Today I learned that Charles Schulz, the creator of Snoopy, Charlie Brown and their crew, had the nickname Sparky.
He was born in 1922, which was also the debut of Spark Plug, a bow legged race horse in the comic Barney Google and Snuffy Smith.
The comic has been called the “Snoopy of its time”. Spark Plug was a bit of a cultural phenomenon. Shulz was nicknamed after the character.
Senator Henry “Scoop” Jackson got his nickname as a kid from a comic strip too. Young Jackson had a paper route and was nicknamed after a Scoop, a cub reporter on the funny pages.
The Toronto Blue Jays (major league baseball) traditionally sell hot dogs for $1 at their Tuesday night home games. They set a record last night (April 7) by selling over 102,000 hot dogs to the 40,000 fans in attendance.
According to the trivia section on IMDb:
By the time she played Elyse Keaton, Meredith Baxter Birney had starred in two hit series: Bridget Loves Bernie and Family; Family Ties was her third hit. One Day at A Time, also a big hit, was based on her life and written by her mother, Whitney Mannings Blake, and was intended to star her, but it starred Bonnie Franklin and Mackenzie Phillips playing her role.
The Center for Disease Control’s headquarters is in Atlanta because when it was founded in the 1930s the agency’s main mission was malaria control, and malaria was a significant problem in the Southeast.
Ben Stiller owns the only surviving original Gorn mask from the 1960s Star Trek ep “Arena.”
TIL there is a word for “the day before yesterday”: Nudiustertian. Definitely a much needed word that is woefully underutilized.
That is the strange thing: anteayer and vorgestern are perfectly common words in Spansh and German, respectively, because they are useful words. Every normal language has an equivalent, and they sort of explain themselves: ante is before, ayer is yesterday. Same for vor and gestern. English is the odd one out, both for not being common and for being etymologically artificial. From Latin nudius tertius, literally, today is the third day as counted from the day I mean onwards.
Well, I guess that makes up for the word fortnite, which is useful and still has no equivalent in German or Spanish. At least to my knowledge it doesn’t.
It has an equivalent in German, we still often say “in vierzehn Tagen”, “in 14 days” when we mean two weeks.
Right, but for once, it’s a single word in English, yet not in German.
Which is ironic.
But fourteen days are two weeks. Am I missing something in your argument?
I dunno, I just always found it strange that the period of “vierzehn Tage” has such a special meaning in German.
We non-German-speakers are still puzzled. What is special about it? Is it not the normal way that you would say 14 of something in German? Is the syntax different than if you said “13 days” or “15 days” ?
If something will happen in 21 days, you are very likely to say “three weeks.”
In 7 days, “one week.”
If something will happen in 25 days, you are rather likely to say “25 days” (though “in three to four weeks” is another option, depending on how precise you need to be).
In 10 days, “10 days” (though “in a week and half” might be an option).
So, if something will happen in 14 days, one would expect the language to prefer “two weeks.” Yet, both English and German have a higher-than-expected preference for “14 days” – in English, to the extent of fashioning it into a single word.
Watching The Misadventures of Romesh Ranganathan the other day I discovered you can have a paintball battle in the ruins of one of Pablo Escobar’s mansions. (cost: somewhere around $400)
Technically, you can have a paintball battle anywhere.
Not surprisingly, fortnight is derived from the German.
“period of two weeks,” 17c. contraction of Middle English fourteniht, from Old English feowertyne niht, literally “fourteen nights” (see fourteen + night). It preserves the ancient Germanic custom of reckoning by nights (mentioned by Tacitus in “Germania” xi). Related: Fortnightly.
I just tried Google Ngram on fortnight (and fortnite). It says that, since 1600, fortnight peaked in 1845 and bottomed out in 1995 in frequency of appearance. The spelling fortnite is rare.
Exactly.