The Encyclopaedia of Everything Else E-Book

William Hartston

• Herausgeber: Atlantic Books
• Kategorie: Bildung
• Sprache: Englisch

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2022

Beschreibung

A delightful and witty treasure trove of utterly useless information by the author of The Things That Nobody Knows. Most encyclopaedias are boring. They are so packed with worthy but dull facts that a great deal of weird and wonderful material is squeezed out. The Encyclopaedia of Everything Else takes the opposite approach and leaves out all the dreary stuff you can find elsewhere. The result is the most fascinating, astonishing, varied and utterly useless collection of information ever assembled and organized between two covers. From aardvark tooth bracelets to the genus of tropical weevils known as Zyzzyva, via Mark Twain's views about cabbages, this is a quarter of a million words of sublime pointlessness.

Leseprobe

Also by William Hartston

How to Cheat at Chess

The Penguin Book of Chess Openings

Soft Pawn

The Ultimate Irrelevant Encyclopedia

The Kings of Chess

Chess – The Making of the Musical

The Drunken Goldfish and Other Irrelevant Scientific Research

How was it for you, Professor?

The Guinness Book of Chess Grandmasters

Teach Yourself Chess

Teach Yourself Better Chess

The Book of Numbers: The Ultimate Compendium of Facts About Figures

Mr Hartston’s Most Excellent Encyclopedia of Useless Information

Forgotten Treasures: A Collection of Well-Loved Poetry (Vols 1, 2 and 3)

The Things That Nobody Knows

Even More Things That Nobody Knows

The Bumper Book of Things That Nobody Knows

Sloths

A Brief History of Puzzles

Numb and Number

First published in hardback in Great Britain in 2022 by Atlantic Books, an imprint of Atlantic Books Ltd.

Copyright © William Hartston, 2022

The moral right William Hartston to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act of 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

Every effort has been made to trace or contact all copyright-holders. The publishers will be pleased to make good any omissions or rectify any mistakes brought to their attention at the earliest opportunity.

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A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

Hardback ISBN: 978-1-83895-723-0

E-book ISBN: 978-1-83895-724-7

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PREFACE

Most encyclopaedias are dull. They are so full of dreary, worthy and important facts that everything else is squeezed out.

Not this one.

This is The Encyclopaedia of Everything Else.

Enjoy it.

AA

Apart from being a useful way to get rid of surplus vowels in Scrabble, aa is a type of volcanic lava flow.

There are also rivers called Aa in France and Germany. These may be considered alphabetically the first places on Earth, but the village of Å in the Moskenes municipality in Norway also has strong claims to that title. It took its name, which was originally spelled Aa, from an Old Norse word meaning ‘small river’, but the spelling was changed to Å in 1917 in accordance with Norwegian language reform. There are also several other places named Å in both Norway and Sweden.

AARDVARK

Aardvark means ‘earth pig’ in Afrikaans. In African culture, the aardvark is thought very brave for its skill and willingness to hunt termites.

Charms made from parts of the aardvark are said to give the wearer the ability to pass through walls in the night.

Aardvarks have only 20 teeth, but their ears may be 25 centimetres (10 inches) long.

At the beginning of 2006 there were only four known aardvarks in the UK but, thanks mainly to the breeding techniques at Colchester Zoo, the number has since grown, with nine baby aardvarks born there since 2007.

ABORIGINE

In 1957, researchers at Darwin University in Australia conducted interviews and experiments to examine the efficiency of the Aborigine habit of standing on one leg to rest. No definite conclusions were reached other than that further research was needed.

In the Pitta Pitta Aboriginal tongue, kanga means ‘alcohol’ and kangamarru is ‘drunk’. The word for ‘kangaroo’ is kulipila, matyumpa or warrhaputha.

DIDGERIDOO, KOALA, QUEENSLAND

ABORTION

In 1920, the USSR became the first country to legalise abortion. Malta, El Salvador, Nicaragua and the Dominican Republic are the only countries in the world where abortion is illegal under any circumstances – even when the mother’s life is at risk.

In North America, beavers’ testicles were once thought to be useful for procuring an abortion. In 1984, however, China had about 18 million births and nearly 9 million abortions without harming any beavers.

GERBIL, HIPPOCRATES

ACCIDENTS

Research in the USA has shown that the average American is more likely to die from an asteroid hitting Earth than as a result of a flood, but is more likely to die in an aircraft accident than from an asteroid impact.

In the years from 2008 to 2015, the chance of an American being killed by an animal (most likely are bees, wasps, hornets and dogs) was calculated to have been one in 1.6 million, and of being killed in a terrorist attack was about one in 30 million.

In the UK, December is the worst month for both road accident deaths and fatal falls, but drowning is most common in July.

CANADA, CRASH, DEATH, HORSE, ROAD FATALITY

ACCORDION

The modern accordion was patented by Anthony Faas of Philadelphia on 13 January 1854. However, an earlier patent for an instrument called an accordion was issued to Cyrill Demian in Vienna in 1829. Both inventions shared the principle of a bellows and keys, but Faas’s creation looked much more like a modern accordion. In the introduction to his patent, Faas said that he had ‘invented certain new and useful Improvements in Accordions’.

ACNE

A survey in 2017 reported that 68 per cent of teenagers believe that most of their peers who suffer from acne will alter their photos on social media to hide it, while 67 per cent of teenagers who have had acne say it had a negative effect on their self-esteem.

ACNESTIS

In quadrupeds, the acnestis is the point or area on the animal’s back between the shoulder blades and the loins which it cannot reach to scratch. In humans, the word has been used for the part of the back between the shoulder blades, whether it can be scratched or not.

ACTRESS

On 8 December 1660, Margaret Hughes appeared as Desdemona in Shakespeare’s Othello at the Vere Street Theatre in London. This is said to be the first time a professional actress appeared on the British stage.

Margaret Hughes was the mistress of Prince Rupert, Duke of Cumberland, and may also have briefly been a lover of King Charles II. In 1662 Charles II issued a royal warrant decreeing that all female roles should be played only by female actresses. Until then men had taken female roles and ‘actress’ meant ‘a woman performing an action’.

All four Best Supporting Actress Oscars from 1978 to 1981 were won by people with the initials M.S.

Maggie Smith won hers for California Suite (1978), playing an actress nominated for an Oscar.

ADAMS, Douglas (1952–2001)

Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy author Douglas Adams died at the age of 49 on 11 May 2001; Spencer Perceval, the only British Prime Minister to have been assassinated, died at the age of 49 on 11 May 1812. William Pitt the Elder died on 11 May 1778, but not at the age of 49.

ADDAMS, Charles (1912–88)

The cartoonist Charles Addams, creator of The Addams Family, liked to use headed notepaper identifying itself as being from ‘The Gotham Rest Home for Mental Defectives’ when he replied to letters from fans. When he married his third and final wife, both bride and groom dressed in black for the ceremony, which took place in a dog cemetery. They subsequently lived together in a New York estate which they called ‘The Swamp’. When Addams died, he was cremated and his ashes buried in a region of The Swamp that had been used as a pet cemetery.

ADDRESS

In 1463, Paris became the first city to use house numbers. London did so exactly 300 years later in 1763.

The Duke of Wellington’s London home at Aspley House had the address Number One, London, because it was the first house encountered from the countryside after passing the tollgates at the top of Knightsbridge.

HITLER

ADMIRALTY ISLANDS

Elisha Fawcett was a one-legged Manchester clergyman who, in the words of a contemporary, ‘devoted his life to teaching the natives of the Admiralty Islands the Commandments of God and the Laws of Cricket’. When he died, his parishioners in the islands were too poor to afford a tombstone, so planted his wooden leg at the head of his grave. Miraculously, it took root and provided a bountiful harvest of wood from which they are said to have made cricket bats for generations.

ADOLESCENCE

A long-term study at Northwestern University medical school in Chicago showed that memories of middle-aged men concerning their adolescent years are highly unreliable. By comparing answers given at the age of 14 about family relationships, home environment, dating and sexuality, religion, parental discipline and general activities with their memories of the same events 34 years later, results published in 2000 showed that the likelihood of accurately remembering events from adolescence was no greater than chance.

‘Adolescence: a stage between childhood and adultery.’ Ambrose Bierce, The Devil’s Dictionary, 1906

HAMSTER

ADRENALINE

The use of gerbils to detect undercover agents and terrorists by smelling out their adrenaline has a history dating back to the 1970s when MI5 looked at the possibility of using trained gerbils for that purpose.

They had been impressed by trials at Tel Aviv airport where gerbils were being used at security check areas to sniff a suspect’s hands as fans wafted the aroma in the gerbil’s direction.

The gerbils were trained to press a lever if they detected increased adrenaline, thus identifying passengers under stress.

Unfortunately, the plans had to be abandoned when it was found that the gerbils could not distinguish between terrorists and people who were afraid of flying.

The adrenaline-sniffing skill of the gerbils began with their use by the Royal Canadian Mounted Police in the 1970s to sniff out drugs in Canadian prisons.

Their ability to do so was undoubted, but a number of suspicious deaths among the gerbils suggested they were being murdered by drug-dealing prisoners and the project was abandoned.

There was also the problem of getting rid of the smell of the gerbils’ urine.

More recently, however, gerbils have been performing excellent work in detecting landmines in Africa.

ADULTERY

In ancient Greek, the meaning of the verb rhaphanizo was ‘to thrust a radish up the fundament’.

This was a punishment for adulterers, but before we condemn it as severe, it should be compared with the penalty in ancient India, which consisted of having the nose cut off, and the still more severe punishment in Britain at the time of King Canute, when an adulteress was liable to lose both her nose and ears.

ADOLESCENCE, BRANDING, DRAMA

ADVERTISEMENT

In September 2010, a Chinese female lawyer issued a lawsuit against a cinema and a film distribution company for showing 20 minutes of advertisements before the main feature. She said the company and the cinema should have told her how long the adverts would last and accused them of wasting her time and violating her freedom of choice. Chen Xiaomei demanded a refund of the money she’d spent on the ticket, an equal amount in compensation, a nominal amount for emotional damages, and a written apology.

In 1996, Daihatsu became the first car manufacturer to advertise a new model by placing stickers on condom machines in pubs and wine bars. ‘The stickers are a further element of Daihatsu’s campaign to poke fun at the pretentious nature of the car market,’ said a spokesman for the advertising agency marketing the new Daihatsu Hijet.

RECRUITMENT, UNITED STATES

AESCHYLUS (525–456 BC)

The Greek tragedian Aeschylus is said to have been killed when a tortoise fell on his head. According to legend, the tortoise was dropped by an eagle which mistook Aeschylus’s bald head for a rock which it could use to crack the shell of the tortoise. What happened to the tortoise is not known.

Pliny the Elder, who first recounted the tale of Aeschylus’s death, said it was a lammergeyer (also known as a bearded vulture) not an eagle.

‘It is in the character of very few men to honour without envy a friend who has prospered.’ Aeschylus

AFGHANISTAN

Afghanistan comes first if you arrange the nations of the world in alphabetical order. From 1918 until 1991, Afghanistan was the only country on Earth whose name began with A but did not also end in A. After the Soviet Union collapsed, it was joined in that respect by Azerbaijan.

A traditional sport in northern Afghanistan is Buzkashi, played by horsemen who try to dump a headless calf in the enemy goal. Players are allowed to whip or kick the man holding the calf, but off-the-calf fouls are penalised.

There are two UNESCO World Heritage Sites in Afghanistan: the Minaret of Jam, and the Buddhas of Bamiyan.

Afghanistan is four and a half hours ahead of Greenwich Mean Time.

CARROT, TALIBAN

AGATHOCLES (361–289 BC)

Machiavelli described Agathocles as an example ‘of those who become princes through their crimes’. Known as the ‘Tyrant of Syracuse’, Agathocles was the son of a potter who achieved considerable military success largely through nefarious means and conquered most of Sicily, of which he considered himself the King. He is said to have died through using a toothpick poisoned by his enemies.

Agathocles is also the name of a heavy metal band from the city of Mol in Belgium.

AGNOSTIC

The word ‘agnostic’ was coined by Thomas Huxley one evening at a party at Mr James Knowles’s house on Clapham Common, specifically to describe Charles Darwin’s attitude towards religious belief.

AGRICULTURE

A world record was set at the Alton and North East Hampshire Agricultural Show in the UK in 2009 for running the longest distance while on fire. Amateur stuntman Keith Malcolm ran 79 metres (259 feet) while on fire, beating the previous record by 9.75 metres (32 feet). He wore several layers of fire-resistant clothing and had a man with a fire extinguisher in close attendance.

The record was subsequently beaten several times and now stands at 205.23 metres (almost 700 feet), set by stuntman Antony Britton in 2017. He also set a record for ‘fastest 100-metres [328-foot] sprint (full-body burn, without oxygen)’, completing the run in just 24.58 seconds.

AIDS

In 2001, King Mswati III of Swaziland invoked an ancient chastity rite known as umchwasho in an attempt to curb the AIDS epidemic in his country. This involved banning all young maidens under the age of 50 from having sex for five years. Two months later he violated his own decree by taking a 17-year-old girl as his thirteenth wife and was made to pay a fine of one cow.

King Mswati rules in conjunction with his mother, who is known as the Great She-Elephant. He currently has 15 wives and 23 children. His father and predecessor, King Sobhuza II, had 125 wives in his 82-year reign.

According to tradition, the King may only marry after his ‘wife’ becomes pregnant. Until then she is known only as a ‘bride’.

NIGERIA

AIR HOSTESSES

Miss Ellen Church of Iowa became the world’s first air stewardess on 15 May 1930 after writing to United Airlines with the suggestion that suitably qualified young ladies might be useful on flights. The airline not only employed Ms Church but asked her to draw up qualifications for further recruits. Her resulting specifications were modelled on her own best points: applicants had to be registered nurses aged no more than 25; they must not weigh more than 52 kilograms (115 pounds) or be more than 1.6 metres (5 feet 4 inches) tall.

The first British air hostess was Miss Daphne Kearley, who served on her first flight on 16 May 1936. Typing and cocktail-mixing were among the skills specified, though her own account of the job suggested that calming down anxious passengers and politely turning down marriage proposals were the main parts of the role. By 1943, the major qualifications demanded by the British Overseas Airways Corporation (BOAC) were ‘poise’ and an ‘educated voice’.

‘Stewardesses’ is the longest common word that is typed entirely by the left hand of a trained typist on a QWERTY keyboard. However, it is two letters shorter than the uncommon ‘after-cataracts’ (an eye condition that may follow an operation for cataracts) and ‘tesseradecades’ (groups of 14).

ALASKA

The Alaskan coastline is 10,686 kilometres (6,640 miles) long, which is longer than the combined coastlines of all the other US states. If Alaska were a country, it would be the sixteenth largest in the world.

Alaska is the only US state whose name can be typed on a single row of letters on a standard keyboard.

Alaska was transferred from Russia to the United States on 18 October 1867 for $7.2 million, which is why 18 October is Alaska Day. Since then, Alaska has remained about 500 miles from the rest of the USA but is still only 55 miles from mainland Russia.

Under Alaskan law, wanton waste of a moose carries a maximum penalty of one year in jail and a $10,000 fine. Taking the antlers without salvaging all the edible meat constitutes ‘wanton waste’. The town of Talkeetna, Alaska, used to hold a Moose Dropping Festival, dropping pieces of moose poo by crane onto a target. This festival was last held in 2009, after which it was judged to have become too popular for the town’s good.

Waking a sleeping bear for the purpose of taking a photograph is prohibited in Alaska.

The Nenana Ice Classic is an Alaskan sweepstake that has been running since 1917. It started when bored railway engineers erected a wooden tripod on the frozen Tanana River and placed bets on the exact moment in spring when it would fall through the ice. A paper in Science journal in 2001 was devoted to demonstrating that the records of the Nenana Ice Classic are a valid measure of global warming.

Until 1995 it was illegal to keep an elephant in Alaska. In that year, however, they changed the law regarding exotic pets specifically to allow an ex-circus elephant to stay there.

The state sport of Alaska is dog mushing, which is racing on sleds pulled by dogs.

Of the 20 highest mountains in the USA, 17 are in Alaska.

BACULUM, DRAGONFLY, MOOSE, TREADMILL

ALBANIA

One official motto of Albania is: ‘The faith of the Albanians is Albanism’. The Albanians call Albania ‘Shqiperia’, which means ‘land of the eagle’.

In 1967 Albania became the world’s first officially atheist state. In 1976 the official name of Albania was changed to People’s Socialist Republic of Albania. In 1992, after the fall of communism, the name changed again to simply Republic of Albania. During the communist era, private cars were illegal in Albania.

Probably the most famous Albanian was Mother Teresa of Calcutta, born Agnes Gonxha Bojaxhiu. Her middle name means ‘little flower’ in Albanian.

In 1995, a traffic light tax of 2,000 lek (about £14) was imposed in Albania, but drivers in the northern city of Shkodra refused to pay it on the grounds that their city had no traffic lights.

The oldest known name of the main island of Britain was Albion. Around the 11th century, writings in Latin referred to it as Albania. Albania is the name of at least three towns in Colombia.

The Albanian currency, the lek, was named after Alexander the Great, whose name was often shortened to Leka in Albanian.

From the 14th to the 20th century, Albania did not have a king. Charles I was king from 1272 to 1285 and was succeeded by his son Charles II from 1285 to 1294. The next king was Zog I from 1928 to 1939.

HOXHA, WISDOM, ZOG I

ALBATROSS

According to a recent study, a large proportion of female albatrosses in Hawaii are lesbian. A pair of lesbian albatrosses in the world’s only inland breeding colony in New Zealand were reported in 2010 to be bringing up a chick together. The identity of the chick’s father is unknown.

ALBERT I, King of Belgium (1875–1934)

King Albert I was killed in a climbing accident in Belgium. His last reported words were addressed to his valet, whom he instructed to wait in the car: ‘If I feel in good form, I shall take the difficult way up. If I do not, I shall take the easy one. I shall join you in an hour.’ When he did not return, a search began and eventually found his body. Rumours of foul play circulated, including a suggestion that he was murdered elsewhere and his body brought to the mountain. In 2016, however, a DNA analysis of blood samples found on March-les-Dames above the place where the body was found confirmed that he had died in an accident there.

In 1914, when presented with an ultimatum by Germany demanding safe passage for the German army to France, King Albert replied: ‘Belgium is a country not a road’; Germany then declared war on Belgium, and the king assumed personal command of the Belgian army while his wife, Queen Elisabeth, worked as a nurse at the front.

ALCHEMY

In the 4th century BC, Plato and Aristotle developed alchemy from the idea that everything was made of earth, air, fire and water. Each of those was said to combine two primary qualities: hot or cold, and wet or dry. Earth is cold and dry, air is hot and wet, fire is hot and dry, water is cold and wet. When fire loses its heat, it becomes earth – in the form of ash; when water is heated, it becomes air – in the form of steam. It followed that anything could be turned into anything else by reducing it to its basic components, then remixing them with a little heating, chilling, wetting or drying.

Sadly, it didn’t work in practice, so the early alchemists decided that something must be missing. That something was the legendary Philosopher’s Stone, which supposedly had the power to turn all things to gold and to bestow eternal life by transforming a person from earthly impurity into heavenly perfection. It was, in short, the answer to everything.

‘I have seen and handled more than once the Stone of the Philosophers,’ said the 17th-century Belgian alchemist J.B. van Helmont. ‘In colour it was like powder of saffron but heavy and shining even as powdered glass.’

John Damian was court alchemist to James IV of Scotland. In 1507, he built himself a pair of wings and tried to fly from the ramparts of Stirling Castle but fell to the ground and broke a leg. He blamed the feathers he had used, which came from barnyard fowl unaccustomed to flying. Despite this failure, James IV still paid £15.16s.0d for Damian’s alchemist’s gown of damask and £4 for his velvet socks.

Edward Kelley claimed to have discovered the Philosopher’s Stone among the ruins of Glastonbury Abbey around 1583. He was sent to the pillory at Lancaster and had his ears cropped after a conviction for forgery.

John Dee employed Kelley and never noticed the latter’s mutilated ears (which were hidden beneath a skull cap). Dee sent Queen Elizabeth a piece of gold that he said he had made from metal cut from a warming pan, and gave his son quoits which he claimed were made from transmuted gold. In 2011, John Dee was himself transmuted into an opera, Dr Dee, directed by Rufus Norris with music by Damon Albarn.

The French alchemist Nicolas Flamel, whose search for the Philosopher’s Stone inspired parts of J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter stories, lived from 1330 to 1418. The house he built in 1407 is now considered the oldest building in Paris and houses a restaurant, the Auberge Nicolas Flamel, which in 2021 sold a three-course lunch for 38 euros.

ALCOHOL

The word ‘alcohol’ was first used in English in the early 17th century as a name for ore of antimony, a fine metallic powder used as eye make-up. By extension, the word then came to be applied to any fine powder produced by grinding or distillation, and finally it took on the meaning of the distilled liquid itself rather than its powdery residue.

Samuel Johnson’s Dictionary defined alcohol as: ‘an Arabic term used by chymists for a highly rectified dephlegmated spirit of wine, or for any thing reduced into an impalpable powder’.

Alcoholic drinks are very old. There is evidence of beer-drinking in Mesopotamia around 8000 BC, while the sediment in a pottery jar excavated in northern Iran indicates that man was drinking a retsina-like wine in 5000 BC. Workers on the Egyptian pyramids around 4,500 years ago had three drink-breaks each day, when five types of beer and four varieties of wine were available.

In the early 18th century, Empress Catherine I of Russia banned women from getting drunk. This may explain the large number of female transvestites at Moscow balls, where wine ran freely. Catherine’s husband and predecessor, Peter the Great, had the lover of one of his mistresses executed and his head preserved in alcohol and kept by his bedside.

The effects of alcohol on goldfish and humans have been found to be remarkably similar. For both species, experiments have shown that anything learned in a state of mild inebriation is liable to be forgotten when sobriety is restored, but a subsequent return to the inebriated state may be accompanied by a return of the forgotten memories. So if you have forgotten something that you learned when you were drunk, your best chance of recalling it may well be to get drunk again. If you drank so much that you blacked out, however, all memories of what you said, did or learned while intoxicated are liable to vanish for ever, whether you are human or goldfish. Mildly inebriated goldfish, however, have been shown to learn simple tasks more quickly than sober goldfish.

As to the effects of alcohol on lechery, a porter explains all to Macduff in Shakespeare’s Macbeth: ‘It provokes the desire, but it takes away the performance.’ Studies have confirmed that alcohol increases subjective estimates of sexual arousal but diminishes physiological symptoms.

According to a poll in 2008, the average British man will drink 11,616 pints of beer in his lifetime as well as 1,089 pints of cider, 5,082 glasses of wine, 4,356 single measures of spirits. This will cost him £24,357.30.

ALE, BEER, HANGOVER, WHISKY

ALDRIN, Edwin Eugene (‘Buzz’) (b. 1930)

Appropriately enough for the second man to walk on the Moon, Buzz Aldrin’s mother’s maiden name was Moon. His own name, remarkably enough, really was ‘Buzz’, but not until 1988. Prior to that it had been a nickname which began with his little sister’s attempt to pronounce the word ‘brother’, which came out as ‘Buzzer’. In 1988, he legally changed his first name to ‘Buzz’. In 1963, Edwin Aldrin, as he then was, received a doctorate from MIT for his thesis on orbital mechanics.

MOON

ALE

In July 2010, the Aberdeen brewery BrewDog created 12 bottles of a superstrength ale, which they placed inside the dead bodies of seven stoats, four squirrels and one hare and sold for £500 a bottle.

At 55 per cent alcohol by volume (ABV), the brewers claimed it was the world’s strongest beer. A week later, however, the Dutch brewer Jan Nijboer produced a beer that was 60 per cent alcohol. Since 2013, the world’s strongest beer has been Brewmeister’s Snake Venom at 67.5 per cent.

BEER, URINATION

ALEXANDRA, Queen (1844–1925)

Wife of Edward VII, Queen Alexandra admitted she had no interest in intellectual pursuits and was notoriously unpunctual. According to one contemporary historian, she ‘had no brain’. When she was left with a limp after an illness in 1867, ladies at court copied the limp to be fashionable.

ALFRED THE GREAT (849–899)

During the reign of Alfred the Great in England, laws were introduced to make people convicted of crimes give compensation to their victims. A 2.5-centimetre (1-inch) wound required a payment of one shilling; a broken tooth was worth six shillings; and an ear cost 20 shillings. The scale for toes specified 20 shillings for a big toe, 15 shillings for the second toe, nine shillings for a middle toe, five shillings for the little toe and only four shillings for the fourth toe.

Alfred is the only English or British king to be known as ‘the Great’.

WESSEX

ALGERIA

Algeria is the largest country by area in Africa. Before 2011, when South Sudan became independent, Sudan was the largest.

The only people born in Algeria to have won Nobel Prizes were Albert Camus (Literature, 1957) and Claude Cohen-Tannoudji (Physics, 1997). Camus played as goalkeeper in the football team for the University of Algiers, which may therefore be the world’s only university to have had a Nobel Prize-winning goalkeeper in its team.

In 2007, a court in Algeria had to rule on the ownership of a donkey that had eaten the money brought by a purchaser for its sale.

St Augustine of Hippo (354–430) was the most famous Algerian of all. The city of Hippo is now Annaba.

ALLIGATOR

Alligators have five toes on their front feet and four toes on the back feet.

In the US state of Florida, intentionally feeding a wild alligator is a misdemeanour of the second degree, but killing or injuring an alligator is a third-degree felony. Except in extreme situations, an alligator must be at least 1.2 metres (4 feet) long before it is considered by law to be a nuisance.

In Louisiana, theft of an alligator, whether dead or alive, is a crime punishable by imprisonment for not more than 10 years with or without hard labour and/or a fine of not more than $3,000 if the value of the crime is more than $500, or two years’ imprisonment and/or a $2,000 fine if the value is between $300 and $500.

CROCODILE

ALPACA

The alpaca is a sort of soft-haired llama and is found mainly in Peru. Alpacas can breed with llamas; a cross between a male llama and female alpaca is called a ‘huarizo’. The offspring of a male alpaca and female llama is a ‘misti’.

In Andean mythology, alpacas were associated with the Earth Mother goddess Pachmama. They were said to have been given to mankind as a gift at Mount Ausangate in Peru and to be left on Earth for only as long as they were properly looked after.

Alpaca wool comes in 22 natural colours, the most of any wool-producing animal.

A baby alpaca is called a cria.

ALPHABET

The technical name for the dot above a letter ‘i’ is a ‘tittle’. Curiously, the Oxford English Dictionary gives ‘The dot over the letter i’ as one of the meanings of ‘tittle’ but does not say that it can also mean the dot over the letter j. It does, however, include a citation from 1676 saying that the dot over a j is formed the same way as that over the i.

‘The person said the Duke [of Marlborough] puts no tittles upon the i’s. “O”, says the Prince [Eugene of Savoy], “it saves his Grace’s ink”.’ Mary Delany, Autobiography and Correspondence, 1783

CROATIA, FIJI, GEORGIA, PI, POLAND, THAILAND, TWENTY-TWO

AMAZING

‘Amazing’ was voted top of the list of overused words nominated for banishment in 2012 in the annual poll conducted by Lake Superior State University. It was closely followed by ‘baby bump’. The 2021 list, published at the end of 2020, gave the top place for proposed banishment to COVID-19, followed by the phrases ‘social distancing’ and ‘we’re all in this together’.

AMAZON

There are no bridges across the Amazon anywhere along its 6,437-kilometre (4,000-mile) length. There is some dispute over the width of the mouth of the Amazon owing to the position of the large island of Marajó, where the Amazon meets the ocean, but according to one measure, the width is greater than the entire length of the River Thames in England.

The Amazon is responsible for about 17 per cent of all the fresh water discharged into the world’s oceans each day and about 50 per cent of the water discharged into the Atlantic.

With a net worth approaching $200 billion, Jeff Bezos, founder of Amazon.com was ranked the richest person in the world in 2021, ahead of Elon Musk. Among his other accomplishments, Bezos played an alien in the movie Star Trek Beyond.

COMPUTATION, MARSTON, OIL

AMERICA

We have long thought that America was named after the explorer Amerigo Vespucci, but another candidate has recently emerged. Richard Amerike, a Bristol merchant, knew about North America long before Columbus and Vespucci ‘discovered’ it. Bristolians had for many years been buying salted cod from Icelandic fishermen which had been caught in Newfoundland.

Not wishing to spread the word about their new fishing grounds, they kept this knowledge secret, but Amerike was a major sponsor of John Cabot’s voyages to North America around 1497–99, and documents found in recent years suggest that Cabot gave a map to Columbus which may have had Amerike’s name on it. Another piece of circumstantial evidence is Amerike’s family banner: a flag in red, white and blue, depicting stripes and stars.

The German cartographer Martin Waldseemüller was the first known person to call the New World ‘America’, having inscribed the name on his engravings for a world map in 1507. Later in life, Waldseemüller changed his opinion, believing that ‘Columbia’ might have been a better name, but by then the name of America had established itself too well to be altered.

The country Colombia was given its name in 1819 by Simón Bolívar. In 1825 Bolivia was named after Bolívar, who was Venezuelan.

According to some official estimates, the number of soldiers killed in conflict in the American Revolution was 4,435, which is fewer than the number now killed on America’s roads every 40 days.

According to a nationwide survey in 2022, one in three people across America have detectable levels of a toxic herbicide linked to cancers, birth defects and hormonal imbalances.

CHIPS, COLUMBUS, CRIME, FOOD, POPULATION, RUBBISH, TELEVISION

AMMONIA

For a curious reason, the gas ammonia (NH3) takes its name from the Egyptian god Ammon.

Ammonium chloride, also known as sal ammoniac, was discovered by accident in classical times as a by-product of burning camel dung in the temple of Jupiter Ammon at Siwa oasis in Egypt, not far from the Libyan border.

The marine fossils known as ammonites are also named after Ammon, because their spiral structure was reminiscent of the ram’s horns that Ammon was said to have had.

AMNESIA

In October 2011, the Journal of Emergency Medicine reported the case of a woman who went to the emergency room of Georgetown University Hospital complaining of lack of memory of the previous 24 hours, about an hour after she had had orgasmic sex with her husband.

Doctors diagnosed a rare condition known as transient global amnesia (TGA), caused by the scrambling of the memory circuits of the brain, often brought on by physical or emotional triggers.

ALCOHOL

AMPUTATION

During the American Civil War, 75 per cent of all battlefield surgery involved amputations. A total of more than 50,000 such amputations were performed.

A man with no arms and no legs swam the English Channel in September 2010, thanks to his motor-propelled, flipper-shaped artificial legs. Philippe Croizon, 42, lost all his limbs in an accident in 1994 when he was hit by a 20,000-volt charge from a power line while removing a television aerial. The Channel crossing took him 13 and a half hours. He said he had done it to inspire all those ‘who think life is nothing but suffering’.

NAPOLEON BONAPARTE, PORTER

AMUSEMENT

A thief in the German town of Hamelin was reported in 2010 to have robbed an amusement arcade by threatening the attendant with a cup of coffee. ‘He wasn’t going to pour coffee over her,’ a police spokesman explained, ‘he was going to hit her with the cup.’

ANAESTHETICS

On 30 March 1842, Dr Crawford Long became the first to use ether as an anaesthetic, when removing a cyst from the neck of a student named John Venable. In the USA, 30 March is celebrated as Doctors’ Day in commemoration of this.

Before 1842, the only medicament available to dull the pain of an operation was whisky or some other alcohol. Surgeons were also known to partake of the whisky during operations to help dull their own sensitivity to the screams of the patient.

Nitrous oxide, or ‘laughing gas’, was used purely for entertainment before its use as an anaesthetic. Charlie Chaplin made a 16-minute comedy short called Laughing Gas in 1914.

In 2002, researchers at the University of Louisville reported that people with ginger hair require 20 per cent more anaesthetic before surgery than people with hair of another colour.

In 1981, 17 doctors in South Africa used enough anaesthetic to kill 70 men when performing dentistry on an elephant.

ELEPHANT, LONGFELLOW

ANAGRAMS

Notable people whose names are anagrams of a single word include: actress Meg Ryan (Germany), singer Britney Spears (Presbyterians), former US vice-president and Nobel Prize winner Al Gore (gaoler), singer Roger Daltrey (retrogradely), musician Eric Clapton (narcoleptic), actor Tom Cruise (costumier) and conservationist Steve Irwin (interviews).

Britain’s first chess grandmaster Tony Miles was an anagram of ‘solemnity’, and Britain’s world chess title challenger Nigel Short is an anagram of ‘holstering’.

COVID-19, LEWINSKY, SHAKESPEARE

ANATOMY

In 1997, after eight years of discussions, the International Federation of Associations of Anatomists (IFAA) finally reached agreement on the correct term for the area between a woman’s breasts.

The expression they settled on was ‘intermammary sulcus’. The creator of the term was the 77-year-old Brazilian Liberato DiDio, who was secretary-general of the IFAA’s committee on anatomical terminology. The committee also agreed that the area at the bottom of the breast where it meets the chest was to be known as the ‘inframammary sulcus’.

Another part of the body renamed by the same committee was the part formerly known as the Adam’s apple, which is now the ‘laryngeal prominence’.

FOOTBALL, SLOTH

ANCHOVY

The first screenplay Quentin Tarantino ever wrote – at the age of 14 – was called ‘Captain Peachfuzz and the Anchovy Bandit’. It has never been filmed.

Anchovy-flavoured popcorn was one of the bedtime treats offered to cats at the Sutton Place Hotel in Vancouver in 1998 when it started its ‘Pampered Pets’ service.

ANDERSEN, Hans Christian (1805–75)

The great Danish writer of over 150 fairy tales, Hans Christian Andersen, was born two months after his parents married. He never married, but carried a letter from his first love, Riborg Voigt, in a pouch around his neck until he died. He also expressed attraction for other men but apparently never acted on this.

Andersen parted his hair on the right and had a big nose. He never ate pork, and when staying in hotels carried a coil of rope with him in case he needed to escape from a fire. He was also afraid of dogs and suffered from taphophobia – a fear of being buried alive. As a precaution against this, he left a note by his bedside at night saying: ‘I only appear to be dead’.

MERMAID

ANDORRA

Andorra is the world’s only co-principality, with two princes jointly sharing authority over it. The two princes are the President of France and the Bishop of Urgell, a Roman Catholic diocese straddling both Andorra and Spain.

Andorra has no unemployment, no airports, no US ambassador, only one prison, and one of the world’s highest life expectancies at 83 years (80.8 for men, 85.4 for women).

The flag of Andorra is the world’s only national flag with two cows on it.

BRUNEI, FLAGS, INCOME TAX

ANIMAL NOISES

In Germany, horses go ‘prrrh’; in ancient Greece, dogs went ‘au au’; Danish pigs go ‘knor’; Japanese cats ‘nyaa’ in Japanese; cows ‘baeh’ in Urdu; geese tööt in Finnish; snakes ‘hvese’ in Norwegian. By contrast, Italian humans sneeze ‘ecci ecci’.

UKRAINE

ANORAK

The word ‘anorak’ first appeared in English in 1924. It comes from the Canadian Inuit annuraaq, meaning ‘a piece of clothing’.

In 1996, Swedish artist Ann-Kristin Antman produced an anorak made from salmon skins toughened and made waterproof by soaking in human urine. ‘It is a method used in the Stone Age in Sweden,’ she explained. ‘The smell disappears when you rinse the skins in water.’

The first recorded use of ‘anorak’ in its more recent sense of (as the OED puts it) ‘a boring, studious, or socially inept young person’ was in 1984.

ANOREXIA

Although we often see anorexia as a modern problem, the word first appeared in English in 1605. The complaint of anorexia nervosa was given its name in 1873 by the physician Sir William Withey Gull, who proposed ‘apepsia hysterica’ as an alternative.

BARBIE

ANTARCTICA

The ancient Greeks gave Antarctica its name, calling it ‘Anti-Arktikos’, which literally means ‘opposite the bear’. The Great Bear (Ursa Major) is above the North Pole, so the South became Anti-Arktikos and the North was identified as Arktikos.

On 17 January 1773, Captain James Cook became the first European to sail south of the Antarctic Circle, and on 17 January 1912, Robert Falcon Scott reached the South Pole.

Present-day Antarctica contains between 1,000 and 4,000 people (depending on the season) from 27 nations (the signatories to the Antarctic Treaty). The number of penguins is less clear. Some estimates put it as high as 100 million, but the State of Atlantic Penguins (SOAP) survey in 2020 listed 5.77 million breeding pairs in 698 locations. Antarctica also has one active volcano, Mount Erebus.

There is about eight times as much ice in Antarctica as in the Arctic. If all the ice in Antarctica melted, the global sea level would rise by about 60 metres (200 feet).

The first person to be born in Antarctica was the Argentine Emilio Marcos Palma on 7 January 1978. The first person to be buried in Antarctica was the Norwegian zoologist Nicolai Hanson on 14 October 1899.

HILLARY, OCEAN, PENGUIN

ANTELOPE

The mating behaviour of antelopes is called lekking. In 2008, it was reported that high-quality male African topi antelopes are so much in demand that they have to fight off female admirers. This is against the normal male mammalian behaviour of mating with as many females as possible. Given the choice, a male topi antelope will choose a new partner over one he has mated with before.

BERLIN, CHAMOIS

ANTIQUES

A giant egg laid in the 17th century was put on sale for £5,000 at the Chelsea Antiques Fair in 2009. The egg, which is more than 90 centimetres (3 feet) in circumference, is probably the biggest in the world at present. It was laid by the Great Elephant Bird of Madagascar which became extinct about 1,000 years ago.

APATHY

At an election in the North Dakota city of Pillsbury in 2008, nobody turned out to vote. The mayor and two aldermen were standing for re-election unopposed, but even they could not be bothered to get to a polling station. The county auditor ruled that those in office could stay there and appoint people, including themselves, to the jobs until the next election. The mayor commented that council members are paid $48 a year, but most of that goes on doughnuts eaten at the meetings and gas to get there.

APHRODISIAC

As long ago as the 16th century, the English were using the word ‘venereal’ (from Venus, the Roman goddess of love) for anything connected with sexual desire. By the 17th century, however, the word had become so strongly linked with venereal disease that another word was needed for its positive aspects. Swap Venus for her Greek equivalent, Aphrodite, and the word ‘aphrodisiac’ was born.

Pliny the Elder, in his Natural History, wrote that the philosopher Democritus considered radishes to be an aphrodisiac. Radishes have also been praised for their aphrodisiac qualities in Japan and other oriental countries.

The 12th-century rabbi and physician Maimonides is also said to have recommended a radish ointment as an early form of Viagra. His recipe was to mix radish oil with mustard oil and carrot oil, then add live ants.

The Indian elephant god Ganesh is also often depicted holding a radish, which some say is connected to its supposed aphrodisiac qualities.

CARROT, CELERY, CHOCOLATE

APPLE

87.24 million tonnes of apples were produced in the world in 2019. By far the largest producer is China, with almost half of the total.

Apples are the second most valuable fruit crop in the USA behind grapes but ahead of oranges.

The apple that is said to have struck Isaac Newton and inspired the theory of gravity is a large green-skinned variety called Flower of Kent. There are over 7,000 varieties of apple in the world.

Steve Jobs, co-founder of the Apple Computer Company in 1976, said that the name of the company was inspired by his visit to an apple farm when he was on a fruitarian diet. He described the name ‘Apple’ as ‘fun, spirited and not intimidating’.

GRAVITY, HEDGEHOG, POMEGRANATE, TURING

APRIL

The name of this month comes from the Latin ‘Aprilis’, though nobody is sure why the Romans gave it that name. Some say it is connected to the verb ‘aperire’, to open, referring to the opening of flowers. Others say it refers to the goddess Aphrodite.

In Old English the month was also called ‘Eastermonad’.

The term ‘April gentleman’ in English used to refer to a newly married man (by implication, a fool).

In Finland April is known as ‘Huhtikuu’ or ‘Burnwood’ month.

APRIL FOOLS

A judge in Melbourne told two robbers they were a ‘pair of fools’ before sending them to prison for a robbery committed on 1 April 2007. Benjamin Jorgensen, 38, and Donna Hayes, 36, were jailed for seven and eight years respectively for robbing a restaurant of a bag which they believed contained the day’s takings. Later they discovered that the bag was in fact filled with bread rolls. Jorgensen also fired his gun accidentally during the heist, shooting Hayes in the buttocks.

1 April is also the date each year of the International Edible Book Festival. The date was chosen to celebrate the birthday of French gastronome and writer Jean-Anthelme Brillat-Savarin, who wrote Physiologie du Goût (The Physiology of Taste) (1825).

Since 2004, 1 April has also been celebrated as Fossil Fools Day, with demonstrations against the use of fossil fuels as sources of energy.

In Ancient Rome, 1 April was the date of the festival of Veneralia, praising the goddess Venus.

Since the early 16th century, French children have celebrated ‘poisson d’Avril’ (April fish) on 1 April by sticking pictures of fish on people’s backs.

On 1 April 1698, many were fooled into going to the Tower of London to ‘see the lions washed’.

On 1 April 1889, the first successful dishwasher went on sale in Chicago. Its inventor Josephine Cochran said it washed faster than her servants.

DANCING, ELASTIC

AQUARIUM

A woman at an aquarium in the Ukraine dropped her mobile phone, which was eaten by the crocodile she was trying to photograph. Staff called her number and the crocodile started to ring. ‘This should have been a very dramatic shot, but things didn’t work out,’ the woman said.

HEADS, WEDDING

ARACHNOLOGY

The singers David Bowie and Neil Young, the film director and actor Orson Welles, the actress Angelina Jolie, the actor Harrison Ford and the satirist Stephen Colbert have all had species of spider named after them.

So have Nelson Mandela and Frank Zappa.

Orson Welles towers above the others, however, as he had a whole genus of spiders named after him, though Frank Zappa also had a jellyfish and a fish genus named in his honour.

SPIDER

ARCHERY

In 1545, the scholar Roger Ascham published a treatise on archery which he called Toxophilus. He coined the name from two Greek words meaning ‘lover of the bow’, and the science of archery became known as toxophily or toxophilism.

Archery itself, however, is far older. The earliest known use of bows and arrows in warfare was in 2340 BC, when Sargon of Akkad in Babylonia defeated the Sumerians with an infantry of archers.

In the 1900 Olympic archery event, live pigeons were used as targets.

The first woman to kill an elephant with a bow and arrow is believed to be the American Teressa Groenewald-Hagerman, who achieved the feat in Zimbabwe in May 2009. She says she worked out for four hours a day for eight months in order to develop the strength to draw the bow needed for the task. She says she did it to win a bet with a male colleague. Previously, the last person to have killed an elephant with a bow and arrow is thought to have been a man called Howard Hill, 60 years earlier.

Great archers:

• Lottie Dod won the Wimbledon ladies’ singles championship in 1887 when she was 15, won the British Ladies Amateur Golf Championship in 1904, and took silver in the Olympic archery in 1908.

• Sybil Fenton Newall known as ‘Queenie Newall’ was the woman who beat Lottie Dod to win Olympic gold in 1908. She was aged 53 at the time and is still the oldest female winner of an individual Olympic gold.

• Geena Davis, the Oscar-winning actress, reached the semi-finals of the US women’s archery championship in 1999 and eventually finished 24th.

BHUTAN, FOOTBALL, GOLF, OLYMPIC GAMES

ARGENTINA

In 1995, the first International Housewives Congress was held in the Argentine capital Buenos Aires, and in 1966 the Free Tramps Federation staged the first World Tramps Congress in the coastal resort of Mar del Plata. Among the proposals suggested at that event was the official introduction of an International Day of Idleness on 2 May as a response to Labour Day on 1 May.

The Argentine lake duck, Oxyura vittata, has the largest penis of any bird. In 2001, researchers from the University of Alaska discovered that its penis, when fully extended, measures about 42.5 centimetres (17 inches), which is about the same as the entire length of the duck. When not in use, the corkscrew-shaped penis retracts into the duck’s abdomen.

In a paper in the journal Nature, Kevin McCracken explained that previously the duck’s penis length had been thought to be only about 20 centimetres (8 inches), however measurements had only been taken from dissected birds: ‘but in April we were in Argentina collecting birds for another genetic study, and we found this bird running around in its natural form, with its penis hanging out, which was something we’d never seen before.’ He said that the trait deserved further study.

Quite apart from its length, the existence of a penis is unusual in a bird. Most male birds do not have one as they copulate by touching genital openings for a brief time.

CARNIVORE, FALKLAND ISLANDS

ARISTARCHUS of Samos (c.310– 230 BC)

The astronomer Aristarchus of Samos was the first person to argue that the Earth orbits the Sun rather than the other way around. A crater on the Moon and a telescope at the National Observatory of Athens are named after Aristarchus.

ARISTOTLE (384–322 BC)

When Alexander the Great was a child, Aristotle was hired to be his tutor. Aristotle believed that the Universe had no beginning and will have no end, and that women are inferior to men.

‘There was never a great genius without a tincture of madness.’ Aristotle

GIRL, GRAVITY, PREGNANCY, SEX

ARIZONA

A woman was arrested in Phoenix, Arizona, in 2010 for attempting to exchange a two-year-old child for a gun. Police said that she thought the friend to whom she offered the swap would make a better job of bringing up the child than she would. She was charged with the unlawful sale of a child and solicitation to possess a weapon by a prohibited person.

CARROT, RUBBER BANDS, TRAFFIC

ARMADILLO

It is frequently stated that the ninebanded armadillo is the only animal other than the human that can suffer from leprosy. That is not quite true, as mice and rhesus monkeys have also been infected with the leprosy virus, but the armadillo is certainly the most useful experimental animal for leprosy research. Up to 5 per cent of wild armadillos are thought to suffer from leprosy.

Without its shell or carapace, an armadillo is said to resemble a rabbit.

ARMENIA

The Armenian company Grand Candy was awarded a certificate by Guinness World Records in September 2010 for making the world’s biggest bar of chocolate. It weighed 4,410 kilograms (9,720 pounds) and measured 5.6 metres (18.4 feet) by 2.75 metres (9 feet). The previous record had been set by a 3,580-kilogram (7,892-pound) bar made in Italy in 2007.

ARMOUR

Under a statute of 1313, enacted during the reign of Edward II, it is illegal for a British Member of Parliament to enter the House of Commons wearing full armour. It decrees, in Anglo-Norman dialect, ‘that in all Parliaments, Treatises and other Assemblies which should be made in the realm of England for ever that every Man shall come without all Force and Armour’. It has never been formally repealed.

ART

The Chilean artist Marco Evaristti displayed an exhibit at a museum in Denmark in 2000 that featured 10 blenders containing live goldfish. Guests were invited to turn on the blenders. This led to the museum director being charged with animal cruelty, though he was later acquitted.

In 2004, Evaristti’s Ice Cube Project set itself the objective of painting the exposed tip of a small iceberg in Greenland red. This was achieved with the help of two icebreakers and a 20-man crew. Three fire hoses and 3,000 litres (660 gallons) of paint were used to paint the iceberg blood-red. The artist commented: ‘We all have a need to decorate Mother Nature because it belongs to all us.’

In 2007, Evaristti hosted a dinner party at which he served agnolotti pasta that was topped with a meatball cooked in the artist’s own fat, removed earlier in the year in a liposuction operation. Later the same year, he draped the peak of Mont Blanc with red fabric. He was arrested and detained for attempting to paint the peak red.

MATISSE, PAINTING, STRESS

ARTICHOKE

The first ‘Californian Artichoke Queen’, crowned in 1948 in Castroville, California, was Marilyn Monroe. Castroville calls itself the Artichoke Capital of the World.

In 1959, the Castroville Artichoke Advisory Board was formed and the town has held an annual Artichoke Festival ever since, with the food available including fried, grilled, sauteed, pickled, marinated and fresh artichokes, as well as artichoke cream soup and artichoke cupcakes.

In 2018, the countries eating most artichokes were Italy (394,000 tonnes), Egypt (319,000 tonnes) and Spain (196,000 tonnes), with these three accounting for more than half the global consumption. The countries eating most artichokes per capita were Italy, Peru and Spain.

ARTIFICIAL LEG

When a plastic right leg, dressed in a stocking and a black shoe, was found in a street in Newport, Isle of Wight, in 1996, a police inspector who was trying to trace its owner commented, ‘I would have thought that the person concerned has noticed it is missing.’

AMPUTATION, FLAMINGO

ASCENSION ISLAND

In January 2005, the Royal Mail admitted that the British dependency of Ascension Island in the South Atlantic had not received any post since the previous October because they had been sending it to Asunción, the capital of Paraguay, by mistake.

Ascension Island was discovered by the Portuguese navigator João da Nova on 21 May 1501, which was Ascension Day. Hence the name.

ASCOT

In 1711, Queen Anne decided that a patch of land in an area of England called East Cote was ideal for ‘horses to gallop at full stretch’, and that was the start of Ascot Racecourse. It was then more than century before the British parliament passed an Act of Enclosure in 1813 ensuring that Ascot Heath, though Crown property, would be kept and used in perpetuity as a public racecourse.

The regulations for Royal Ascot week range from mildly eccentric to very strict. For example:

• Divorcees were banned from the Royal Enclosure until 1955; convicted criminals and undischarged bankrupts are still banned. In the 1920s, women in the Royal Enclosure were forbidden to smoke.

• According to Ascot’s Royal Enclosure dress code, ‘Her Majesty’s Representative wishes to point out that only formal day dress with a hat or substantial fascinator will be acceptable.’

• Gentlemen must wear morning dress, including a waistcoat, with a top hat. ‘A gentleman may remove his top hat within a restaurant, a private box, a private club or that facility’s terrace, balcony or garden.’

• It is traditional that when the reigning monarch finishes lunch in the Royal Box, everyone else must stop eating.

• The late Princess Diana is the only woman to have been allowed in the Royal Enclosure bare-legged.

ASH

The name of the ash tree comes from the Old English word aesc, meaning spear. Winged seeds of an ash are called samara. They are also known as keys, wingnuts and helicopters.

Ash was the name, in Old English, for the letter æ, formed by joining an ‘a’ and ‘e’ together.

The first man to have his ashes taken into space was Star Trek creator Gene Roddenberry in 1992. Those ashes were brought back to earth but 7 grams of them were scattered in space in 1997.

‘Ashes will always blow back into the face of the thrower.’ Nigerian proverb

TREES

ASH WEDNESDAY

The name of Ash Wednesday comes from the practice of placing ashes from palm branches on the heads of Christian worshippers and blessing them with the words ‘remember that you are dust, and to dust you shall return’. Ash Wednesday is 46 days before Easter, being the 40 fasting days of Lent plus six Sundays, which are seen as feast days.

Until 1715, Ash Wednesday was marked in the British royal household by an officer known as the King’s Cock Crower imitating a cockerel, in remembrance of St Peter being called back to repentance by a cock crow. An 18th-century account explains how this grand tradition came to be abandoned:

‘On the first Ash Wednesday after the accession [in 1714] of the House of Hanover, as the Prince of Wales, afterwards George II, was sitting down to supper, this officer suddenly entered the apartment, before the chaplain said grace, and crowed “past ten o’clock”. The astonished Prince, not understanding English, and mistaking the tremulation of the crow for mockery, concluded that this ceremony was intended as an insult, and instantly rose to resent it; when, with some difficulty, he was made to understand the nature of the custom, and that it was intended as a compliment, and according to court etiquette. From that period the custom was discontinued.’

LENT

ASHES, The

The idea behind the Ashes cricket trophy dates back to England’s first home cricket defeat by Australia in 1882, which led to a mock obituary in The Sporting Times: ‘In affectionate remembrance of English cricket, which died at the Oval on 29th August, 1882.’ A note at the end said: ‘The body will be cremated and the ashes taken to Australia.’ However, there were no physical ashes until the following year when two Australian sisters, remembering the Sporting Times obituary, burned the bails after an English cricket victory in Australia to give the English some real ashes to return to the motherland. The ashes now found inside the urn at Lord’s Cricket Ground in London are from those bails burned in 1883.

ASPARAGUS

People have been eating asparagus since ancient times, with both the Greeks and Romans providing records detailing instructions for growing it and for medicinal uses. The Greeks in particular recommended using asparagus to cure everything from toothache to heart disease.

Roman emperors employed people with the specific job of collecting wild asparagus, and Roman aristocrats took asparagus with them when they conquered new lands.

In the early 17th century, King Louis XIV of France ordered special green-houses to grow asparagus.

Peru is the world’s largest exporter of asparagus; the largest importer, by a very long way, is the United States.

The word ‘asparagus’ comes from the Greek asparagos, meaning a shoot or sprout. The word has been known in English since the 16th century, when it was also known as ‘sperage’ or ‘sparage’. In the 17th and 18th centuries it was commonly also known as ‘sparrow-grass’.

In his diary for 20 April 1667, Samuel Pepys wrote: ‘Brought home with me from Fenchurch-Street a hundred of sparrowgrass.’

CUPCAKE, CURRY, HERON-ALLEN, SHOPPING TROLLEYS

ASSHOLE

In 2010, the American Civil Liberties Union sued the police on behalf of a woman who had been issued a disorderly conduct citation when she yelled ‘asshole’ at a motorcyclist who swerved close to her.

As a result, Philadelphia State Police agreed in January 2011 to stop issuing citations to people who call motorcyclists assholes, or for similar uses of bad language.

BLACK HOLE

ASTROLOGY

The Babylonians invented the Zodiac signs around 700 BC, but the Greeks, in the 4th century BC, were the first to cast personal horoscopes. The Iranian calendar is based on Zodiac signs.

According to a 1998 survey by Touchline Insurance in the UK, people born under the sign of Sagittarius make fewer insurance claims than those born under any other Zodiac sign. Cancer, Aquarius and Aries make the highest number of claims, while people born under Capricorn were revealed as the clumsiest, with the most claims for accidental damage.