Quartz is the most common mineral in the earth’s crust. (I’ve known that for years, so maybe it doesn’t count.)
There’s an ad on the Hallmark Channel that uses the word предизвикателства. I’d been wondering what that meant for about a week now, and today I looked it up.
It means “challenges”.
Einstein was not the first to predict that light would be bent by heavenly bodies. Johann Georg von Soldner. Einstein got the figure right, though.
Psst! Quartz! LouisB’s putting it about that you’re common!
I think it’s actually a brand name; I’ve seen Tannoy speakers advertised here.
“Antebellum” means “prewar”. It was the longest time before I realised this. I thought it was simply a term describing the culture of the Old South, and for the longest time I never connected it with words like 'bellicose" or “belligerent”.
“Serial monogamist”. Isn’t that illegal? 
Ancient Roman deep sea divers were called urinators.
http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/urinator
http://www.jstor.org/pss/294109
A shrunken head is made by cutting a slit into the back of the head and peeling the skin away from the skull. The eyes are sewn shut and the lips held closed with small wooden pegs. The head is then simmered in a pot for up to two hours. The skin is turned inside out and excess flesh scraped off with a knife. The skin is turned right side out and the slit sewn closed. The head is shrunk further by dropping hot stones into the neck hole and stirred to keep the skin from scorching. Sand is heated and poured into the nasal and ear openings. Hot stones are used to shape the outer features. The head is hung over a fire to blacken and harden. Then a heated machete is pressed against the lips to dry them before being sewn closed with string.
Nice to know for Christmas tree ornaments!
Not just pre-any-war. Specifically pre-Civil-War.
I believe the number is much, much higher than that. If I remember correctly, the book Under the Banner of Heaven alluded to hundreds of spinoffs.
I read a little article on the hanging a while back. To add a bit to the Wiki story: because an elephant was a valuable commodity, if there were an incident like Mary’s, it wasn’t uncommon to simply sell the elephant to another circus and change its name (it’s unknown whether this had been done with Mary before she came to the Sparks circus). Charlie Sparks, the circus owner, was instructed by neighboring towns that they wouldn’t stand for that. Sparks had to have her killed in a very public fashion, so there could be no doubt that he hadn’t just sold her off. Thus, the hanging, which seemed less grisly than having her pulled apart by railroad engines (another idea they apparently considered).
In truth, I’m a very rare find.
The last person on Earth to die of smallpox (Janet Parker) was a medical photographer contracted it from a lab accident after it had been eradicated in the wild – in 1978.
I’d never really though of smallpox as being a modern disease; turns out people were still naturally contracting it after my birth. If you’d asked me to guess, I’d have said it had been eradicated by 1930 or so. It was actually the mid 70’s. Were I even a few years older, I’d probably have known that.
A boulder is a rock 10 inches or more in diameter. I did not know they had a defined size, or that something that small could be considered a boulder.
The primary fatty acid in soy beans is linoleic acid in cis confirmation.
I’ve always thought that the creation of the Republic of Texas was a singular event - that it was prompted by the presence of a sizable population of American settlers. But I just found out that Mexico as a whole was in a state of unrest after Santa Anna declared himself dictator. Four other states declared independence and several other states were in rebellion.
The word “sweetheart” was originally sweetard, in much the same way dotard meens someone who is in their dotage. It became “sweetheart” because some people thought it had to do with the heart, and it eventually stuck.
So the NYC working class pronunciation “sweet’aht” is really more correct.
A duck’s quack doesn’t echo. Nobody knows why.
A blue whale’s aorta is large enough for a grown man to crawl through.