Today I learned that the smell of Play-Doh is trademarked in the U.S.
I can’t believe it either:
Hell, Harley-Davidson tried to trademark a sound.
Tried being the operative word.
I tried jumping the Atlantic and similarly got nowhere.
There are lots of companies that use a sound as part of their branding (e.g. the NBC chimes, or Netflix’s “tudum” sound). They’re usually slightly more musical, I suppose.
The article states:
‘The Court stressed that the feature could not serve as a trademark. As the functional element is essential to the use or purpose. Meaning, what Harley was trying to trademark is a feature which is crucial to the “use or purpose” of the motorcycle in general’
IOW, the sound was a side effect of the function, rather than a separate construction
I recently learned that, near Oklo, Gabon, a series of nuclear fission reactions naturally occurred 1.7 billion years ago. Apparently the right conditions were present to allow uranium to go critical in 16 sites. Natural nuclear fission reactor - Wikipedia
You win the Nobel Prize in Literature for your writings, right?
It’s not always that simple.
The Nobel Prize in Literature 1953 was awarded to Sir Winston Leonard Spencer Churchill “for his mastery of historical and biographical description as well as for brilliant oratory in defending exalted human values”
My bold. Cite.
j
I mean, didn’t Bob Dylan win for songwriting? I don’t see how oratory is any less literature.
Especially since he wrote the speeches!
Dylan?
“For having created new poetic expressions within the great American song tradition”
Thing is, this is something I found out about at Chartwell - home of Churchill - and yes, my immediate thought was “Hmmm - Dylan?”
But I think it’s different. Churchill’s citation specifies performance. Interesting? I think so.
j
“Brazilian Bombshell” Carmen Miranda was actually Portuguese.
Well, she was born in Portugal and lived there for 10 months until her family emigrated to Brazil. Even though she never returned to Portugal she did retain that as her nationality for some reason.
-ent at the end of a French word is pronounced something like a short ‘o’, followed by a nasal ‘n’, The ‘t’ is silent. There’s no exactly corresponding sound in English. But yes, it’s pronounced.
French: the language that doesn’t use a single letter of the Latin alphabet the way the Romans intended. 
You laugh, but coming from German where more or less most words are pronounced as written (of course there are exceptions), for me French pronunciation is easier than English, because it’s more consistent. Yes, the sounds often don’t match the letters, but in general the same combinations are always pronounced the same way. In English, not so much. When I encounter an unknown French word, I mostly know how to pronounce it, but I’m sometimes lost at a new English word and have to look (or better listen) it up.
General guideline: don’t pronounce the last letter of a french word.
The Gauls will even add letters if they want you to pronounce the final letter, resulting in -tte being used a lot.
So La Grand Jatte (as in the famous pointilist painting “A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte” is pronounced La Grahn Jhott.
Nitpick: La Grande Jatte is feminine and la Grande has an ending ‘e’, so the ‘d’ would be spoken. If overpronounced, even with a short closing ‘e’. The ‘e’ in Jatte though is silent.
Mnemonic: Be CaReFuL about which consonants get pronounced at the end of French words.
The way I would describe it, is that you start to pronounce the letter, but then you stop before the sound comes out. Doing so puts your tongue and jaw in the correct position for what, to English-speaking ears, isn’t a sound but it is to the French. Clear as mud, I suppose, but it works for me.