You are most likely familiar with numbers being used to implicate letters, phrases or even symbols. In SMS (txting) shortcuts, for instance, 2 can also be used for “to”, 4 can mean “for” and the 8 spells “eat” in gr8, meaning great. This is called SMSish or textese or simply SMS language. When numbers instead [...]
Category: literature
Samuel Johnson completed the first English dictionary in 1755. Apparently Johnson was known for his drinking. On the other hand, Noah Webster, who wrote the famous Webster Dictionary, was known as a short, pale, smug, boastful, humorless, yet religious man. Webster is also accused of crediting himself with coining many words which had been in [...]
Tourism is a $4 trillion-a-year industry, affecting more than 200 million jobs, or 1 in 10 workers. But tourism actually is an old industry, dating back to the first Olympics in 776BC. Even in ancient Rome it was popular to travel up the Nile to Thebes to view the statues. The first book on travel, [...]
The head of ancient Egyptian sphinxes portrayed the reigning pharaoh but also, when featuring the head of a falcon, represented the sky-god Horus or Amun-Re, with the head of a goat. When the Greeks adopted the sphinx it became a female monster. According to Greek legend the sphinx put a riddle to all who passed [...]
Aoccdrnig to a rscheearch at Cmabrigde Uinervtisy, it deosn’t mttaer in waht oredr the ltteers in a wrod are, the olny iprmoetnt tihng is taht the frist and lsat ltteer be at the rghit pclae. The rset can be a toatl mses and you can sitll raed it wouthit porbelm. Tihs is bcuseae the huamn [...]
The word encyclopedia comes from two Greek words meaning “a circle of learning.” The oldest known encyclopedia was written in Greece about 2000 years ago. It’s no longer in existence. The oldest encyclopedia in existence was written in the 1st century by Roman scholar Gaius Plinius Secundus (Pliny the Elder). His encyclopaedia, called Natural History, [...]
When Jonathan Swift published Gulliver’s Travels in 1726 he intended it as a satire on the ferociousness of human nature. Instead, today it is enjoyed as a children’s story. In another book, called ‘A Modest Proposal’, Swift suggested that the solution to poverty and overpopulation is to raise and eat the children, as one would [...]
Joyce Joyce started writing Ulysses in 1907 and finished 15 years later. It is considered the greatest novel of the 20th century. Yet it was originally banned in Britain and the US. Another great work banned by the country of the author was Lysistrata by Aristophanes. It is an anti-war play banned in Greece in [...]
The word encyclopedia is derived from two Greek words meaning “a circle of learning.” The oldest known encyclopedia was written in Greece about 2,000 years ago. It’s no longer in existence. The oldest encyclopedia in existence was written in the 1st century by Roman scholar Gaius Plinius Secundus (Pliny the Elder); called Natural History, it [...]
Ernest Vincent Wright’s 1939 novel Gadsby has 50,110 words, none of which contains the letter e. Don’t believe that a novel could be without any e’s? Here’s an excerpt from page one of Wright’s Gadsby: “If youth, throughout all history, had a champion to stand up for it; to show a doubting world that a [...]
