According to historical records, he was 5’2, which does sound short – except the the French at that time used the “ponce” instead of the imperial inch. The ponce was around 2mm longer than the inch, so in a more familiar English measure, he was closer to 5’6. That is still a tiny bit below average today, but not in early 18th century France.
It seems that he is described as short because the ranks and rabble yearn to follow a big man, while Napoleon was just average. Perhaps his personality just exuded shortness.
Even plain old movies can do the trick. 1968, Balboa Theater downtown San Diego, I saw Bullitt for the first time on the big screen. I’ve never forgotten watching that car chase, the entire audience going “whoah!!” and squirming in their seats.
Motion sickness is caused by a mismatch between what your eyes are seeing and what forces the vestibular system in your inner ear is experiencing. Often that happens when your vestibular system is experiencing motion but your eyes are not seeing motion, like when you’re riding in a car and reading. But the opposite can also cause it, when your eyes are seeing motion but you’re not feeling any forces. Many people, including myself, experience this strongly when using some apps in a VR system. I don’t think I’ve ever experienced it while watching an ordinary movie but I can certainly believe that it can happen.
The word is unconnected to the Luddites. First attested 1907, long after. Saboteur originally meant clumsy clog wearing person that causes damage through incompetence. Not restricted to scab workers, as far as I know.
I don’t know. Possibly they did. Sabots were work shoes used for foot protection in factories.
Actually, due to lowering the tax on British tea, those that smuggled Dutch tea into America thought it would cut into their profits so they led the Boston Tea Party.
Basically they didn’t approve of the East India Company’s monopoly on tea, and viewed the tax cut on the tea as a way to enhance the EIC’s monopoly and cut into the colonists’ profits from Dutch tea. We’re both right, I suspect.
The thing that was more interesting to me was that I had always heard about it in history class as some sort of commando raid, but it was a multiple hour, 100+ person affair involving the cargoes of three ships. That’s a whole lot more overt than I had been led to believe.
Similarly, ninjas didn’t use to dress in all black.
That trope comes from Kabuki theatre. In stage productions, stage hands (called karuko) would dress all in black so as to not be noticeable while they manipulated the stage. Having ninjas dress in black served the purpose of making them appear out of nowhere.
Real ninjas would be expected to dress like a typical farm worker or peasant, so as to blend in with regular people.
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And another, which I’ve posted before.
Ty Cobb wasn’t a horrible racist. His reputation was besmirched by a man named Al Stump, who wrote a defamatory biography of Cobb right around the time he died.
Cobb was an irascible man, and I wouldn’t want to cross him. But in the 1950s he said he has no problem with black players playing baseball.
Cobb also named Willie Mays as a player he’d pay to watch play.
(Cobb, a Georgia native, also grew very rich from smart investments, especially in Coca Cola)
See, the dollar was a ruse meant to create a kefuffle in the Hessian camp. Imagine the Hessian sentry, “Hey, look, I found a silver dollar!” and all the other soldiers gather around gawking at it, allowing the US Army to just surround them. Washington was a military genius.