Uncle John’s Heavy Duty Bathroom Reader@ (50 page)

Knights who died during the Crusades were buried with their legs crossed.

“MIND OVER MATTRESS”

Jane Ace is one of the unsung stars of the golden age of radio. From 1930 until 1945 she appeared in
Easy Aces,
a comedy about a real estate agent and his wife. Much of the show’s humor revolved around the crazy situations Jane got into, and her unparalleled gift for mangling the English language. She may be largely forgotten today, but some of the malaprops she made famous on the show are still in use
.

“Hopefully we’ll be more combatable.”

“Neatness is next to cleanliness.”

“I was sound awake all night.”

“You’re making a mountain out of Mohammed.”

“I must get her out of my cistern.”

“I’m a member of the weeper sex.”

“We’re living in squander.”

“I don’t drink, I’m a totalitarian.”

“You’ve got the cards before the horse.”

“He talks with a Western drool.”

“You can’t judge a book by its lover.”

“I am his awful wedded wife.”

“Where’ve you been? Long face no see!”

“That used car wasn’t what it was jacked up to be!”

“Get thee behind me, satin!”

“I couldn’t do it of my own violation.”

“He went off half-crocked.”

“Here’s the whole thing in a nuthouse.”

“I don’t like to cast asparagus.”

“Stop shouting yourself horse in the face!”

“Be it ever so hovel, there’s no place like home!”

“I don’t like your altitude!”

“You look ravenous in that sweater.”

“I want your candied opinion.”

“She got rid of all her exhibitions.”

“He told her what makes her thick.”

“Time wounds all heels.”

“Truth is stranger than friction.”

“You’re as pale as a goat!”

“Birds of a father flock together.”

“Make up a story out of whole wheat.”

“The word ‘birthday’ is tattoo around here!”

Over tall buildings? Superman’s birthday is February 29th, Leap Day.

HIS ROTUNDITY

Recently, we’ve had “Tricky Dick,” “Slick Willie,” “Shrub,” and “Nobama,” which are pretty tame compared to some of these other mean nicknames for American presidents
.

L
ittle Jemmy:
James Madison was the shortest president, just 5'4" (average height of a male American at the time: 5'8"), which explains the “little.” “Jemmy” was a nickname commonly given to children and babies named James (like Jimmy). The name implied that Madison was a toddler, and not a man.

General Mum:
Gen. William Henry Harrison, hero of the Battle of Tippecanoe, was elected in 1840 and died after only a month in office. He caught a cold while delivering a three-hour inaugural address in freezing temperatures; the cold developed into pneumonia, which killed him. Ironically, his nickname during the election campaign was “General Mum” because, like any savvy politician, he avoided addressing any definitive opinions on controversial issues.

His Accidency:
When William Henry Harrison died, Vice President John Tyler ascended to the presidency.

The Negro President:
Given to Thomas Jefferson following the election of 1800, which he won thanks to “the three-fifths compromise,” which counted slaves as
⅗
of a human being for population purposes. That, in turn, gave greater representation to slaveholding states in determining electoral vote distribution, allowing Jefferson to defeat New Englander John Adams.

The Fainting General:
While fighting in the Mexican-American War in 1848, future president Franklin Pierce was on a horse when it was startled by exploding artillery. The horse tossed him forward onto the pommel of his saddle, which was driven into his groin. The injury was so painful that Pierce fainted and remained passed out, lying on the battlefield for the rest of the day.

Queen Victoria in Riding Breeches:
Rutherford B. Hayes, and his wife “Lemonade” Lucy Hayes, were ardent teetotalers. It wasn’t very macho for a man to abstain from alcohol—or smoking, as Hayes also did—earning him this emasculating nickname. (The “riding breeches” are because he was a horseback soldier in the Civil War.)

Lowest governor’s salary: Maine ($70,000). Highest: California ($206,500).

The Walrus:
Chester Alan Arthur sported a large handlebar mustache, and he was fairly overweight, both of which made him look like…a walrus.

Uncle Jumbo:
It’s a fat joke. By the time he was running for reelection in 1892, Grover Cleveland’s weight had risen to 250 pounds. Some newspapers called him “Uncle Jumbo.” Others favored “The Stuffed Prophet” and “The Elephantine Economist.”

His Rotundity:
Another fat joke. It’s what detractors called the overweight second president, John Adams, who was also accused of being pompous. (When Washington was president, Adams proposed calling him “His Majesty” or “His High Mightiness.”)

Ronnie Raygun:
President Ronald Reagan proposed the multibillion dollar weapons defense system called the Strategic Defense Initiative, which would use orbiting structures in space to shoot down Soviet-launched nuclear missiles. SDI was perceived as so bizarre and impractical that it was called “Star Wars,” earning Reagan this sci-fi nickname.

President Hardly:
A play on the name of Warren G. Harding, and his work ethic—he reportedly left most of the day-to-day work of his office to advisers.

Kid Gloves:
Benjamin Harrison suffered from various skin problems, particularly infections on his hands, and often wore gloves during the frequent outbreaks. Other nickname: “The Human Iceberg” because, although he was a gifted orator, he tended to be cold and aloof in person.

That Man in the White House:
Some of Barack Obama’s loudest opponents suggested he wasn’t actually born in the U.S.; George W. Bush’s opponents labeled him “Commander-in-Thief” after the disputed 2000 election. Similarly, some Republicans referred to Franklin Roosevelt as “that man in the White House” because they were so disgusted with his social-welfare agenda that they couldn’t even bring themselves to say his name.

Pound for pound, women can absorb 30% more alcohol into their system than men.

ESPERANTO, PARTO DU

Esperanto—the most successful made-up language in history—is much easier to learn than most “natural” languages. So why don’t more people speak it? Here’s Part II of the story. (Part I is on
page 195
.)

T
ALK SOUP
When L. L. Zamenhof’s
Unua Libro
introduced Esperanto to the world in 1887, the time seemed ripe for what the language had to offer. Railroads, steamships, the telegraph, transatlantic cables, and other inventions of the Industrial Revolution were remaking the world and bringing people closer together. A person who might otherwise have lived their entire life without ever leaving their village could now travel the world in ease and comfort, at a price that was within reach of just about everyone.

Standardization was also the order of the day: Many countries around the world had already abandoned their traditional systems of weights and measures in favor of a new international standard, the metric system. They would soon begin setting their clocks according to a single standard, too: Greenwich Mean Time. To many people it seemed like just a matter of time before the world adopted a single international “auxiliary” language that people could speak when traveling or conducting business abroad, to save the trouble of having to master German, Swedish, Arabic, Hindi, Cantonese, and Swahili. Why not Esperanto?

GOING GREEN

Zamenhof saw his language as much more than just a language of convenience for tourists and businessmen. For him it was a means to a very important end: stopping violence between communities by encouraging peace and understanding through a shared language. Without this as a goal, Esperanto had little or no value as far as he was concerned. The most dedicated Esperantists shared his vision, and over time an Esperanto “culture” of sorts began to develop. Esperantists wore green clothes. They pinned green five-pointed stars on their lapels to identify themselves to other speakers they might meet on the street. They went on trips together. They attended Esperanto conferences and theater performances. They had their own flag, with a single, giant five-pointed green star on a white background against a field of solid green. They had their own hymns and their own Esperanto anthem, “La Epero,” which they sang at every gathering. People met each other through Esperanto, fell in love, married, and had kids that they raised as native Esperanto speakers. In time Esperanto culture began to overshadow the language itself, as people learned the language to join the community, and not vice versa.

What do one-third of people allergic to cats have in common? They own a cat.

CULTURE CLASH

But as Esperanto spread beyond the Russian Empire into western Europe and other parts of the world where ethnic unrest was not (yet) as acute as it was in Warsaw and Bialystok, many people who were intrigued by Esperanto’s practical potential weren’t interested in the movement’s culture and values at all. They were repelled by it: All that talk about peace, brotherhood, and universal understanding came to be seen as, well…flaky. Esperantists were like turn-of-the-century hippies.

Add to that the fact that while Zamenhof had a knack for languages, he was an eye doctor, not a professionally trained linguist. There were things about Esperanto that drove language experts crazy. When an organization called the Delegation for the Adoption of an International Language began meeting in Paris in 1901 to choose an auxiliary language, they agreed to consider Esperanto as a candidate…provided that Zamenhof and his followers toned down their goofy green-shirt idealism and fixed the “problems” that the critics had identified in Esperanto.

CANON FODDER

Zamenhof, a man who had literally seen blood running in the streets, would have none of it. He had a lot more in mind for his language than simply making it easier for tourists to say “I’d like to buy a train ticket” and “Where is the bathroom?” He wasn’t about to temper his idealism—not one bit.

Furthermore, Zamenhof understood something about artificial languages that his critics apparently didn’t, namely that they needed to have a central core of unchanging grammar and vocabulary if they were going to survive over time. In natural languages like English, this is such a given that we hardly think about it. The word “elephant,” for example, is spelled only one way: e–l–e–p–h–a–n–t, and it’s pronounced “EH–luh–funt,” not “EEL–uh–fint.” or “eh–LEE–funt.” Questions are indicated by a question marks, not by ampersands or asterisks. And the question mark is placed at the end of the sentence, not at the beginning. These rules are inviolate; not obeying them probably doesn’t even occur to English speakers.

Billionaire philanthropist George Soros (b. 1930) is a “native” Esperanto speaker.

TINKER TOY

With artificial languages, however, everything is up for grabs. And once the tinkering starts, it’s hard to stop. Soon there are multiple “reformed” versions of the language, each with its own unique grammar, vocabulary, and spelling conventions. Once that happens, how is a prospective language learner supposed to know which version to study? More than one artificial language has been killed this way. Esperanto itself owed much of its popularity to the failure of another constructed language, called Volapük. After its adherents splintered into several warring factions in the 1880s, many Volapük clubs abandoned the language and remade themselves as Esperanto clubs. (For more on Volapük, see
page 429
.)

MAN CRAZY

Zamenhof’s critics had a long list of things they didn’t like about Esperanto. They took umbrage, for example, at the fact that Esperanto had no word for “mother,” other than the word “father” with the feminine suffix
–in
attached. Most family words in Esperanto are masculine by default and are feminized this way.

They also resented the fact that Zamenhof used the letter
-j
to indicate plural nouns, not the letter
-i,
which would have resembled Latin and not made Esperanto so foreign-looking.

The Esperanto alphabet was another object of scorn: Zamenhof had eliminated the letters Q, W, X, and Y entirely. Even worse, he added special marks called
diacritics
to the letters C, G, H, J, S, and U when he wanted them to represent a second set of sounds. U had a special curved diacritic over it that looked like a small u; the rest had ˆ marks. And neither diacritic could be reproduced on a typewriter—one more thing that drove Esperanto’s critics crazy.

Part III of the story is on
page 373
.

An Australian product called Shark Shield attaches to your surfboard and emits an electrical field that supposedly repels sharks.

Q & A:
ASK THE EXPERTS

More answers to life’s burning questions from some of the world’s top trivia experts
.

N
OT 2 SHORT 4 U

Q:
Why are text messages capped at 160 characters?

A:
“In the late 1980s, 45-year-old Friedhelm Hillebrand sat at his typewriter, tapping out random sentences on a sheet of paper. He counted the number of letters, numbers, punctuation marks, and spaces on the page. Each blurb ran on for a line or two and nearly always clocked in under 160 characters. That became Hillebrand’s magic number—and set the standard for text messaging. He and others had been laying out plans for a standardized technology that would allow cell phones to transmit and display text messages, and because of tight bandwidth constraints, messages had to be as short as possible. Two decades later, to avoid the need for splitting text messages into multiple parts, the creators of Twitter capped the length of a tweet at 140 characters, keeping the extra 20 for the user’s unique address.” (From the
Los Angeles Times,
“Why Text Messages Are Limited to 160 Characters,” by Mark Milian)