value of these tournament games and began creating their own “bowl” games, even though many of these games were not played in bowl shaped stadiums.

The NFL eventually borrowed this terminology when they created the Pro Bowl in 1951. In 1970, the AFL and NFL merged and they created a championship game called the “AFL-NFL World Championship Game”. This game was called such for two years while the final details of the merger were being worked out. Upon the third “AFL-NFL World Championship Game” the merger was complete and this championship game was re-branded the “Super Bowl,” after the college naming convention. This third match-up, being called “Super Bowl III,” also set the tradition of using Roman numerals for the Super Bowl, rather than the year of the game.

Why Chocolate is Bad for Dogs

Chocolate contains an alkaloid called “theobromine
.” Theobromine is in the same family as caffeine and is a type of stimulant (they both are mythylxanines). Theobromine stimulates the central nervous system and cardiovascular system, and it causes slightly increased blood pressure.

Dogs and certain other animals, such as horses and cats, cannot metabolize theobromine as quickly as humans can; this causes the above effects to be much more severe than is the case with humans
. The specific notable side effects of toxic levels of theobromine in dogs includes: diarrhea; vomiting; increased urination; muscle twitching; excessive panting; hyperactive behavior; whining; dehydration; digestive problems; seizures; and rapid heart rate. Some of these symptoms, like the rapid heart rate, can ultimately be fatal to the dog.

So how much chocolate is too much for a dog
? That depends on the size and age of the dog, as well as what type of chocolate is consumed. The larger the dog, the more theobromine they can handle without dying and older dogs tend to have more problems with the side effects.

As far as the chocolate itself, cocoa powder contains about sixteen times as much theobromine per ounce over milk chocolate, with most popular forms of chocolate falling somewhere between those two, excepting white chocolate, which contains insignificant amounts of theobromine per ounce, making it extremely unlikely that a dog could, or ever would, consume enough to be harmful.

So, the general rules for the amount of chocolate that will be toxic for a dog:

Milk chocolate: one ounce per pound of body weight
(so, without intervention, a 16-pound dog (7.2 kilogram) would likely die from eating one pound of milk chocolate)

Dark chocolate: 1/3 of an ounce per pound of body weight (around 5 ounces of
dark chocolate for that same 16-pound dog)

Baker’s chocolate: 1/9 of an ounce per pound of body weight (around 1.8 ounce
s of baker’s chocolate for a 16-pound dog)

Cocoa powder: 1/16 of an ounce per pound of dog (around 1 oun
ce of cocoa powder to kill a 16-pound dog)

On the other extreme end, it would take about 200 pounds of white
chocolate consumed within a 17-hour period to reach toxic levels of theobromine for a 16-pound dog. The low quantity of theobromine here is because white chocolate is made from cocoa butter, sugar, and milk, not cocoa solids.