Seeing how quacking doesn’t echo, and then seeing a thread about women blinking more often than men in the same day I get an e-mail containing “Fun facts” means that yet another one of those is spreading like wildfire around the globe.
So, I’m putting the whole list of fun facts here, in the interest of fighting ignorance. Fire away. Debunk the damn things, so we can get ammunition and fire back.
Butterflies have their tastebuds on their feet.
A hurricane releases more energy in ten minutes, than the combined power of all the nuclear weapons in the world.
100 people die annually from choking on a pen.
People are generally more afraid of psiders than of death
Elephants are the only animals who can’t jump
Only one person in two billion will live to 116 years of age
You can lead a cow up a stair, but not down
Women blink twice as much as men
A snail can sleep for three months
There is no word that rhymes with ‘month’.
Your eyes are the same size all through your life, but your ears and nose never stop growing
The electric chair was invented by a dentist
All polarbears are left-pawed (south-pawed :snicker: )
The eye of an ostrich is bigger than its brain.
Typewriter is the longest word that can be writter, using only one row of keys on your keyboard
If Barbie was real, she’d meassure 39-23-33.
A crocodile can’t put out its tongue
The cigarettlighter was invented before the match.
I’m sure we’ve seen some of these before. And of course I could google for the answers. But that wouldn’t be so much fun!
I don’t really get why these are supposed to be “fun” facts, as opposed to just regular ordinary non-fun facts. So what if nothing rhymes with “month”?
I don’t think I’ve ever seen a worm jump. If by chance that was supposed to be mammal instead of animal, then I can’t imagine how a whale or dolphin or bat would jump.
Add Pepperroot, Pepperwort, Perpetuity, Pewterwort, Pirouetter, Prerequire, Pretorture, Proprietor, Repertoire, Repetitory and Tetterwort to that list. (From A Collection of Word Oddities and Trivia, Page 8)
This may be true - the ‘fun fact’ I usually hear, though, is that only four words don’t have rhymes - month, silver, orange, and purple. That’s untrue - there are lots of words without good rhymes - ‘tincture’ leaps to mind.
However, the top three don’t pass the spelling checker in Word, and can’t be found on www.m-w.com. Perhaps they’re British spellings or such. So… Maybe yes, maybe no. But even if it’s yes, typewriter is in a tie with several words I’m sure are correct, namely perpetuity, proprietor and repertoire.
I believe it was recently shown in a SD column here that people are more afraid of public speaking than death, so this is certainly plausible. (Maybe I saw it somewhere else, though, like Snopes. Anyway, there was a study that at least had the pretense of being a scientific survey.)
Obviously false. Think of aquatic animals and those without legs: sponges, fish, barnacles… I’d be surprised if all bats can jump.
I think this was also disproven in a recent column here, or maybe on Snopes.
Dependent upon the keyboard. On mine, it’s not possible to type “typewriter” using the keys from only one row.
Man, somebody should throw that pen away or put it someplace safe.
I do know, from firsthand experience, that Armadillos jump. They apparently do it when they’re frightened. Sadly, this means that when a car bears down on them they tend to jump up when they really should stay on the ground.
Polar bears probably do show a preference for one paw or the other (every mammal I’ve heard of has a usual side preference), but I’d be surprised if it were 100%.
If Barbie were real, then she’d still be seven inches tall. If you also specify that she be life-sized, then she’d be life-sized. If she were five feet tall with a fifty inch waistline, then she’d be really fat. This all seems incredibly trivial, though.
I’ve debunked the rhyming thing n times already, and now I’ll debunk it for the n+1th.
And the last time we went over the elephants jumping thing here on the board, we agreed that elephants don’t jump, and that cetaceans do, but I seem to recall that we couldn’t come up with a definitive answer on sloths (we were restricting to mammals, since there are obviously non-mammals which don’t jump).
Well, if by “sleep,” they mean “become dormant” (I doubt they undergo anything in their tiny little ganglia that any scientist would classify as “sleep”). But then the fact becomes pretty ho-hum, as many organisms can remain dormant for much longer than that – some desert frogs bury themselves for the dry season, locusts remain underground for 17 years, and things from bacteria to tardigrades can encyst and remain dormant-but-viable “forever.”
Except, of course, that polar bears are from northern polar regions.