When I was a child my mother would try to encourage, threaten, and bribe my brother and I into reading books, which, of course, we resisted. As an adult I have come to enjoy reading; I especially enjoy non-fiction, and read the newspaper everyday, usually the Guardian Weekly and less often the Economist. So when I came across The Book of General Ignorance by John Lloyd and John Mitchinson, I was excited. The premise is that the authors briefly cover and debunk wrongly-held common beliefs (which number to about 200, hereafter these will be referred to as Facts). Here are a few examples of the Facts;
Some Facts are statistically proven and will perhaps make you say ‘huh’, but not sell your house and move to New Zealand:
Where are you most likely to be caught in a hailstorm?
Kenya
Why is a marathon 26 miles and 385 yards long?
For the convenience of the British Royal Family.
What rhymes with Orange?
No common nouns, just two proper nouns – Blorenge and Gorringe, both with origins in the UK.
Some Facts are just so obscure or inane that you just don’t care:
What’s the biggest thing a blue whale can swallow?
A grapefruit.
Which of the following are nuts: almond, peanut, brazil nut, walnut?
Of these choices, just a walnut.
Some Facts are just offensive to Scots:
Where do kilts, bagpipes, haggis, porridge, whisky, and tartan come from?
Not Scotland.
Some Facts are very offensive to the French:
Who invented champagne? And, Where was the guillotine invented?
Not the French, and Not France.
Some Facts, I think, and more interesting:
Who is America named after?
Richard Ameryk, a Welshman and wealthy Bristol Merchant, not the Italian merchant and cartography Amerigo Vespucci. Ameryk was the rich patron of Italian explorer Giovanni Cabato (his English name was John Cabot) who landed in the Americas two years before Vespucci. Apparently, there are records of the new lands being referred to as America in Bristol, before Vespucci’s mappings. Since Vespucci did extensively map Latin America, it was assumed by following explorers, because of the similarity of the names, that America was named after Amerigo. Further, Vesspuci never himself used the word America for the lands he discovered.
Who invented the Telephone?
Antonio Meucci. Alexander Graham Bell apparently pounced on the idea after Meucci failed to renew the stop-gap patent for his teletrofono. Apparently, in 2004 the US House of Representatives passed a resolution recognizing his achievements, but somehow American schools still teach that it was Bell.
Where do Turkey’s come from?
The Americas, they reached Europe in the 1520s from Spanish Mexico (Extra tidbit: the Turkeys that were supposedly on the pilgrims dinner table actually came with them from England back to the Americas). More interestingly for me, Turkeys received that name because it was Turkish merchants who parlayed this delicious bird throughout Europe – and the English began calling them Turkie cocks, from which the modern name Turkey is derived. Ironically, the Turkish merchants, who had originally bought them from the Spanish, called them hindi, which is the Turkish word for India, because the Spanish were still calling the Americas India at that time.
What color were the original Oompa-Loompas?
Black. Apparently, Roald Dahl’s original described them as a tribe of African pygmies imported to replace the laid-off white factory workers. Previously, they had eaten beetles and tree bark, now they were enjoying an all-chocolate diet. By the time the story was to be published by Knopf the racist and slavery-reminiscent elements of the book were expunged. The Oompa -Loompas’ appearance was dabbled with in different editions by many creative authors, publishers, illustrators, and movie-makers; giving the Oompa-Loompas rosy-white to orange skin, long golden-hair to mohawk hairdos.
And some Facts are just a kick in the balls:
Have you ever slid down a banister?
No, you haven’t. Banisters are the thin pieces of wood that support the wide part you slide down, which is called a handrail.
If you love knowledge like I do, you would be excited to read these tidbits rights? But as I was reading, there was a fact of which I doubted the veracity – I noticed there were no footnotes, I thumbed to the end, no endnotes! No bibliography! No citation whatsoever! How can a factbook have no citations? I feel cheated. That was the biggest kick in the balls of all.
-Charles P. Pearson
Lloyd, John and John Mitchinson. The Book of General Ignorance. Harmony Books: New York, 2006.
Can you explain the grapefruit one?
Apparently, although their mouth is enormous, their throat is only big enough to accommodate grapefruit-sized objects. But since their diet consists of only krill, its not a problem.