Cute, adds elan but lacks bite!
No, he’s a friend-in-law.
“Daughter-in-deed”?
Common-law daughter?
Or daughter-in-common-law, I guess. But I do like the custom-and-practice bit.
j
IIRC, Thai has four words for what in English would be “aunt” or “uncle”, but they don’t line up. There’s one word for “Mother’s younger sibling”, one for “father’s younger sibling”, one for “parent’s older brother”, and one for “parent’s older sister”. In other words, it’s the gender of the older sibling that matters, not always the parent’s gender nor always the sibling’s gender.
I’m always interested in forgotten stories. Today I learned about Frank Soo, a Chinese football player in England in the 1940’s.
The word “sibling” was rarely used in English until the 20th century. It was archaic, but came back into use, mostly due to Freud.
Not that I would want to test this…
[Sorry, I got way behind on this thread.]
Today I learned about the radium girls, a group of young women who died horrible deaths painting clock faces with glow in the dark radioactive material. They would suck on the paintbrushes to get a fine tip and swallow the stuff constantly. Apparently radioactive stuff was all the rage back in the day, and many health benefits of microdosing with uranium were claimed even by physicians. But these girls were not warned of the potential danger, were given no protective equipment and developed horrific physical deformities as their bones rotted inside them. They went to their grisly deaths fighting a full-throated legal battle against their employer, a battle which would eventually result in the formation of OSHA. It’s a very disturbing story but also a very moving one. These women, who knew their lives were over, fought with their last dying breath to prevent anyone else from harm. And given their legacy, it paid off.
Was there already scientific consensus that radioactivity in radium was harmful when that happened? I remember having seen products with radium that were all the rage in the early 20th century like radium gum, radium tooth paste and even radium cigarettes (the double whammy).
Not at all, radioactivity was not recognized as harmful until 1927 (cite):
The mutagenic effects of radiation were not realized until decades later. The genetic effects and increased cancer risk associated with radiation exposure were first recognized by Hermann Joseph Meller in 1927. Muller went on to receive the Nobel prize in 1946 for his research.
Even Marie Curie died as a result of radiation (probably X-rays in the first World War and not radium, but radiation nonetheless) and did not know it.
According to the podcast I listened to about this (“Behind the Bastards”), there were a few people raising the alarms about radium poisoning, but products being sold as health remedies were pretty ubiquitous. They knew enough about radiation to know it was seriously dangerous in massive doses, but they were also trying to use it to treat cancer, which proliferated the notion that it was the next greatest thing in health care. But most people familiar with radiation knew it could be dangerous in the wrong quantity. At the radium plant, many of the male workers were warned of the risks and put in full protective gear. The women had none and were told it was completely safe. Once the women started dying, the company did conclude that they died of radiation poisoning, but quickly covered it up, going so far as to steal the bones of the women after their deaths so that they couldn’t be independently autopsied.
I believe this is all detailed in the book Radium Girls.
For a while, radium was not only not recognized as dangerous, it was considered (by some) to be a miracle drug that could improve health. One of the best known radium-containing elixirs was Radithor. The horrific death of Eben Byers in 1932 was traced to his daily consumption of Radithor over a period of several years. The fact that he was a wealthy white socialite brought a lot of publicity to his premature death, and finally brought the dangers of radium to the attention of the general public.
The issue with radium is this: Radium decays into alpha particles. It also is chemically similar to calcium (same column on the periodic table), so the body treats it like calcium and uses it to build bones.
The alpha particles are usually less dangerous than other forms of products of radioactive decay. They only travel a few centimeters in air, and less than a tenth of a millimeter in body tissues.
However, since the radium was now part of the bone, even that short travel was dangerous. The alpha particles slammed into the bone around the radium like submicroscopic hammers. Eventually, the bone started to break under the onslaught, and were eventually hammered away.
Right, alpha particles will be stopped very quickly by almost anything. You just want to make sure that that almost anything isn’t living parts of you. Gamma rays, by contrast, will go through almost anything, so it’s really tough to shield against them, but they’ll probably just go right through you, too, without interacting, and so they’re much less likely to do harm.
And the previous major advance in workers’ safety was a result of the Triangle Shirtwaist Fire, where all of the workers (mostly young women in their teens and early 20s) were locked into the building so they couldn’t take unproductive breaks, and as a result they all burned to death when the building caught fire.
Sadly, the road to workers’ rights was paved with lots of dead young women.
One of the more sobering parts about this is that it was all happening at the beginning of the Great Depression, so there were all these people trying to silence the women because they were desperate for the jobs. People were essentially choosing between potentially horrible death or watching their families starve, and didn’t feel they had much choice but to keep working.
A nice seasonal fact
In 1955, Continental Air Defense Command (now NORAD) had the red phone, which only two people knew, the number of; the person in charge - Col. Harry Shoup - and one 4-star general.
In December of that year, the phone rang. Col. Shoup answered, and heard a small child ask “Is this Santa?” After he determined that the kid was serious and not playing a prank, he asked to speak to the Mom.
Tuns out that Sears had placed an ad telling kids they could call Santa… and printed the wrong number.
Col. Shoup decided to roll with it, and got a couple of guys to answer the phone call as Santa.
When Christmas eve rolled around, for fun some of the guys in his command put a sleigh over the North Pole on the map of the US and Canada where they tracked flights.
He looked at it, and instead of taking it down, he called a radio station and said, ‘This is the commander at the Combat Alert Center, and we have an unidentified flying object. Why, it looks like a sleigh.’
And that is how NORAD came to track Santa every Christmas
This is rather disturbing on more than one level, so spoilered. (It’s nothing you can’t find on the City of Dublin’s website.)
Kings and princes are among the famous bog bodies in Ireland. You know how they know they were kings? The nipples have been cut off. (See for instance Wikipedia’s page on Old Croghan Man, though beware the photos.) Apparently nipples were a big deal for Irish kings; since the king represented both male leadership and female nurture, people would suck on his nipples as a gesture of fealty.
From here:
Cutting the nipples was more than torture. The aim was to dethrone the king. “Sucking a king’s nipples was a gesture of submission in ancient Ireland,” says Kelly. “Cutting them would have made him incapable of kingship in this world or the next.”
Husbands and wives are traditionally considered to be joined as one. So there is no differentiation.