And she’s partly right, and the phenomenon is visible while the Moon is a reasonably small crescent if you don’t have too much light pollution. It’s called “Earthshine” and means that the entire disc is lit - the non-sunlit part is dim but perfectly clear. Of course, as the Moon goes round its orbit not only does it receive less light by way of the Earth but the sunlit part becomes larger, so the effect is washed right out by half-moon or so.
I’ve had arguments with people who insisted that the faint Earth-lit part of the Moon was merely an optical illusion, a result of the eye/brain filling in the missing part of the disc. Couldn’t convince them otherwise.
Hey, I wonder if someone can clear this up for me. I don’t think it rates its own thread, but I’m curious to know if something I did not believe is actually true.
I’m not an expert on Marilyn or JFK, so this is probably something I could resolve by reading a biography, but I can’t, not with the Zevon bio to finish and two Beatles bios in the pipeline. Anyway, I have never been convinced that JFK and Marilyn had a full-fledged affair. That they slept together at least once, I don’t have a hard time believing, but I’ve always suspected that there was no torrid affair, just an urban legend fueled by Marilyn bragging on/deluding herself about a relationship that never was and trying (again) to get to him through Bobby, and perpetuated by conspiracy theorists. Because JFK’s women generally came to him, right? And it would have been noticed if the most famous actress in the free world (or was she still, by that time?) was constantly at hotels where he was, or at the Presidential Mansion. And he couldn’t move about freely, being a) the President b) in an era where people couldn’t travel nearly as easily as today and c) even further restricted by medical problems that meant he could not take off on a whim. I mean, random women who come and go, sure. A year and a half with a very high-profile movie star…really?
I have just learned from a search prompted by a GQ thread that “metalled” roads are not actually reinforced with metal or anything. The terms comes "from the Latin metallum, which means both ‘mine’ and ‘quarry’ " (Wikipedia).
I’m 23, and until a couple of years ago I thought Warren Buffett and Warren Beatty were the same person. I thought he was just a really rich, eccentric actor. So when there were rumors a few years ago that Buffett was going to run for president, I said something like, “Well, was in Bulworth!”
I’ve never heard of metalled roads. :smack:
It’s a British term.
See, and all this time I believed that no one actually thought they were having some weird on-going affair.
I always thought when people talked about “the affair” they were talking about her singing happy birthday, them having sex and then never seeing each other again.
Ditto. I didn’t figure out that I had it wrong until I read Marvin’s poetry in one of the Hitchhikers’ Guide to the Galaxy books… “head” rhymes with “in-frehrd”? Huh?
Also, since childhood I knew that on the one hand bric-a-brac and ornamental clutter in general was “chatsky”, a word that was only ever spoken, and on the other hand there was this word “tchotchkes” which meant more or less the same thing but was only ever written… I was in my 30’s before I realized there was a connection there.
JRB
I too thought infrared was in-frehrd for the longest time.
Amusingly, it was the audiobook version of HGTTG that taught me the pronunciation of finite. I knew how infinite was pronounced, and simply assumed finite was infinite minus the in, or ‘finnit’. Hearing the word ‘fy-night’ confused the everloving heck out of me for a good 5 minutes.
You mean that IS all there was to it? Wow, it’s so weird to be right about the simple explanation!
When our family had tickets for plays, we would communally read out loud through a copy beforehand to prepare. For The Importance of Being Earnest I got to play Gwendolen since that is my name. The last line of one scene is “Infamous!” which I hadn’t ever seen before and of course pronounced it “In famous!”
OK, it may have been a different play since “infamous” doesn’t seem to be in the Earnest script, but the point stands. Big ups to whoever can solve this mystery for me. Man and Superman? We didn’t see all that many plays. :smack:
Are you sure it wasn’t “Happy Anniversary, Mr. President”?
I thought of yet another one last night. Until I was 15 or 16 years old, I thought that the word I use to address my dad’s mother, bubbe, was a made up word. In my defense, I grew up in a town with a very small Jewish population and no one else I knew had a bubbe.
(FYI: bubbe is the Yiddish word for grandmother. BUT NO ONE EVER TOLD ME THAT.)
Here’s one that I just remembered. I’d been a coin collector when I was younger.
For the longest time I used to think that the way to refer to the original (1909-1958) reverse for the Lincoln penny as “wheat chiefs.”
It wasn’t until I was in college that I really thought about it and realized that I’d been mishearing people referring to them as “wheat sheaf” pennies.
You may need pen and paper to follow this…
My maternal grandparents are both bred-and-born in Barcelona. She’s a mix of Italian, Catalan and Astur and grew up speaking Catalan; he’s parts Salamanca, Teruel and French-or-German and grew up speaking Spanish (the F-or-G lastname has gotten mangled since that Napoleonic soldier fell in love with a local). We’ve always called her Yaya and him Avi. Once I was old enough to wonder why none of my classmates used the same names for their grandparents, I figured they were the Catalan words.
When I took a course of “Catalan for people who speak Catalan but not very well”, I found out that Avi is, indeed, Catalan, but Yaya is - the term used in Teruel Spanish! My SiL, whose mother is from Teruel, uses Yaya and Yayo for grandparents, but I didn’t know her when I took that course.
OK, so my half-from-Teruel gramps, who didn’t learn Catalan until his 20s, gets the Catalan term, but my Catalanist grandmother, who didn’t learn Spanish until her 20s, gets the Spanish-from-Teruel one. Am I the only one to find it confusing?
Thanks for that - I didn’t look into the possibility of ‘Earthshine’ before posting as I wanted the chance to be wrong about something and only learn that I was in this thread.
I was in my late 20s when I learned about the metastatic nature of cancerous tumours. I knew that they invaded tissue, but had no clue about metastasis.
Also, it was just recently that I learned I’d used an old phrase incorrectly. I first head the phrase “first one out of the chute” as “first one out of the shoe,” which admittedly makes little sense (unless it referred to the Mother Goose character), but that’s what I thought it was.
Fascinating. When was that? I collected coins fairly heavily when I was in high school (early to mid-1970s), and I never heard that term. I always heard “wheat ears” or “wheaties.”
I graduated in 1986. And “wheaties” was the more common term. But I didn’t have any confusion about that. 