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QI 'fact of the day'

Eric Arthur Blair (1903-1950), better known as George Orwell, was born in Bengal, where his father was a government opium agent.

quote of the day was ?Liberty is telling people what they do not want to hear." George Orwell

from www.qi.com

I'm making human brains out of green Play Dough.

Lethologica is a psychological disorder characterized by forgetting key words or names during conversation. It is sometimes accompanied by physical symptoms such as having trouble swallowing.

I believe I may have this.

thanks Mick & IdahoRose.
dunbots, you must have some quite interesting trivia, especially to do with words & languages.

Hmm, well something I've always found funny is that in Latvian, "ass nazis" means "sharp knife". Although it's pronounced nothing like in English.

In Papua New Guinea, there are over 800 separate languages, more in one country than any other country on Earth.

I can't think of anything else right now, but I'll try.

Well, most people speak Tok Pisin, which is the lingua franca. It's a creole based on English, so it's relatively easy to learn.

Here is a text with a recording in Tok Pisin if you're interested. Sometimes it's easy to understand, but sometimes not.

"Orait, no longtaim bihain Papa Wren i kam bek."
Alright, not long ago Papa Wren came back.


Oh, I thought of another one: there are some words in English that are exactly the same etymogically, but not by definition. For example, "guarantee" and "warranty" are the same word, but the first comes from French, and the second from Anglo-Norman, which is what the was spoken after the Norman conquest of England in 1066. More examples are "warden" and "guardian", "catch" and "chase", and more.

(I took the examples from Wikpedia. I already knew this, but I'm not good at recalling memories. )

some more qi.com, i'm sleepy & couldn't think of anything.

Earthspeed
"Despite its apparent stately motion, the Earth is pretty nippy: if you stand on the Equator, the speed of its rotation around its own axis is about 1,040mph. This decreases as you approach the poles: stand on either pole and you barely move at all. But remember that as well as spinning, Earth is hurtling around the sun at 67,000mph. Were we able to fly at that speed, we could circle Earth in 20 minutes. The solar system is moving even faster, spinning around the centre of the Milky Way at 492,000mph. Even so, it takes it 225 million years to complete a single orbit (so it has managed 20 in total since the birth of the Sun, and only one since humans evolved)."

" At least a quarter of us respond to bright lights by sneezing. This is called the photic sneeze reflex (from photos, Greek for light) or ACHOO syndrome (Autosomal-dominant Compelling Helio-Ophthalmic Outburst). It was first medically described in 1978 but people have been known to sneeze after looking at the sun since Aristotle; he blamed the effect of heat on the nose. In fact, the disorder is caused by confused signalling from the trigeminal nerve, the one responsible for sensation in the face. Somewhere along its passage to the brain the nerve impulses from around the eye and inside the nose become scrambled, and the brain is tricked into thinking that a visual stimulus is a nasal one. The result is that the body tries to ?expel? the light by sneezing. This surprisingly common trait is inherited. Both men and women can get it and they have a 50:50 chance of passing it on to their children."

"neither haggis, whisky, porridge, clan tartans nor kilts are Scottish."

that's what makes their not being originally scottish remarkable



orange things...
The fruit came before the colour. The word 'orange' derives from the Arabic naranj and arrived in English as 'narange' in the 14th century, gradually losing the initial 'n'. This process is called wrong word division and also left us with apron (from naperon) and umpire (from noumpere). Orange was first used as the name for a colour in 1542

New Orange.
New Amsterdam was founded by the Dutch in 1653, taken by the English in 1664 and renamed New York, then retaken by the Dutch in 1673 and renamed New Orange. Under the Treaty of Westminster in 1674 the city was ceded to the English and New York became its permanent name.

Orange punishment
In Spanish, anaranjear means, literally, to 'orangicate' , to pelt something with oranges.

Timothy Wilson of the University of Virginia notes that the brain can absorb about 11 million pieces of information a second, of which it can process about 40 consciously. The unconscious brain handles the rest.

it does sound pretty tempting..

from the QI elves' twitter.. "Butch Cassidy trained as a butcher - that's how he got his name"

Midge Ure was briefly in Thin Lizzy to finish a tour. in his words he was "the worst guitarist" they ever had