Uncle John’s Facts to Annoy Your Teacher Bathroom Reader for Kids Only! (9 page)

Q. My dad says “flammable” and “inflammable” are opposites. Is he right
?

A:
No. Both words mean “easily set on fire.” The word “inflammable” was first used in the early 17th century, and since then, it has caused a lot of confusion. The prefix “in-” sometimes means “not,” so people have often thought things labeled “inflammable” were fireproof when they weren’t.

In the 20th century, scientists, firefighters, and insurance companies agreed to start using the word “flammable” and its opposite, “nonflammable,” to make things more clear.

Being annoying and pushy can get you far in life…as it did for these two women who stood up to prejudice and made people take them seriously.

A
NNE HUTCHINSON

In 1634, when she was 43 years old, Anne Hutchinson left England and moved with her husband and children to the Massachusetts colony in North America. Despite the fact that she wasn’t an ordained minister, she started giving sermons and organized Bible study groups for women in Boston. They’d get together and talk about religious verses or ideas, and Hutchinson usually offered her own thoughts. Often her ideas differed from the ones taught in English churches, especially when it came to the rights of women and minorities. Hutchinson believed that the Bible said they were equal to white men; the church disagreed.

By 1637, Anne Hutchinson’s study groups were full of women and men, and the official church of Massachusetts (the Puritan church) had labeled her a “troublemaker.” The next year, the colony put her on trial for heresy, or speaking out against the established beliefs of the church.

The largest meteorite ever found weighed 60 tons.

At her trial, Hutchinson refused to back down. She challenged the judges and defended her right to hold her meetings. The judges, though, were having none of it; they banished her from Massachusetts.

So she moved to Rhode Island, which had become a place in the colonies known for being tolerant of different ideas. Hutchinson helped establish the colony’s government and continued giving lectures and holding her Bible study meetings. She was also one of many inspirations for William Penn, who founded the Pennsylvania colony in 1681 and created a government based on equality and religious tolerance. Eventually Anne Hutchinson moved to New York and died there in 1643.

It took a long time, but the State of Massachusetts finally changed its mind about Anne Hutchinson. Today, more than 300 years after her death, she’s got a statue outside the statehouse. The inscription on it calls her a “courageous exponent [advocate] of civil liberty and religious toleration.”

AMELIA BLOOMER

What did women in the 1800s wear under their dresses? Before Amelia Bloomer came along, they had only restrictive underwear that made it difficult for them to play sports or ride bicycles. But thanks to Bloomer’s innovation—a pair of puffy pants that gathered around the ankles with elastic—women could be a lot more comfortable.

Letter with the most entries in English dictionaries: T.

Bloomer didn’t start out as a feminist. Her first cause was temperance, a movement in the mid-19th century to ban alcohol in the United States. But by 1849, she’d started her own newspaper, the first in the United States to be produced entirely by and for women. She also started giving speeches about women’s rights, and when she showed up for an event, she often wore puffy trousers under a short skirt. But pants were considered men’s clothing, and at the time, Bloomer was ridiculed for wearing something so odd. She kept doing it, though, and to make fun of her, men started calling the pants “bloomers.”

But bloomers eventually caught on with women. By the 1890s (around the time Bloomer died in 1894), bicycling became a trendy hobby among men and women in the United States. And women—who had a hard time maneuvering their bicycles while wearing long skirts and tight undergarments—started wearing bloomers and short skirts…just like Amelia Bloomer had. It would be more than 50 years before it became commonplace to see women wearing pants, but bloomers became an acceptable way for women to be comfortable and fashionable at the same time.

*      *      *

“I pick my nose and I’m not ashamed to admit it. If there’s a [booger], then just pick it, man.”

—Justin Timberlake

Q. What goes around the world but stays in a corner? A. A stamp

When Uncle John heard this tale, he immediately called in his favorite detective—Inspector Commodius Loo—to solve the crime. See if you can figure it out. (Answer on
page 241
.)

H
EAD GAMES

One of Miss Shapen’s students, Winslow, had been kidnapped. Winslow’s dad paid the $20,000 ransom, but things hadn’t gone as planned. Winslow was still missing, and his brother Waldo—who had delivered a gym bag full of cash to the ransom drop—was suffering from a bump on his head.

“I went to the deserted parking garage just like they told me,” Waldo said to Inspector Loo. “But somebody conked me on the back of the head. I fell and dropped the gym bag. My attacker swooped in from behind, picked it up, and ran off. I never saw his face, only his back. He was tall and redheaded, wearing jeans and a zippered sweatshirt—it might have had a college logo, I’m not sure.”

Yeehaw Junction, Florida, used to be called Jackass Junction.

“Anyone else around?” Loo asked.

“A homeless guy showed up, pushing a shopping cart,” Waldo said. “Then someone drove up in a Mercedes. He wanted to call the cops, but I begged him not to. The kidnappers said no police.”

“Now they want another $20,000,” Miss Shapen wailed. “What should we do? Should we track down the homeless man and the Mercedes driver?”

“No need,” Loo said. “I know what happened.”

How did Inspector Loo crack the case, and what had he figured out?

*      *      *

BLOWIN’ IN THE WIND

In 2009, people living next door to folk rocker Bob Dylan in Malibu, California, had a complaint: the portable toilet he kept on his property stank. (The singer had hired construction workers to do some renovating, and they needed a place to go.) Dylan’s next-door neighbors said the toilet smelled so bad that it made them sick. When complaints to the city didn’t work, they came up with their own solution: they installed huge fans on their deck and blew the stink back at Dylan’s house.

Bull sharks have been known to pursue their victims onto land.

Here are the origins to some real words that are acceptable to say, but sound naughty anyway.

URANUS
.
In 1781, astronomer William Herschel called this planet Georgium Sidus, after King George III of England. But since all of the other planets were named after ancient gods, German astronomer J. E. Bode renamed it after Ouranos, the Greek god of the sky. And the correct pronunciation is not “yer-anus,” but the much more respectable sounding “urine-us.”

WINNIE THE POOH
.
This was the name of a teddy bear owned by Christopher Robin Milne, the son of author A. A. Milne. He named it Winnie after a bear at the London Zoo, and Pooh after a swan the family had met while on vacation. (No word on why they chose to name a swan after you-know-what.)

RECTIFY
.
This word, meaning “to make right something that is wrong,” sounds like it should have a naughty origin, but sadly, it doesn’t. It comes from the Latin
rectificare
, which means “to make right.” Yawn.

TITMOUSE
.
The name for this bird species comes from two Old English words—
tyt
meant “little,” and
mase
meant “bird.” Over the centuries,
tytmase
turned into “titmouse.”
Warning
: Only experienced bird watchers can say this word without cracking themselves up.

“Big sisters are the crab grass in the lawn of life.” —Charles M. Schulz

What if the winner of a contest to find America’s greatest cowboy was…a girl
?

M
OVE OVER, BOYS

In 1904, the best cowboys in the Southwest gathered together to compete in a roping competition in Dennison, Texas. A lot was on the line: $10,000 in prize money (a fortune in those days) and the title of “World’s Greatest Roper.” But no one paid much attention to one of the competitors, an 18-year-old girl from Oklahoma. Back then, very few women participated in rodeo competitions along with the men, and no one thought this girl, with her slight frame and refined manners, was likely to win anything. It was the last time anyone made that mistake.

When her chance came, Lucille Mulhall roped three steers in 3 minutes, 36 seconds. No other rider could match her, and when the dust cleared, Mulhall had earned the gold medal, the world record, and the $10,000 prize.

A STAR IS BORN

Word spread about the Oklahoman, and the following year, Mulhall was the main attraction in a star-studded rodeo at New York City’s Madison Square Garden. President Teddy Roosevelt was so dazzled by her roping and riding that he declared her “the world’s most expert horsewoman.” But it was a fellow Oklahoman—a performer and champion rider—named Will Rogers who gave her the nickname that stuck: “America’s First Cowgirl.” According to Rogers, the word “cowgirl” had never been used before Lucille Mulhall came along.

Spiders can’t chew or swallow, so they inject their prey with a poison that turns the victim into a liquid goop.

BRED IN THE SADDLE

Mulhall was born in 1885 and, as she told a reporter later, “I’ve ridden all my life. I expect my father gave me a horseback ride before I was a month old.” Her father was Zack Mulhall, an army colonel and rancher who owned more than 82,000 acres in Oklahoma. Young Lucille picked up the tricks of the cowboy trade from the cowhands on the ranch. She also became an expert with a rifle and had a natural talent for roping. When she was 13, her dad told her she could keep all the cattle she could rope in one day. Before sunset, she’d roped 300 steers and put them in her personal corral. Within days, her herd grew to more than 1,000, and her father was forced to call off the deal.

SWEETHEART OF THE RODEO

Mulhall got her start in show business in 1899 when her dad took her to the St. Louis World’s Fair to star in his Wild West Show called “The Congress of Rough Riders and Ropers.” People there were amazed that such a small person (she was only five feet tall) could rope and wrestle huge steers to the ground. But Mulhall was whipcord-strong, and she worked as a headliner in rodeos and Wild West shows across the United States and around the world until 1917.

THE GOVERNOR

When she wasn’t starring in rodeos, Mulhall trained hundreds of horses, but her favorite was named Governor. She taught him to do more than 40 tricks, including shooting a gun, pulling off a man’s coat, and walking up and down stairs. Governor was so skilled that Mulhall joked, “He has received a good education, and does nearly everything but talk.”

END OF THE TRAIL

When World War I put an end to the heyday of Wild West shows, Mulhall went back to the family ranch in Oklahoma. She lived there until 1940, when she died in a car crash. She was inducted into the Cowboy Hall of Fame in 1975, and to the Cowgirl Hall of Fame in 1977. Both places gave her the title “All-Around Champion Cowgirl.”