King Gustav V was the first Swedish king since the High Middle Ages, per Wiki, not to have a coronation and so never wore a crown, a practice that has continued ever since. He reigned from 1907 to 1950.
The Imperial State Crown is one of the Crown Jewels of the United Kingdom and is worn by a new monarch for the first time in the royal procession following their coronation. The current version of the crown was made in 1937 and weighs about 2.3 pounds.
In 1824, Great Britain adopted the imperial gallon and abolished all other gallons in favor of it. Inspired by the kilogram-litre relationship, the imperial gallon was based on the volume of 10 pounds of distilled water weighed in air with brass weights with the barometer standing at 30 inches of mercury and at a temperature of 62 °F (17 °C).
Until this time there were different gallons used for different items: wine gallon, ale gallon, corn gallon (or dry gallon). In the US, the gallon is equal to the wine gallon of 1707, defined by statute under Queen Anne.
To convert the US gallon to Imperial gallon, multiply by 0.833111.
“Ten-gallon hat” is a common term for some cowboy hats, though the etymology of the term is unclear. It may have come from one or more of the following:
- A corruption of the Spanish word “galón,” or “galloon,” referring to a style of braided hatband; this may refer to a cowboy hat which has a wide enough crown to feature ten such braids.
- A corruption of the Spanish term “tan galán,” meaning “really handsome” or “so fine.”
- A reference to print ads from cowboy hat manufacturer Stetson, which featured a cowboy using his hat to give water to his horse. However, the typical cowboy hat would hold less than one gallon of water, much less ten gallons.
Many words associated with cowboys and the old west are derived from Spanish, going back to when much of the west was New Spain:
- Buckaroo is a corruption of vaquero, from vaca, cow, a cowboy
- Hoosegow, a corruption of juzgado, court or tribunal
- Lariat, from la reata the lasso, itself from lazo, knot, loop
- Ranch, from rancho, camp, settlement, ranch
- Rodeo
- Tornado, from tronado, thunderstorm
- Stockade, from estacada, fence
- Stampede, from estampida
- and even sarsaparilla, from zarza, bramble, and parrilla, small vine
The word boondocks is an American expression from the Filipino word bundók meaning “mountain”. It originally referred to a remote rural area, but now it is often applied to an out-of-the-way area considered backward and unsophisticated by city-folk.
When overland camping without connections to water and electricity, it is often called boondocking.
In the Tagalog language, of which the Philippine language is based, the inhabitants of that island nation are referred to as “Pilipinas”, as Tagalog doesn’t differentiate “p” from “f”.
Reminds me of this joke: What do Filipinos (Pilipinos) call two pilots?
A pair of pliers.
Nice one, Bullitt.
The word “nice” has shifted its meaning considerably over the centuries. It first entered English from French with the meaning of a “stupid, ignorant, or foolish”person.
By the late 1300s, it meant a person or conduct that was excessively luxurious or lascivious.
By the 1400s, it began to mean someone with refined taste or scrupulousness, or precision, such as “a nice distinction”.
The term then began to refer to upper class behaviour, “the nice class of people.”
By the time of Jane Austen, “nice” had been watered down, similar to its current vaguely positive meaning. Henry Tilley in Northanger Abbey teases Catherine’s use of the word:
“… and this is a very nice day, and we are taking a very nice walk, and you are two very nice young ladies. Oh, it is a very nice word, indeed!—it does for everything.”
Etymology is the study of the origin of words and the way in which their meanings have changed throughout history.
Never ceases to amaze how we can seamlessly move from one topic to another!
In play:
On the Origin of Species, a book by Charles Darwin, was first published in 1859. This study is considered to be the foundation of evolutionary biology. Darwin was already widely respected as a scientist and the book was immediately popular.
The complete title of the book is On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life.
Charles Darwin married his first cousin, Emma Wedgwood, in 1839. The couple had ten children, though two died in infancy, and one died at age 10; one of the two which died in infancy was their final child, Charles Waring Darwin, who was mentally handicapped, and may have had Down Syndrome (a condition which had not yet, at that time, been medically described).
Darwin worried that the illnesses and early deaths among his children might have been the result of inbreeding, due to the close familial relationship between himself and his wife.
When Jane Austen wrote Emma, she told her sisters that she was writing a book with a main character whom no-one would like. Emma is actually one of her more popular books, because of Emma’s significant character development, more marked than was the case with the main characters in Pride and Prejudice and Sense and Sensibility.
Austen’s books were available in China until the Cultural Revolution of 1966-69 banned them for being “works of British bourgeois” and “frivolous.” The were reintroduced in 1970, and her popularity with readers confounded the authorities who had trouble understanding that people generally read books for enjoyment, not political edification.
For generations, Jane Austen was seen as apolitical and detached from the events of her era. However, more recent analysis has shown connections between her novels and issues such as colonialism (Sir Thomas Bertram of Mansfield Park visits his landholdings in the West Indies) and the Napoleonic Wars (Captain Wentworth in Persuasion captures enemy ships and wins prize money)
Jane Austen mentioned baseball once and only once in all her published writings, in her Gothic satire Northanger Abbey, published posthumously in 1817.
The Inebriates Act of 1898 was an Act of the Parliament of the United Kingdom, which came into force in 1898. It allowed non-criminal inebriates to be admitted to reformatories for up to three years if they had been convicted of drunkenness four times in one year. The act was directly due to the Jane Cakebread case, where the British homeless woman gained notoriety for her frequent arrests for public “drunkenness”. She appeared in police court 277 times for her behavior in public.
The act was superseded by the Mental Deficiency Act of 1913, reclassifying many inebriates as mental defectives.
Police in the sf novel Logan’s Run wear yellow uniforms, unlike the Deep Sleep operatives or “Sandmen,” tasked with finding and killing those who try to escape mandatory euthanasia at age 21 (30 in the movie). They wear black.
Logan’s Run star Michael York was playing tennis and saw what he described as a “blonde vision of delight.” It turned out to be Farrah Fawcett. York suggested her to the casting director and she subsequently landed the role of Holly.