Uncle John’s Legendary Lost Bathroom Reader (50 page)

Here’s the “high culture” section of the
Bathroom Reader.

“The first thing we do, let’s kill all the lawyers.”

“Neither a borrower, nor a lender be; For oft loses both itself and friend.”

“He is well paid that is well satisfied.”

“What’s in a name? That which we call a rose / By any other name would smell as sweet.”

“Some are born great, some achieve greatness, and some have greatness thrust upon them.”

“Though this be madness, yet there is method in it.”

“When Fortune means to men most good, she looks upon them with a threatening eye.”

“Remuneration! O! that’s the Latin word for three farthings.”

“Words pay no debts.”

“You taught me language; and my profit on’t is, I know how to curse.”

“Talkers are not good doers.”

“The saying is true, the empty vessel makes the loudest sound.”

“My words fly up, my thoughts remain below: Words without thoughts never to heaven go.”

“If all the year were playing holidays / To sport would be as tedious as to work.”

“The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars / But in ourselves.”

“A politician....One that would circumvent God.”

“When my love swears that she is made of truth / I do believe her, though I know she lies.”

“Let me have no lying; it becomes none but tradesmen.”

“If it be a sin to covet honor, I am the most offending soul.”

“One may smile, and smile, and be a villan.”

“Time is come round, and where I did begin, there shall I end.”

In the average film, male actors utter 10 times as many profanities as female actors.

Some quick stories about the origins of everyday objects
.

S
COTCH TAPE.
Believe it or not, the sticky stuff gets its name from an ethnic slur. When two-toned paint jobs became popular in the 1920s, Detroit carmakers asked the 3M Company for an alternative to masking tape that would provide a smooth, sharp edge where the two colors met. 3M came up with 2-inch wide cellophane tape, but auto companies said it was too expensive. So 3M lowered the price by only applying adhesive along the sides of the strip. That caused a problem: the new tape didn’t stick—and company painters complained to the 3M salesman, “Take this tape back to your stingy ‘Scotch’ bosses and tell them to put more adhesive on it!” The name—and the new tape—stuck.

BRASSIERES.
Mary Phelps Jacob, a teenage debutante in 1913, wanted to wear a rose-garlanded dress to a party one evening. But, as she later explained, her corset cover “kept peeping through the roses around my bosom.” So she took it off, pinned two handkerchiefs together, and tied them behind her back with some ribbon. “The result was delicious,” she later recalled. “I could move much more freely, a nearly naked feeling.” The contraption eventually became known as a
brassière
—a name borrowed from the corset cover it replaced. (Jacob later became famous for riding naked through the streets of Paris on an elephant.)

DINNER KNIVES.
Regular knives first had their points rounded and their sharp edges dulled for use at the dinner table in 1669. According to Margaret Visser, author of
The Rituals of Dinner
, this was done “apparently to prevent their use as ‘toothpicks,’ but probably also to discourage assassinations at meals.”

WRISTWATCHES.
Several Swiss watchmakers began attaching small watches to bracelets in 1790. Those early watches weren’t considered serious timepieces, and they remained strictly a women’s item until World War I, when armies recognized their usefulness in battle and began issuing them to servicemen instead of the traditional pocket watch.

“Smut” gets its name from a fungus that lives on corn kernels.

FORKS.
Before forks became popular, the difference between refined and common people was the number of fingers they ate with. The upper classes used three; everyone else used five. This began to change in the 11th century, when tiny, two-pronged forks became fashionable in Italian high society. But they didn’t catch on; the Catholic Church opposed them as unnatural (it was an insult to imply that the fingers God gave us weren’t good enough for food), and people who used them were ridiculed as effeminate or pretentious. Forks weren’t generally considered polite until the 18th century—some 800 years after they were first introduced.

PULL-TOP BEER CANS.
In 1959 a mechanical engineer named Ermal Cleon Fraze was at a picnic when he realized he’d forgotten a can opener. No one else had one either, so he had to use the bumper guard of his car to open a can of soda. It took half an hour, and he vowed he’d never get stuck like that again. He patented the world’s first practical pull-top can later that year, and three years later, the Pittsburgh Brewing Company tried using it on its Iron City Beer. Now every beer company does.

REFRIGERATOR MAGNETS.
Mass-produced magnets
designed
for refrigerators didn’t appear until 1964. They were invented by John Arnasto and his wife Arlene, who sold a line of decorative wall hooks. Arlene thought it would be cute to have a hook for refrigerator doors, so John made one with a magnet backing. The first one had a small bell and was shaped like a tea kettle. It sold well, so the Arnastos added dozens of other versions to their lines. Believe it or not, some of the rare originals are worth more than $100.

TOOTHPASTE TUBES.
Toothpaste wasn’t packaged in collapsible tubes until 1892, when Dr. Washington Wentworth Sheffield, a Connecticut dentist, copied the idea from a tube of oil-based paint. Increasing interest in sanitation and hygiene made the new invention more popular than jars of toothpaste, which mingled germs from different brushes. Toothpaste tubes became the standard almost overnight.

Believable Quote:
“I was not lying. I said things that later on seemed to be untrue.”

—Richard Nixon

Top 4 presidential religions: Episcopal (12), Presbyterian (9), Baptist and Unitarian (tied at 4).

After being widely cultivated for 10,000 years, marijuana was suddenly outlawed in America in 1937. Was it because it was a threat to the American public—or only to certain business interests?

F
or thousands of years, hemp (
cannabis sativa
) has been one of the most useful plants known to man. Its strong, stringy fibers make durable rope and can be woven into anything from sails to shirts; its pithy centers, or “hurds,” make excellent paper; its seeds, high in protein and oil, have been pressed for lighting and lubricating oils and pulped into animal feed; and extracts of its leaves have provided a wide range of medicines and tonics.

HEMP & AMERICA

• Hemp also has a notable place in American history:

Washington and Jefferson grew it.

Our first flags were likely made of hemp cloth.

The first and second drafts of the Declaration of Independence were written on paper made from Dutch hemp.

When the pioneers went West, their wagons were covered with hemp canvas (the word “canvas” comes from
canabacius
, hemp cloth).

The first Levi’s sold to prospectors were sturdy hemp coveralls.

Abraham Lincoln’s wife, Mary Todd, came from the richest hemp-growing family in Kentucky.

• After the Civil War, hemp production in the States declined steeply. Without slave labor, hemp became too expensive to process. Besides, cotton ginned by machines was cheaper. Still, hemp fabric remained the second most common cloth in America.

• The plant’s by-products remained popular well into this century. Maple sugar combined with hashish (a resin from hemp leaves) was sold over the counter and in Sears Roebuck catalogs as a harmless candy. Hemp rope was a mainstay of the navy. Two thousand tons of hemp seed were sold annually as bird feed. The pharmaceutical industry used hemp extracts in hundreds of potions and vigorously fought attempts to restrict hemp production. And virtually all good paints and varnishes were made from hemp-seed oil and/or linseed oil.

Which George Washington portrait is more accurate, the $1 bill or the quarter? The quarter.

WHAT HAPPENED

• In the 1920s and 1930s, the American public became increasingly concerned about drug addiction—especially to morphine and a “miracle drug” that had been introduced by the Bayer Company in 1898 under the brand name “Heroin.” By the mid-1920s, there were 200,000 heroin addicts in the United States alone.