L. M. Boyd Selections

Below are 1064 bits of trivia that pertain to the numerous Ancient and Medieval cultures. L. M. Boyd graciously gave me permission to reprint these selections of his newspaper column, which appeared locally in the daily edition of the Seattle Post-Intelligencer under "Mike Mailway."

L. M. Boyd retired at the end of December 2000, but popular demand persuaded him to revive the column, mixing previously published tidbits with items that have been rewritten or updated. Please feel free to bring to my attention any errors or clarifications and I will fix or amend the selections accordingly. However, I do not have direct contact with Mr. Boyd. You can write to Mr. Boyd at P.O. Box 99126, Seattle, WA, 98199. Thank you, Mr. Boyd, for bringing a bit of fun to our morning coffee breaks!

Includes selections submitted by Cara Carlsdottir

Q: A sailor on a ship 200 miles out to sea tosses a bucket on a line over the side and pulls up water fresh enough to drink. Where is he?
 A: Off the mouth of the Amazon. That's possible out there.

When a grazing cow chomps down on a tuft of grass, she thrusts her head away from herself to cut it free. But a grazing horse to slice loose a mouthful jerks his head toward himself.

Stratford, Ontario, is another Shakespearean Festival town. Youngsters there go to Romeo and Juliet Elementary Schools, and to King Lear High. When you visit there, you can stay in the "As You Like It Motel." Understand it's a pretty little hamlet.

Poetic folk, the Portuguese. They call a hummingbird a "Beija Flor" meaning "kiss the flower." A bit genteel for a bird that elects to eat 50 times a day, no?

Do you know a Lloyd? Is his hair gray? Should be. "Lloyd" comes from the Welsh meaning gray.

A 14th-century satirical poem tells how a certain king's courtiers tried to get on his better side by doing chores around the castle. Such as grooming his horse. Name of the horse was "Favel." Report is our "to curry favor" is a twist on the original term in the poem: "To curry Favel." Maybe so. This one's suspect.

Almost all redheads inherit their hair color from their fathers. Or so say the genetics experts.

"Yule" started out as a 12-day heathen feast.

Ireland's Irish know potatoes came late. Their staple since the Bronze Age had been oats. Don't know what those centuries of oat-eating did for their cholesterol, but their life expectancy breaks no records.

Confucius isn't a Chinese name, but K'ung Fu-Tzu is.

Street pollsters say they can't find one person in 1,000 who knows the difference between Luxembourg and Liechtenstein. If you're a student, ask your teacher to explain the difference. If you're a teacher, ask the principal.

Name of Iceland's capital, "Reykjavik," means "smoking bay." So called by Vikings. What they saw thereabouts was geothermal steam, but they knew nothing of that.

You think modern warfare started with gunpowder? So did I. But evidently not. According to those renowned historians Will and Ariel Durant: In 399 B.C. in the Greek City-State of Syracuse, Dionysius the Elder wanted a better weapon than a sword. So his engineers invented the catapult.

Mythmakers of ancient England spoke of a monster in the shape of an emaciated cow called "Chichevache" that ate nothing but faithful wives. The bit of lore eventually lost currency. Some English say it was too silly. Some Irish say the old cow starved to death.

In the India of old, certain wise men prescribed that a wife should be one-third the age of her husband. Ideally, they averred, if he were 24, she should be 8.

Item No. 511D in our Love and War man's files: "In 5,000 years of recorded human history, polygamy has been much more common than monogamy."

Historians say those Native Americans called the Nez Perce didn't pierce their noses. Why the early French so named them is a mystery. "Nez Perce" means "pierced nose."

You and I aren't the first to notice that the philodendron likes to grow up tree trunks. In Greek, "philo" means "love" and "dendron" means "tree."

It's only a coincidence that "nasa" in Hebrew means "to go up."

Was the custom in Worcestershire once to give a bough of mistletoe to the cow that bore the first calf after New Year's. You didn't have to kiss her.

"Aggravate" used to mean "to make heavy."

Q: If no asps lived in Cleopatra's Egypt, how come the story says she was bitten by one?
A: Because "Egyptian Cobra" wouldn't fit in the headline, I suspect. No, too flip. Blame translation errors.

Was a time when the horses in Japan wore straw sandals.

Makers of medieval calendars marked two days of each month as evil days. Called them the "Dies Mali." During which nothing good was supposed to happen. Their label came down as our word "dismal."

Do you regard the renowned painter and sculptor, Michaelangelo, as one of the greatest poets of all time? His contemporaries did.

In Iran, too, shaking your head from side to side means "yes."

Q: How did 13 come to be called a "baker's dozen"?
A: Bakers in early England were fined for short-weighting bread loaves. So they tossed in an extra loaf for each dozen to legalize the average loaf weight.

Under colonial law, no Pilgrim could wear that Pilgrim's hat — wide brim, high crown — unless he owned property worth at least 200 pounds.

If the chair on which the bishop sat had not been called a "cathedra," the building in which the chair was kept would not have been called a "cathedral." If the saint's cape had not been called a "chapele," the building in which it was kept would not have been called a "chapel," nor would the guard at the building, the keeper of the cloak, have been called a "chaplain."

On tombstones in ancient Sparta were names of warriors killed in battle and women who died in childbirth. No others got tombstone inscriptions.

Q: More naked females than naked males have been portrayed in works of art throughout history, except in one place. Name it.
A: Ancient Greece.

Pity the Incas of Peru didn't have movies. They had popcorn.

In the lordly manors of ancient England, one servant was assigned to clean the pots and pans, and this worthy's job title was a noun we still use, but differently: "blackguard."

An "underslave" was what the old Romans called a slave owned by a slave.

Q: How do you account for the fact that fancy rice dishes seem native to Holland?
A: Because rice dishes were native to the Dutch East Indies where Netherlanders once practiced a little imperialism.

Yes, as reported here, anthropologists know of no human society whose children do not play hide and seek. But I left something out. Other animals play the game, too. Otters do. So do young deer.

In Middle English, "fens" was a marsh, that's true, but also was short for "defense," whence the name of that sport called "fencing."

It's a matter of record that the Aztecs were extremely clean, and the Spanish conquistadors were extremely dirty, and the Spaniards won.

Q: What did Julius Caesar and Alexander the Great have in common?
A: Epileptic seizures and the personal conviction of each that he was divine.

Historians have much to say about William the Conqueror's Domesday Book — England's first official census of who owned what land and who lived on same. William much wanted to know, so he could confiscate property and divvy it up among his friends. But he never got a chance to read the book. His horse stumbled and the iron pommel on his saddle tore him up. Fatally.

"Preposterous" comes from Latin meaning "before and after." Originally it was supposed to convey how ridiculous it is to put something first that ought to be last. Such as a cart before a horse.

The old Romans thought a person's health changed every seven years. They also thought a mirror reflected a person's health, good or bad. It was a twist on this combination that gave us the superstitious notion that a broken mirror foretold seven years bad luck.

Q: How long has the famous Vienna Boys' Choir been singing?
A: Since 1498 — six years after Columbus first sailed west.

Not only can you float in the Red Sea, but you can float on your side. Or so correspondents report.

"Amateur" comes from the Latin "amator" meaning "lover."

A 14th century alchemist named Geber translated into Latin the works of an 8th century alchemist named Jabir ibn Hayyan. But few could understand the translation. According to one word tracer, it was from Geber's name that we got the word "gibberish."

Q: Who first sculpted a nude woman?
A: A Greek named Praxiteles. Insofar as is known. In the 4th Century B.C. Of Aphrodite.

So many words have more than one definition, however outdated. Take "bishop." It once meant "to kill by drowning." And "to file down the teeth of a horse to obscure its true age thus to get a higher sale price."

Unwesternized Chinese never talk while they eat.

Remarkable what governments do to prop up their nations' ailing industries. Take England during the reign of Charles II. The woolen trade was hurting. Badly. So a law was passed that required all coffins to be lined with flannel.

Q: What European is credited with the discovery of Brazil?
A: One of Columbus' captains, Vicente Yanez Pinzon. He was master of La Niña on Columbus' first trip. Eight years later, he lit out on his own. Pinzon took back an opossum, the first marsupial Europeans had seen. Think of that! A pouch!

In our alphabet, some letters signify more than one sound. Some sounds are signified by more than one letter. Client asks why. When the Romans invaded the British Isles, they imposed Latin on the locals. Latin has only 26 letters. Not enough to handle the 44 sounds in their spoken tongues. So the locals simply wove Latin into their own language. Not an ideal wedding of words, but it served. Still does.

Many Europeans claim to be direct descendants of Charlemagne. Maybe because he had four successive wives and six concubines. Hardly noteworthy numbers for potentates. Some bartenders in Vegas have lengthier lists, I believe. Still, in founding the first empire in Western Europe after the fall of Rome, Charlemagne kept pretty busy, and couldn't be expected to break all the records in romance, too.

England's archives list women charged with witchcraft between 1556 and 1718. The most common given name on lengthy list is Ann.

Leonardo da Vinci knew how to make the camera. He just didn't know how to make the film.

If you want to discipline youngsters the way the Iroquois did theirs, don't spank them, dunk them in water.

If your name is Fletcher, odds are somebody among your ancestors made arrows.

Item No. 3927-C in our Love and War man's file details part of the law in medieval England against illicit romantic affairs. A widow caught in the physical act could be fined 20 shillings, but a young unmarried woman so apprehended was only liable for 10 shillings.

Q: Where'd our words "hocus pocus" come from?
A: Norse legend. Depicted therein was a sorcerer named "Ochus Bochus."

If you committed a murder on a weekday in medieval England, you could be fined 10 shillings. But if you did it on a Sunday, the fine was 20 shillings. So it was writ in William the Conqueror's Domesday Book of A.D 1086.

Greek fighters 35 centuries ago wore boxing gloves on their right hands only.

"Sean-tigh" is Gaelic for "old house." You pronounce it "shanty."

In Cerreto, Italy, lived a family of bunco artists named "Ciarlatano." From them we got the word "charlatan."

Roman soldiers ate onions. Thought that made them brave. If true, there'd be a lot of brave people. Onions rank No. 1 among vegetables worldwide.

A horse can see in just about all directions — except one. It has a blind spot between the eyes directly in front. Am told that's why a horse is likely to rear back, if you try to pat it on its face. You need to pat it on the neck where it can see what you're up to.

In yesteryear's England, a widow didn't have clear-cut property rights. She was suddenly helpless. So vulnerable. To survive, she had to remarry, quickly, if possible. She was prey, therefore, to any romantic fellow who got there first. The etiquette of the era was plain and simple: It was not proper for a widow to receive a marriage proposal while the body of her late husband was still in the house.

Before people gave up meat for Lent, they celebrated with a "carnival." That word stems from "carne vale" meaning "goodbye, meat."

Green, blue and purple may look different to the Navajos, but they use the same word for all three.

The original "esquire" — the man, not the magazine — was a young noble apprenticed to a knight. "Esquire" was one rank below "gentleman."

Q: Where'd we get the word "hello"?
A: From the Anglo-Saxon phrase "be whole" meaning "stay healthy" or something similar.

Plato did not jog, diet or take maintenance medications. Said he: "Attention to health is the greatest hindrance to life."

Q: First kitchen utensil invented is said to be the ladle. What was the second kitchen utensil invented?
A: The apple corer, probably. Early specimens made from animal bones date far back. Scientists think such instruments were needed by prehistoric elderly who'd lost their teeth.

Greek rainmakers dipped oak branches in water when praying for rain, and sometimes it rained thereafter. The Romans threw clay images into the Tiber River, and that, too, was oftentimes followed by rain. Teutonic rainmakers poured water over nude girls. That never did produce rain, but they clung to the ritual.

Q: Julius Caesar said, "I came, I saw, I conquered." But where'd he come, what'd he see, who'd he conquer?
A: In what's now northern Turkey, he saw the troops of Pharnaces II, King of Pontus, and beat up same in the Battle of Zela, then sent a message to the Roman Senate: "Veni, vidi, vici."

Saint Jerome was a Dalmatian. Don't get smart. He came from Dalmatia. He said, "Matrimony is always a vice. All that can be done is to excuse and to sanctify it."

The common posture of prayer for centuries was the spreading of the arms with palms and face cast upward toward the heavens. Steepling of the hands under the chin was an artist's creation of recent generation.

Public kissing was serious in old Italy. Early in the 16th century, Pietro Lando, the podesta at Padua, saw his son kiss the young man's one and only girlfriend on a public street, and Pietro had his son beheaded. Harsh.

That Lady Godiva rode nude on a white horse through the streets of Coventry makes an excellent story. It's understandable, I think, that nobody pays attention to the female archivists in Great Britain who claim the records show Lady Godiva was not nude but merely "stripped of all signs of her rank." We do not need archivists like that.

In the Ptolemy Dynasty of Ancient Egypt, each tax collector personally had to pony up the tax of any evader assessed in said collector's assigned group. History records that those collectors became exceedingly dangerous hunters of men.

One of the most brilliant thinkers of the Middle Ages was a scholar named John Duns Scotus. But scoffers in the 16th century ridiculed his name to give us our word "dunce."

Q: The Atlantic Ocean is choppier than the Pacific, right?
A: Choppier, true. But the Pacific is bulgier. Its sea swells are higher.

Halloween's trick-or-treat started in Ireland.

"Finance" in Latin meant "to end a debt." Ha!

Q: How come chicken pox is called that?
A: The old English word "gican" meant "itch." The ailment started out as itching pox.

The job of the alpine St. Bernard dogs was not to bring to safety the snowbound, but to go by the most direct route to the victim, and thus mark a trail for the rescuing monks.

Jean Nicot was a 16th-century French foreign ambassador who first took tobacco to France. Maybe he shouldn't have. It's in his dubious honor that we got the word "nicotine."

Q: Why is the bathroom called "the john"?
A: An Englishman named Sir John Harrington was involved in the earliest water-closet designs.

In some places around Scotland, it's still the quaint custom for an engaged couple to lick their thumbs and press them together to make the romantic commitment. This is not the only way it's done, however.

Chrysanthemums grow wild in China.

"Shambles" used to mean "slaughterhouse."

Aristotle stuttered.

Q: Who actually brought the first horses to the Western Hemisphere? How many? And when?
A: Hernando Cortez, 17, in 1518. That's history's first horses. Prehistoric little horses were here 10,000 years earlier.

You can't call it "Port" wine, according to the law of Portugal, unless the grapes were grown in Porto.

Q: All oil floats on water, right?
A: Not right. Oil of cloves doesn't. Nor oil of wintergreen. Some oils are heavier than water, that's all.

The night before a soldier was to be elevated to knighthood — in the Middle Ages, this — he was given a public bath.

Q: Ancient Romans crucified people. Who put a stop to it?
A: Constantine I, first Christian emperor of Rome.

"Obstetrics," that medical field dealing with childbirth, comes from the Latin meaning "stand by." Of course, of course.

Q: How can we "shell" corn when corn doesn't have shells?
A: Goes back to when Indians stripped off corn kernels with mussel shells. Or so the word mechanics think.

Hunters in old England fed their dogs the entrails of the animal they killed. Their word for a heap of those entrails collected on the game's hide gave us our word "quarry."

Q: You've talked about kings with harems of women, but how about queens with harems of men?
A: There've been a few. Queen Kahena, a Berber in Northwest Africa, was one. She kept 400 male athletes in her lockup.

A scholar who has studied the matter says no synonym for the word "stutter" can be found in any American Indian language.

Q: Has there ever been a king or queen who was a twin?
A: Know of none. Unless "The Man in the Iron Mask" really was the twin brother of Louis XIV. But that remains a mystery.

The Netherlands town of Edam — where those redcoated cheese balls come from — has a coat of arms: a cow with three stars.

Q: Why is "Poland" so named?
A: Comes from an ancient Slavik tribe known as the "Polanie," a local word for "field dwellers."

Aristotle thought farming was "natural," but retail trade was "unnatural."

Q: What sort of design was on the first coins ever minted?
A: Face-to-face heads of a bull and lion. About 640 B.C. in Lydia, part of what's now Turkey. So reports a coin expert.

Why the ancient Egyptians so disliked red hair I don't know. But the historical footnotes suggest they feared red-haired people. And their prejudice spread to the Greeks and Romans.

Q: Didn't the older Australian aborigine man have many wives?
A: If influential. The younger man had none. If he wanted one, he had to rent her.

Old Persian Proverb: "Fortunate parents who have fine children usually have fortunate children who have fine parents."

If you're going to own a camel, feed it, or it'll eat your tent. Camels do that.

Was none other than that pioneer medicine man Hippocrates who first put into the record that fat people don't tend to live as long as thin people.

In the Japanese roots of the word "karate," "kara" means "empty," and "te" means "hand."

In old England, 10 families equaled a tithing. 10 tithings equaled a shire. Each shire elected a reeve. That "shire reeve" came to be known as a "sheriff."

Do people learn from history? That mountain called Merapi on Java has erupted 70 times in the last 1,000 years, so is said by some to be the world's most active volcano. Just about everybody in Indonesia knows that. Yet nearly two million people live in Merapi's flanking lava lanes.

What the Pilgrims so sorely wished they'd brought with them was a plow or two, according to the historical footnotes. Still, they made do without. For 12 years. Until they shaped a few with the tools at hand. And more ships came.

In Asia more than 200,000 years ago lived a species of 10-foot ape that weight half a ton.

A luminescent marine worm with a long name surfaces in the Caribbean periodically, and glows. It's now thought Christopher Columbus spotted such worms, and was overjoyed, certain he knew what they were. He got that wrong, too.

In William Shakespeare's day, houses didn't have chimneys. Fires, yes. Chimneys, no. Or if any did, they were most exceptional.

The word "mortgage" traces back into Norman French to something very nearly like "death pledge," but no doubt you suspected as much.

Longevity isn't enough. The Pied Piper legend had been around for a long time. But it took robert Browning's lengthy verse about it to make it famous.

Q: Who were the first people on earth to write?
A: Accountants — people who had to count things.

A long-missing soldier returns to find his wife remarried. She'd thought him dead. Which husband rightfully gets the lady, inquires a client. Usually, it's her choice, but laws vary. The ancient Babylonians gave her back to the returned soldier as though she were property. And so she was back then.

The Greek, Aristotle, thought he was a member of the supreme race.

An archeologist named Peter Schmidt discovered that tribesmen near Africa's Lake Victoria learned how to make steel long before Europeans did.

A certain husband in ancient Athens was advised by a male associate that he had bad breath. He asked his wife, "Why didn't you tell me?" His wife said, "I thought all men smelled like that." This historical footnote shows how isolated women were then and there. The early Athens woman was rarely allowed to meet any man other than her husband and a relative or two.

Bricks in pueblos of New Mexico measure 33 by 15 by 10 centimeters — almost exactly the proportions of the bricks put into Egypt's Temple of Hatshepsut in 1450 B.C.

"Teen" is a Scottish word for grief.

Nor could Aristotle figure out why some whales beached themselves to die. It's an ancient mystery, that one.

Q: Were any women among old England's court jesters?
A: Some. Kings and princes designated males as royal fools. Queens and princesses appointed female fools. Historical footnotes suggest female fools were harder to find.

The Dutch word for the fruit "orange" means "Chinese apple."

Q: Where did celery come from?
A: Roman invaders found it growing wild in England and cultivated it.

You may recall our Love and War man has said a popular utterance on a first date is: "I want to know more about you." He now says an occasional literary lover at this point quotes Plate: "You can discover more about a person in an hour of play than in a year of conversation."

Q: The word "bamboo" is Malay for "explosion." So why is the bamboo plant called that?
A: Natives used to clean foliage out of the groves with fire before harvesting the stems. You know those hollow chambers in bamboo? Heat exploded them.

You've read dinner guests in 17th-century France had to bring their own knives. That was lowbrow. In Paris and Versailles, dinner guests had to bring their own waiters. That was highbrow.

In Britain, if the name of the place ends in "by," you can figure it came down from the Vikings. "By" is the common Scandinavian word for village. That's why Scandinavian "by-laws" are so called, too. "Town-laws."

The Pilgrims fattened their hogs on clams.

Ask the card player in your family which of the kings doesn't hold a sword. No, look again. The King of Diamonds holds an ax.

The letter "H" started out as a Phoenician drawing of a fence.

Q: What's the difference between an emerald and an aquamarine?
A: Only the color. Both are beryl. A trace of chromium makes it an emerald — green. A trace of iron makes it an aquamarine, or blue-green.

Clearly, that current penchant for first names only is more than a fad. You know what Michelangelo called himself? Michelangelo.

In A.D. 654, a Saxon monk founded Saint Botolph's Town in England. Time eroded syllables off that name until it became Boston. And the name as such eventually was exported across the North Atlantic to where good little villages grew great. Hardly a Saxon monk left alive would recognize it.

According to the historical footnotes, a common expression in ancient Rome was the Latin version of "Repetition is the mother of learning."

Four out of five species of rose come from Asia.

Q: Who were the first people to use finger rings as marriage symbols?
A: The old Romans. They particularly liked the ring with stones set all the way around the band.

Not one person on the Mayflower's historic pilgrimage had a middle name.

Oarsmen powered ancient Greek warships called triremes. With 170 oars stacked in three levels on each side. Trick was to get up to 12 knots within 30 seconds. Ramming speed. That's how they sank the enemy. Rammed them.

An Arabian proverb goes: "If you have health, you have hope. If you have hope, you have everything."

Q: Why is the Adriatic Sea called that?
A: It was named for the Roman port of Adria. But it's no longer a port. The Po River flooded and the bayshore shifted and Adria is now 14 miles inland.

Seek pleasure. Avoid pain. So advised the philosophical Greek Epicurus. That convinced almost everybody he was smart. Epicurus also thought the sun was about two feet in diameter.

Q: What men started the fashion of wearing neckties?
A: Orators of ancient Rome. They feared loss of voice and fancied they needed something to protect their throats. What they wore was called a "chin cloth."

"Sir" comes from the Latin "senior."

Oldest known Last Will and Testament was left by Nik'ure, son of an Egyptian pharaoh. He died in 2601 B.C. In that will was familiar phrasing roughly translatable as "being of sound mind and body..."

If it's a "conclave," it's secret.

French for "sour wine" is "vin aigre." Whence: "vinegar."

Camels don't sweat. Don't pant, either.

Tell the bartender the Chinese invented whiskey, too.

Q: I've read horse collars weren't invented until about A.D. 1000. So how did earlier horses pull loads?
A: With their tails.

"Flowing in of the tide" was the first meaning of our word "flood."

Q: What makes honey such a good antibiotic?
A: It draws moisture out of everything it touches. Germs can't live without moisture.

First hospitals in the Middle Ages were places where poor people went to die. It has been pointed out the great difference was they were poor before they got there.

Q: What's the difference in sea vernacular between "ahoy" and "avast"?
A: Ahoy means hail, avast means stop.

Greeks and Persians fought. The Persian king captured the commander at the Greek colony of Ionia. The commander shaved the head of a trusted slave and tattooed thereon: "Incite Ionia To Revolt." In time he sent the slave through the lines to his son-in-law. There the slave shaved his head again, and the son-in-law launched a revolt. It failed. The Persian king invaded Greece, which suffered mightily. As for the slave, he would've fared better with a Page Boy bob.

Q: You said the spinning top has been a plaything in every society. What did Eskimos make tops out of?
A: Ice.

Every Greek statue of a naked female depicts a goddess. Every Greek vase painted with a naked female depicts a prostitute. Can you confirm these two statements by a highly reliable source? Am still checking.

Q: Where'd we get the "late" in the phrase "the late John Doe" or whomever?
A: From "lately deceased." Started in England four centuries ago.

It was Richard II who introduced the handkerchief into England. Didn't do his reputation much good. His peers thought him a sissy. Or their word for it.

Q: The onion is the national flower of what country?
A: Wales, almost. Actually, Wales' "National Flower" is the leek. Close enough. The leek is an Old Country cousin of the onion.
Reader-contributed clarification

If the ancient Greeks weren't sure who'd fathered the baby, they said it was the child of their greater god, Jupiter.

The sage Jana Hollingsworth says: If you pronounce "Caitlin" according to Gaelic spelling rules rather than by English spelling rules, it comes out "Kat'leen."

Q: England's King Charles II acknowledged 14 illegitimate children. How many of his mistresses can historians actually identify by name?
A: Thirteen, so far.

In the Roman republic of 500 B.C., the senate could appoint a supreme national commander for a limited time in case of emergency. While in charge, his word was law. So he was given a title that in Latin meant "I have spoken." It was "Dictator."

In this one way more than any other have clans throughout history rid themselves of unwanted people — they've set fire to the unwanted's house, hut, hovel, shed, tent, whatever. It's how we came by the idiom "got fired."

What's now Ohio, Indiana, Illinois and Missouri once was extremely rugged terrain. Sharp mountains with volcanoes. Ragged gorges. Where are they now? Still there. Rocks and dirt and sediment filled in the gaps, eventually to be topped off with the farmer's favorite friend, rich soil. The fierce landscape of old is two miles down.

When you next eat a pancake for breakfast, if ever, bear in mind it's just about the oldest prepared food in human history. Not that particular pancake, no. But Egypt's wheat cakes of 2500 B.C. weren't all that much different.

The Bedouin nomad rotates his tent panels. So they get even wear. Much as we rotate tires.

A fastball pitcher is much admired today, but not as was his prehistoric predecessor. The tribal champion before device weaponry was the man who killed game with thrown stones. He fed his followers, and defended them, and maybe even won the Fred Flintstone Award or whatever. Some aspects of baseball were devised before the written word.

Q: How did Egypt's King Menes die?
A: A hippo ate him.

Rainstorms in ancient Germany washed over old ruins. They exposed curious gold coins. These, from before Roman times. The coins were called "rainbow plates." They lead to the "pot of gold at the end of the rainbow" fancy.

Q: Why don't I ever read anything about ancient Roman prisons?
A: Weren't any. According to historians, some of the convicted were sent to their deaths through hard labor in the mines and quarries, others to their deaths by big beasts in amphitheaters.

There were tattoo artists before there were farmers.

Q: Why do some countries make it a crime to commit suicide?
A: Explanations vary, but it should be noted such laws allow governments legally to confiscate the property of the deceased. That's how it worked in ancient Rome.

Back when most people ate off wooden trenchers, many objected to crockery plates because they dulled knives.

First name of the Queen of Sheba was Balkis.

The powerful William the Conqueror became the even more powerful Duke of Normandy, and thereafter enforced the Truce of God. It forbade violence on Mondays, Tuesdays, Thursdays and Fridays. It cut the murderers' work week down to three days.

It's a matter of historical record that the Romans invented the folding pocket knife. No doubt, they didn't call it that. Neither their tunics, the underwear, or their togas, the outerwear, had pockets. Maybe they called it a purse knife, don't know.

King Henry VIII believed the artichoke was an aphrodisiac. Don't know who sold him that notion, but it was a pretty good way to move artichokes. Henry bought a whole bunch of them for the Ladies in Waiting.

Wives and children of the military long were officially designated as "camp followers," once a respectable term. They've only been known as "dependents" since about 1900.

Q: Who were first to play tennis?
A: The French. Eight centuries ago. Only they called it "Jeu de Paume" meaning "Game of the Palm." They batted the ball with open hand.

In no human tribe have left-handers been the majority.

Q: How did the Chinese come up with the idea for acupuncture?
A: Early Chinese ceremoniously jabbed pinpricks into selected compatriots to draw blood drops for sacrifice. Eventually, scholars believe, somebody realized those sacrificial donors enjoyed specific physical benefits linked to placement of the punctures.

It's a matter of historical record that Louis XIV owned 413 beds, plus, in a manner of speaking, an undetermined headcount of livestock therein.

Q: What's a "washed rind" cheese?
A: One periodically washed to keep it moist and supple as it ages. It's also flavored some by what it's washed with — saltwater, brandy, whatever.

That word "junk" started out as a seamen's term for leftover bits of rope and cable.

Archaeologists digging into an ancient ruin near Rome found graffiti on an outer wall with this loose street translation: "Nero is a weirdo."

Q: A man in Dublin about two centuries ago wagered he could coin a nonsense word that people eventually would use. He won his bet. What was the word?
A: Such is the fable about the word "quiz." At first it supposedly meant "an odd or eccentric person." But people kept asking what it meant, so their continuing questions finally gave the word a different definition. Not all word tracers support this origin tale.

In northwest Hungary is the town of Kocs where craftsmen built the best wagons of their time. From the name of their community came our word "coach."

In 1915, one Mr. Chubb of England paid the equivalent of $11,000 for Stonehenge and gave it to his dear wife. Some present. It wound up a few years later as a donation to the British government.

Q: Why is that tree called a dogwood?
A: Because a concoction brewed from its bark was thought to cure dogs of mange.

Evidence suggests prehistoric man chewed mustard seed with his meat.

So reproductive is the rabbit that it long has been the symbol of birth, rebirth, new life, however you want to say it. This, in fact, is why it came to be chosen by so many Westerners as the token animal of Easter.

You can say this about the Sahara: Only 15 percent of it is sand. So what's the rest? Gravel and rock.

Q: Why are "cacao" tree beans called "cocoa" beans?
A: Because the name of the cacao tree was misspelled cocoa by an early English trader, it's believed.

Still at large are positive persons who contend the only animal with a straight backbone is the camel.

Q: Did you ever dig up the origin of our word "humbug"?
A: Did indeed. Or one of the several proffered origins. England's King James II ordered his mint in Dublin to make coins of lead, pewter, whatever was at hand. Those coins had little intrinsic value. And the Irish called them "Uim bog" meaning "soft metal." Out of that came "humbug."

Punishment for smoking in India 350 years ago was the slitting of the smoker's nose.

That word "shivaree" — the noisy serenade of newlyweds — comes from a set of syllables that literally mean "headache."

That a "No Loitering" sign was posted at an ancient cemetery near Mill River, Mass., is not noteworthy. What's noteworthy is it was engraved on rock in the Phoenician language called Iberian Punic 200 years before Columbus' 1492 trip.

Q: What's a "scree slope"?
A: A flat pack of rocks on a mountainside. Scree comes from a Scandinavian word for landslide.

Students of antiquity say that petite pup known as the Chihuahua was bred by the Aztecs to be eaten by the Aztecs.

Several major battle scenes in Mel Gibson's "Braveheart" had to be reshot because some extras wore sunglasses and wristwatches in the first takes.

The Old Testament is written with a vocabulary of about 5,800 words. The New Testament, approximately 4,800 words. Today's newspaper, typically, 6,000 words.

Q: Why was it once against the law in France to wear green clothing?
A: It wasn't. But for a while after the French Revolution some citizens wearing green were apprehended, beaten, jailed, mistreated in whatever manner. Green was the symbolic color of the old-time royalty in France.

An execution by hanging takes 21 feet of rope.

European castles of old were built with rounded walls. Theory was battering rams would be less able to crash such buttresses than to punch down angular corners.

Q: What's the oldest manufactured building material still in use?
A: Bricks.

The French word "cahute" means cabin. Whence our word "cahoots." In early America, you were "in cahoots" with somebody if you were camped out together in one shelter.

Q: I've often heard it said so-and-so "can't hold a candle" to so-and-so. Where'd it come from?
A: Four centuries ago, young male servants called "link boys" held candles to light the way or work of privileged people in dark places. This was the simplest job for the least capable of hired help. Anyone who "couldn't hold a candle" to somebody was thought none too swift.

British kings and queens are expected to be seen both at horse races and boxing matches. U.S. chief executives don't show up at these events. Such are the traditional patterns.

Q: Did Europe ever have a common currency?
A: Under the Roman Empire it did. And some of Europe under Napoleon, too.

In the Vienna of 300 years ago, coffee was regulated as a drug. Coffee houses were suspect, and thought to be the birthing quarters of political conspiracies.

Q: In which sovereign nation are there no human births?
A: Vatican City.

How many times have you paused to consider that the quince has been under cultivation for more than 4,000 years?

Q: How come fire-breathing dragons were dreamed up long before anybody knew about dinosaurs?
A: South Pacific boaters in an antique age saw hugh lizards. Their flicking tongues in the sunlight looked like flames. Astonishing tales spread from there through Oriental ports filled China with dragon symbolism, and eventually reached even beyond the British Isles of Saint George. That's the theory.

Clip off a horse's mane and what you've got in stable talk is a "hogged mane."

Q: The people of what national origin are most likely to have red hair?
A: The Celts of Northern Ireland.

Did I say the King James Version of the Bible didn't contain the word "whale"? Wrong! Scholars report the original biblical texts alluded to them as great fish, but the King James Version used "whale" or "whales" a number of times.

Q: Who invented the screwdriver?
A: Who isn't in the record, but why is. It was devised to bolt knights into their armor.

How many of history's renowned figures were known to the world only by their nicknames? Start with Buddha, whose real name was Siddhartha Gautama. Add the Greek philosopher Plato. His actual name was Aristocles. Then there was the legendary Homer. But I don't know his real name. Nobody knows.

Q: What does a woman's bikini bathing suit and an ordinary garden trowel have in common?
A: Both have remained in use since antiquity without any design changes, because each is perfect for its purpose.

Some students of the Bible will tell you that you break a commandment when you say "Oh, heaven!" but not when you say, "Oh, hell!"

The metallic pointer that casts a shadow on a sundial is called a "gnomon." It was once a well-known word. Not anymore. Students of the language speculate that digital timepieces will make the word "hands" in reference to clocks as obscure as gnomon.

Where the Atlantic Ocean meets the North Sea above Scotland are the wind-swept Orkney Isles. On one of same is a stone cottage called the "Knap of Howar." Nobody's lived in it for 5,000 years. It's the oldest house in Northern Europe.

Time was under old Roman law when a father could sell his children at will or even kill them. Constantine changed all that. He decreed a father couldn't kill his children without cause.

Irish Catholics, or some of them, recognize more than 200 saints listed as St. Colman.

Q: How much money did William Shakespeare make in a typical year?
A: Equivalent of about $400, but I don't know how much that amounted to there and then.

"Geranium" comes from the Greek for "crane's bill." If you've seen more geraniums than cranes, you may not think a geranium looks like a crane's bill. But somebody thought so.

Q: If those sardines in that little can on my kitchen shelf had escaped the net to grow up, what would they be called?
A: Herring or pilchard, probably, or any of several related species. They became known as sardines after they were first caught near Sardinia in the Mediterranean.

"O" is the oldest letter in any known alphabet.

England's medieval guild, the Fan Makers, got started more than six centuries ago. Still exists, that guild. Its members do central heating and air conditioning.

Not every word mechanic accepts the common explanation that the "bull" in "bulldog" comes from that canine's history in bull-baiting spectacles. The "bull" is from the French "coule" for "ball" in an allusion to the dog's thick round head, say some. A few maybe.

National drink of Poland is mead.

Client asks if intense thought burns calories. How would I know? No, back up. The medicos say the mental energy needed to write Shakespeare's "Hamlet" could have been supplied by a few salted peanuts.

Chinese requires no punctuation.

Q: What was the name of those six males who were sole survivors of different ship disasters?
A: All were named Hugh Williams. One, on Dec. 5, 1660, when a ship sank in the Straits of Dover. Another, on Dec. 5, 1781, when a ship sank in the same waters. Still another, age 5, on Aug. 5, 1820, when a vessel sank in the Thames River. Yet another, on July 10, 1940, when a British trawler sank after hitting a German mine. Finally, two men, an uncle and his nephew with the same name, in an undated shipwreck.

The people's sweetener of choice for approximately 8,000 years was honey.

India's Butter Tree yields a sort of thick oil much like cow's milk butter, and it's used the same way.

First buttons were carved seashells. Decorations, not fasteners. Circa 2000 B.C. Credit the Chinese.

According to the historical footnotes, it was a tradition of Roman soldiers before going into battle to meet with their beauticians to have their hair curled and lacquered.

Nobody knows why Buddhist monks wear saffron-colored robes, not even the Buddhist monks.

Let me tell you about the real environmentalists of old. England passed its first smoke abatement law in 1273. Enforcers in 1306 convicted a manufacturer of burning coal, and beheaded him.

The Japanese 600 years ago made war kites as big as hang-gliders to hoist men as lookouts.

In the 16th century, Englanders with an opinion on paternity — just about everybody — went around saying, "He that bulls the cow must keep the calf."

Alfalfa came here from Chile. In 1854. How it got to Chile is not clear. Persians grew it in the fifth century B.C. A lot of people are interested in alfalfa. Some anyway.

Philip the Fair ruled France in the early 14th-century. It was he who decreed no unmarried woman could own more than one dress, unless she'd inherited a castle.

The first "belfry" was a war watchtower called a belfry before anyone ever hung a bell in it.

Ancient Ethiopians elected a dog as king.

"Thremilce" is what the Anglo-Saxons once called May, because their cows then could be milked three times a day.

The only Zodiac sign that doesn't have a living creature as its symbol is Libra with its Balance.

Q: What were the ancient Romans looking for when they invaded Britain?
A: Pearl fisheries. They found none. Some misinformed messenger had steered them wrong.

Vikings ate oatmeal. Mush. Don't know about cookies.

It was illegal by decree in bygone Cambodia to insult a rice plant.

You most likely didn't eat 4-1/2 pounds of licorice last year. But the average Hollander did. The Dutch call it "drop" — rhymes with "hope." And they've been devoted to licorice since long before they took interest in tulips of the 1500s. Since as far back as the 13th century.

"Jack, be nimble. Jack, be quick. Jack, jump over the candlestick." It was not just meaningless nonsense when first written, that nursery rhyme line. Englanders of old told fortunes that way. He who jumped over a lighted candle could expect good luck if the candle stayed lit. But if it went out, sorry, Jack.

Q: How come nobody knows where coconut palms originated?
A: Because coconuts float. They drift thousands of miles and take root wherever they wash ashore.

It was none other than Leonardo da Vinci who first noted for the record that a tree's age is recorded in its rings. He's the fellow who invented the car jack before cars were invented. That's right. He did.

Q: Who were the original "robber barons" for whom the term was coined?
A: Castle owners along the Rhine River in the Middle Ages. They forced boating passers-by to pay extortionate tolls.

Another physical act recognized in every known society is the shrug of shoulders to mean "I don't know."

Q: What "Man" was the Isle of Man named after?
A: "Manannan," the legendary Celtic lord of the sea.

Every third man in ancient Athens worked with marble.

Q: What makes you think the umbrella was invented to block sunshine, not rain?
A: Its name came from "umbra," Latin for "shadow," for one thing.

Much of East Africa is close to the equator. Year around there the sun rises every day at about the same time — 6 a.m. That's our time. In Swahili time, it's 0:00. First the Swahili culture chose to recognize sunrise as the start of each day. Reasonable. Then that culture chose to set the start of each day as the start of the daily time cycle. Reasonable. But we begin each day at midnight in the dead of darkness. Reasonable?

To countless Danes who have never chewed tobacco, the name "Copenhagen" means "Merchant's Harbor" to designate the capital city.

Q: Why do historians insist Nero did not play a fiddle while Rome burned?
A: Because the violin bow wasn't invented until centuries later in the Middle Ages. A lyre was responsible for that tale.

Chinese proverb: "Even as a hollow building echoes all sounds, so is a vacant mind open to all suggestions."

Q: How long have Mexicans been eating tamales?
A: All I know is history suggests the Aztecs offered them as gifts to the gods.

"To the ancients, the original Seven Seas of the known world were the Mediterranean, Iberian, Ionic, Aegean, Tyrhennian, Black and Red. Man's knowledge expanded greatly, but the old Seven Seas term lived on." So reports that sage C. F. Eckhardt.

Q: Haven't more females than males been depicted in the nude by painters and sculptors in every country?
A: Except in ancient Greece, yes.

Centuries after Christopher Columbus took molasses to the West Indies, it lubricated Western Hemisphere commerce. As wages for work, tender for goods. In all barter markets, it thrived, and especially in the slave trade. Thus, Georgia was populated in part by free folk offered 64 quarts each to settle there, and unfree folk bound over each for however many quarts. Now triangle traders no longer adore molasses. But it's still much admired by a better class of people, good cooks.

Pinocchio is Italian for "pine eyes."

Q: Did you say Queen Elizabeth never wears any underwear?
A: No, no, no, what I said was Queen Elizabeth I didn't wear underwear, nor did any of her contemporary Elizabethan ladies of England.

The Greeks say: "Not your friend but your enemy will tell you who you are." Interesting.

Q: When did people start using the nickname "Jack"?
A: In late A.D. 700, maybe earlier. No name is more common in nursery rhymes than Jack.

It was in 1676 that the English physician Sir Thomas Millington first discovered that plants have sex lives. Exactly how he found out is not in the record, but I believe it was legal.

Q: In the original Snow White story, the villain was an evil stepmother. Why did Walt Disney change the character to an evil queen?
A: He said stepmothers don't need that kind of image, they have it rough enough.

Some translations of Exodus XXII, 18 read: "Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live." This was the authority numerous European executioners cited when they put witches to death in bygone centuries. Certain scholars now, however, claim it was a mistake. The passage should have been translated: "Thou shalt not give a witch sustenance."

First thing an Eskimo of old did when he picked up a salmon was check out its gender. If female, he ate it. If male, he threw it to the dogs.

Irish Proverb No. 153B: "Nodding the head does not row the boat."

Q: How do the wildlifers know elephants get drunk on purpose?
A: Because the elephants return repeatedly to grazing grounds where they've found fermented fruit.

Wolves can bark, but they don't.

Q: How would I say "hello" in the classic manner of old Japan?
A: Bow from the waist, palms on thighs, heels together.

That fairy tale "Sleeping Beauty" — wherein the handsome prince falls in love with the young lady and awakens her with a kiss — dates back to a pair of ancient romantic stories call "Perceforest" and "Pentamerone." In these, the prince likewise falls in love with the young lady, and awakens her but with more than a kiss, then goes away.

Q: Who was the first king addressed as "Your Majesty"?
A: Henry VIII of England. Earlier kings were addressed as "Your Grace," "Your Excellent Grace," "Your High and Mighty Prince" and the old familiar favorite "Your Highness."

Gray wolves mate for life and fight to the death and make no noise at all during either activity.

Q: If camels don't store the bulk of their water in their humps, where do they store it?
A: In their muscles.

The Egyptians used pitch to embalm. The word "mummy," in fact, comes from the Arabic "mumiya" meaning pitch.

Q: History suggests Nicolaus Copernicus was the Polish genius who first theorized the earth traveled around the sun instead of vice versa. You suggested he was the father of buttered bread. How so?
A: As commander of Allenstein castle during a 16th-century plague, he coated baked goods with a paste from churned milk in the hope it would purify the food. It didn't. But the troops liked it. And everybody started wanting bread smeared with milk paste.

The ancient Greeks thought lettuce induced sleep. Many of them therefore served lettuce soup at the end of every evening meal.

Q: What's a tikka?
A: A pendant that many a woman in India hangs on her forehead. It means she's married.

In no society in the history of mankind have men and women been treated alike. Nor have they dressed alike. Nor have they done the same sorts of work. So wrote Vance Packard.

Q: If King Tut wasn't all that important, why is his tomb a big deal?
A: It was the only such tomb that hadn't been plundered by thieves. In 1922, archaeologist Howard Carter found it under the rubble of a later tomb.

The law of Old Rome allowed funeral processions to move only at night.

"Yacht" is a Dutch word, and such a boat clearly would have been called something else if the Dutch hadn't crafted the earliest version around 1660.

No, Scottish women never wear kilts.

Q: Where in the English-speaking world could a husband sell his wife to another man?
A: England until deep into the 19th century.

Two gallons of beer a day was part of the rations allocated to each youngster in the Children's Hospital of Norwich, England. This, in 1632. Beer is food, the English said. Maybe so. Serve it warm and it's just like soup. But two gallons per child?

Fishermen along India's Ganges for centuries have bred otters to chase fish into nets.

A Scottish leader named Sir William Wallace in 1305 was hanged, beheaded, disemboweled and quartered. Language mechanics sometimes mention this when they define the word "overkill."

If war is inevitable, so is defeat. For some, anyway. Ancient Greeks wanted nothing but winners in their military. And losers paid dearly. Historians say every great Greek battle commander eventually was exiled, sacked, indicted or fined.

As Marco Polo made his way across what's now Azerbaijan, he noticed surface seepage of oil, and with local advice smeared it on the skin lesions of his camels. It had been so used for ages.V

Spanish explorers saw wisps of mist in Florida's Everglades and thought they were gaseous images of the Holy Ghost. It became known as a netherworld where people went in but never came out. The aura of ominous mystery lasted for centuries.

Already mentioned were the teams of archers who competed in old England. On each side, the best-rated team shot arrows first, then the next-best-rated team did so. But they weren't always called "teams." In that sport, they originated the terms "first string" and "second string."

"Tis not safe to trust a left-handed man with money," penned the Spanish writer Quevedo a couple of centuries ago. A piece of popular nonsense, that. But really believed by many way back when.

Ireland's Irish, who know a thing or two about fighting, eat seaweed to fight the common cold.

Silk merchants centuries ago dug a labyrinth of tunnels under Lyons, France. So they could move their silk without getting it wet on rainy days. And so they could protect their designs from textile pirates. The passageways aren't traveled by silk sellers anymore. But to this day, others skulkers use them.

Some artist gave our ancestors the notion that Atlas held aloft the earth. Globe mapmakers perpetuated it. In Greek mythology, however, Atlas held up the heavens, not the earth.

Some people of the Andes in South America probably have common ancestry with some people of southern Japan. Scientists now so believe after DNA and virus tests of ancient remains.

That vicious fish called the barracuda got its name from a Spanish word for "overlapping teeth."

One band of Vikings did not raid by sea, but swarmed overland into the east. In their Scandinavian identity, they were called Russians, whence the national name Russia. In the eighth to 10th centuries, this.

Johann Sebastian Bach composed almost but not quite one cantata every week for six years.

Q: Understand a few early settlers of the Jamestown colony went immediately to live with the Indians. Why?
A: To find out what wild foods they could eat safely.

One way to deal with a rebellious son is prescribed in the Old Testament's Deuteronomy 21:18-21. Turn the boy over to the town elders to be stoned to death. That was in another land at another time, yea verily.

Q: What does the traditional woman of India wear under her sari?
A: A sort of vest that doesn't cover the waist. And a long half-slip that ties with drawstrings. Remarkable costume, the sari. Believe I said it takes the production of 6,000 silkworms to make one.

The city of Byzantium was named in honor of Byzas the Navigator. But that wouldn't do for the conquering oncomers. They changed it to Constantinople. And that wasn't entirely serviceable for later arrivals. They called it Istanbul.

Parmesan cheese is made from skim milk, Romano from whole milk.

Knights of St. John occupied Malta for 268 years, paying their landlord, Holy Roman Emperor Charles V, a rent of one falcon a year. So? So there were 268 Maltese falcons.

Q: Didn't the pharaohs of ancient Egypt believe in sex after death?
A: Devoutly. Hieroglyphics in their tombs prove it.

No doubt you'll readily guess that the old town named "La Villa Real de la Santa Fe de San Francisco de Asis" is now the city called Santa Fe. You didn't?

Q: In all the world, there are only four marble domes atop buildings. One on Rhode Island's State Capitol. Another on Minnesota's State Capitol. Where are the other two?
A: Taj Mahal in India and St. Peter's Cathedral in Rome.

Almost every resident of Iceland descends from the few thousand original settlers of the ninth and 10th centuries. This interest geneticists. Nowhere else can they find such a consistent pool of unmixed human genes for scientific study.

Q: A "mugwump" is a political independent. I'm told the word originated in the Bible, but I can't find any reference to it in my concordance.
A: It's from an Indian word that turned up in an Algonquin translation of the Bible in 1661. In the Indian tongue, the word meant captain or chieftain. It became a political label for Republicans who refused to support their party's candidate in the 1884 election.

Hardly anybody on the street knows that elephants have hair all over. Light hair. Very light.

Q: What was the favorite sport, not counting wife-decapitation, of King Henry VIII?
A: Darts.

In a deck of Italian playing cards, there's no queen.

Q: Where in the United States did early natives mummify their dead?
A: In what's now Texas, Arizona, Kentucky, Tennessee and the Aleutian Islands.

Magnesia was an ancient city in Asia Minor. Nearby was mined a black iron oxide with polarity properties. Because of the city's name, the ore came to be known as magnetite. And we would up with the word "magnetism."

Q: Why did the Africans love the Roman Emperor Hadrian?
A: Northern Africa was in a five-year drought. On the day Hadrian headed his barge into the Nile, rain came, finally. Many locals thought he'd brought it.

Burn the skin of toads and some chemical therein gives off a smoke that intoxicates. Cherokee Indians found out about this 300 years ago. Their experimentalists sat around smoking pipefuls of dried toadskins, and talking, laughing, and getting shiny-eyed. Or so the scholars now report.

Q: Where in the Bible does it say, "God counts a woman's tears"?
A: That's from the Talmud, and it says, more specifically, men should be careful lest they cause women to weep, for God counts their tears.

Chinese proverb: "If a man has no nickname, he never grows rich."

Q: What are "contagious living fluids"?
A: Viruses. At least, that's what a Dutchman named Martinas Willem Beijerinck called them in 1898. He was the first to realize they could infect cells. In Latin, "virus" means "poison."

England's terminally sick kings traditionally pardoned all prisoners except murderers and thieves.

Q: Why do you and others sometimes tack a rhetorical "what?" onto the end of a sentence? I mean like "Incredible, what?"
A: It's a conversational throwback to the old English "wot." Related to "to wit." And means "know." Bad habit, if overused. Similar to the bad habit of ending sentences with "you know?"

White bread for the rich, brown bread for the poor. That was the color line drawn by the ancient Romans in their devotion to class distinctions.

Q: What mammals don't have pinkish tongues?
A: Some bears and that spitz breed of dog called the chow chow. Science has traced the off-color gene to the same place in Central Asia where both the blue-tongued bears and the blue-tongued chow chows originated. You can get creative with this data.

Under Peter the Great in old Russia, a man arrested for public drunkenness was punished by having a 17-pound medal chained to his neck for some prescribed time.

Q: Who was the first European to smoke a cigarette?
A: Make that famous European — history records it was Casanova.

It was 650 B.C. Western time that the Chinese licensed lady lovers, history's first organized authorized prostitutes.

Q: Historically, who have been the most isolated people on earth?
A: Aboriginal Tasmanians, long gone except for a small scatter of descendants. On an island 100 miles from the most isolated continent, Australia, they had no ocean-going vessels. They lived 10,000 years without the influences of any other societies.

Any historian will tell you Cleopatra was her own sister-in-law.

Q: Where'd the first sugar cane come from?
A: What's now called New Guinea, it's believed. From there to India. Then to China. Both the words "sugar" and "candy" derive from languages of India.

Something else you can do to while away time at stoplights is count things people ceremoniously kiss. Rings. Dice. Garment hems. Holy writ. Blarney stone. Icons. Fingers. Feet. Lottery tickets.

Q: What's the name "Kenneth" mean?
A: "Handsome." Or so it meant once. In Gaelic.

Scorpions look as though they belonged to another age, don't they? They do, in fact. Fossil scorpions date back 400 million years. Among insects, spiders, crabs, that sort, scorpions are the oldest.

Siberians used to pay their taxes with garlic. Good plan.

Portuguese merchants once were known as "guineamen." They were the first to import from South America the rodent that got its name from them: the guinea pig.

Said Confucius: "To see the right and not do it is cowardice."

Water in Brazil's Rio Negro is black. In the Rio Solimoes it's muddy brown. Those rivers fork into each other, but their waters don't. They flow side by side without mingling for about 12 miles. Each of those waters shoves off the other.

Cut something in half, and both its halves in half, then all those halves in half, and you'll finally come up with something too small to cut in half. That's what the Greek scholar Democritus figured. So he designated the smallest particle conceivable in his time as "uncuttable." Or in Greek: "atom."

If you know a "Debbie," however spelled, short for "Deborah," however spelled, ask her what her name means in both Greek and Hebrew. She should say "bee." Same goes for Melissa.

It was customary in the 13th century to baptize children with beer.

Q: When in this country was a woman required by law to take her husband's name?
A: Never. It was the law in Hawaii, though, when Hawaii was a monarchy. And it was the common law of England.

Clearly, the English astronomer Edmund Halley knew more about what was overhead than underfoot. He said a certain specific light streaking across the sky was a comet; he was right. He said the earth was a hollow sphere with an active social life inside; he was wrong.

Not until 400 years ago was the marriage ceremony considered sufficiently holy to be performed in church.

You maybe and I certainly have thought the term "doozy" was a slang allusion to the renowned name of the "Duesenberg" brothers, but word tracers now report "doozy" was spoken in the streets long before the car makers lived. It's an ancient corruption, they say, of "daisy" even as "daisy" was a corruption of "day's eye."

Q: What are the people of Azerbaijan called?
A: Azeri.

"Zen" means "meditation," that's all.

Q: Where'd the "brand" in "brand-new" come from?
A: An allusion to a firebrand "fresh and glowing as from a furnace." Goes back to Shakespeare's time and earlier.

Bananas got their start in India.

Nations run by rulers who want to wage wars of conquest tend to reward families with many children. Nations run by rulers who want to live peaceably are inclined to promote birth control. So say some historians. Julius Caesar, a warrior if ever there were one, offered gifts to old Romans who produced children aplenty. Adolf Hitler took up this policy. So did Josef Stalin.

A rabbit can eat a toxic mushroom that would kill a man.

Even at this late date, an Internet word chaser is still in search of a rhyme for "purple." It has been said repeatedly there's no rhyme in English for that one. Maybe not, if you refuse to admit the Scots speak English. A Scotsman refers to the hindquarters of his horse as its "curple."

Q: How much did tobacco cost in Shakespeare's day?
A: Its weight in silver shillings. That was the London price. It was an extravagance of dandies who held smoke ring-blowing contests.

Chinese Proverb No. 1453: "To know the road ahead, ask those coming back."

Cooking in Mexico's state of Oaxaca has changed little in 2,000 years. Now archaeologists there dig up shards of cookware. If diggers can't identify their find, they ask local cooks. Oftentimes the cooks can explain just what the original piece looked like, and the way it was used, no matter how ancient the artifact.

Q: Where's the biggest glacier in Europe?
A: Norway. It's the Jostedal. Covers 300 square miles.

"Algernon" was not so uncommon a name in the England of Olde. It came from the notable Norman invader William de Percy. He was nicknamed "aux garnons" — French for "with whiskers" — and that wound up as Algernon.

Sir, our Love and War man advises, "Speak softly to your lady and quote that great Greek Euripides, who said, 'Where there is no wine, there is no love.'" Waiter! Waiter!

In William Shakespeare's time, a "tomboy" was a girl who played around in a most promiscuous manner.

No one wears perfume in a mosque. It's thought to be too sensual. And in Nova Scotia, few locals wear perfume in public. It's legally termed an allergenic. Where else are scents unacceptable?
Reader-contributed clarification

Not everybody realizes there are almost a million sheep in Iceland.

You know how we say "as good as gold"? The French say "as good as bread."

If you like things that go bang — guns and firecrackers — you, too, may claim a patron saint. One in whose honor some cities have been named, in fact. Such as Santa Barbara.

Christopher Columbus was trained to be a weaver.

That authoritative body of Jewish tradition, the Talmud, warns: "Don't use the conduct of a fool as precedent."

That fox may look like a dog, but its eyes have vertical pupils, like a cat's.

Irish Proverb No. 894D: "There is no fool who has not his own kind of sense."

In most of Asia's languages, one word means both "food" and "rice."

Chinese Proverb 893B: "Great souls have wills. Feeble souls have wishes."

One the southern flanks of the eastern Himalayas lies that mystical place called Bhutan. It's name isn't mystical, though. It comes from an Indian word meaning "edge of Tibet."

Behind cloistered walls in old France, a servant served the monks. One of the things he served them — as they played in their court — was a ball. He cried out as he tossed it to them "Tenez," meaning "Take heed." Both our game words "serve" and "tennis" started there.

The Australian aborigines, even as the ancient Greeks, concocted myths about how humankind came into being. But the aborigine myths are more than twice as old as the Greek myths.

It's in the record that St. Augustine once amazed himself by reading without pronouncing the words. From such indications, scholars say they know all writing originally was meant to be read aloud.

That word "golf" itself originally meant "club." So "golf club" must be a redundancy, no?

Old English law required a suicide to be buried near a crossroads at midnight without religious rites.

If it's a winding river, it's either very old or very young. Straight rivers are middle aged.

A metals expert says hot water dulls knives.

Confucius was of the opinion that music gives a sort of pleasure that human beings can't do without.

A marriage between people near the same age meant trouble. That's what the traditional aborigines of Australia once believed. But when older women married younger men and older men married younger women, that was all right. And they were expected to marry more than once.

Marco Polo built an extraordinary reputation for himself in his own time, not as the world's greatest explorer but as the world's greatest liar. Hardly anybody, maybe nobody then, believed him.

Wooden pegs once used to hold beams of houses and barns in place are called "trunnels" — that's short for "treenails."

Woodsfolk say this about wild berries: If they're white, they're poisonous. If red, maybe dangerous. If blue or black, edible.

Scottish Proverb No. 36A: "One may survive distress, but not disgrace."

History records that Sir Isaac Newton lost the equivalent of about $2 million speculating on South Sea stocks. You'd think a fellow described by some as the smartest man in the world would have figured out how to make money on the stock market, no? No.

Q: What's the first masculine name in the Bible?
A: Come on, you know that. Adam.

According to one undocumented footnote in history, Sir Walter Raleigh clenched a smoking pipe in his teeth as he bent to the executioner's axe, and there it remained until death did it depart.

What we call whooping cough the Koreans call donkey cough.

Medieval priests invented that ball-on-chain battle club called the mace as a substitute for the sword. Because their Bible prohibited them from shedding blood but not from bashing skulls. So says one historian.

When King James I played cards, one attendant held the cards, another told him which to play, and there are those who say this set a pattern for numerous heads of state even unto this day.

If human history were compressed into one full day and night, you could say the hunters have been around for 23 hours 45 minutes while the farmers have only been around for 15 minutes.

Q: Which end of the horse lies down first?
A: Front legs. Front legs get up first, too.

Can you name any society in human history where it has not been bad manners to point at somebody? No? Scholars queried on this matter said they couldn't think of any, either.

Q: When was it legal in old Rome for parents to kill their infants?
A: Until 374 A.D. The good Valentine had been emperor for a decade before he got around to ending the parental death decrees.

The only thing the king cobra eats is another snake.

The Moroccan bride who adheres to ancient custom keeps her eyes closed throughout her wedding ceremony.

Rope cost a lot of money in the old sailing days, so ship owners wanted sailors to save line by splicing together bits and pieces. It gave us the vernacular phrase "to make ends meet."

Q: Didn't the Egyptians once use cats in warfare?
A: Not the Egyptians, but the Persians did. In 525 B.C., the Persians fought the Egyptian Army. A cunning Persian officer lined up a row of cats in front of his troops. The Egyptian soldiers thought the cats were sacred. They wouldn't fire off any arrows. But the Persians would. They killed just about everything in front of them except the cats.

When a Roman peasant died, friends turned a harrow upside down, used the spikes for candle holders, and put the body on it, thus to drag the remains to burial. Our word "hearse" came from the Latin for "harrow."

Italians wrote the first novels.

What distinguished the Greek physician Hippocrates from the other healers of his time was his contention that diseases had natural causes without the influence of evil spirits.

In England long ago, syphilis was called the French pox. In France, the Spanish pox. In Spain, the Italian pox.

A fighting rooster's crest droops when he's whipped. Whence "crestfallen."

One old English Christmas dish consists of suet, flour, sugar, raisins, nuts and spices tied loosely in a cloth, and boiled. When done, it's unwrapped, sliced like cake, and topped with cream. Boiling swells the ingredients. When swollen enough to fill the cloth, it's called "plum," an old synonym for "plump." That's the "plum" in "plum" pudding.

Mythology had it that souls were ferried to Hades across the River Styx. And fancy fiction writers let that river symbolize any faraway place next door to nowhere. Plain talkers wouldn't put up with it. So it would up in the vernacular as "out in the sticks."

English Proverb: "What good is running if you're on the wrong road?"

Some think a national capital ought to lie at the geographic center of its nation, but insofar as I know, Spain's Madrid is about the only one that so qualifies.

Q: Where'd Mexico get that name?
A: From the name of the Aztec war god — "Mexitili." Curious how so many peoples have had war gods. They far outnumber peace gods, must say.

The modern Hebrew dialect spoken by Israelis is not a precise revival of an ancient language. It's only about 100 years old.

When smallpox flooded through Mexico and Central America in the 16th century, it killed about half the Aztecs. That made it proportionately deadlier than Europe's Black Death of the 14th century. And proportionately deadlier, too, than the pandemic influenza of 1918 that killed an estimated 21.64 million people in North America, Europe and part of Asia.

In Siberia's region of Yakutia, the temperature falls as low as minus 58 degrees F sometimes, and sometimes rises as high as 100 degrees F. No other natural place on earth has a greater temperature range.

Q: What was old China's "bamboo wife"?
A: An air-conditioning device. Specifically, a five-foot cylinder of woven basketwork. A sleeper sprawled against it, resting legs or arms over it. Cooler air circulated through it.

It's written that Sotuku, 12th century emperor of Japan, exiled himself for three years to copy a 10,500-word Buddhist religious work called the Lankauarn Sutra in his own blood.

"Americ" was what American Indians long ago called a Nicaraguan mountain range. Spaniards adapted it as "Amerique." And many, maybe most, scholars now believe that's where Europeans really got the name of "America."

An inventor four centuries ago came up with a new ribbon loom, and it scared everybody in the weavers' trade. In Danzig, most particularly, locals feared it would put them out of work. The efficient city council there promptly hired an assassin to strangle the inventor.

Q: Who was the first woman executed in this country?
A: A Quaker named Mary Dyer. In 1660, the local powers in Massachusetts told her to get out of their colony. She said: "In obedience to the will of God, I came. And in his will I abide until death." They hanged her.

At least one scholar contends that our distant ancestors stopped hunting to take up farming only after they figured out how to make beer.

Neanderthals ate Neanderthals, that we now know from evidence in recent diggings. We also know they didn't make a daily diet of their own kind. Mostly, scholars surmise, one Neanderthals ceremonially ate another in the hope of acquiring from the devoured denizen such a characteristic as strength or courage.

"Fib" comes from "fable."

Ancient tradition calls for wives and girls to give themselves in courtesy to any traveling man who visits the oasis town of Hami in China's northwestern desert. Our Love and War man reports there are no direct flights to Hami.

Q: What's the difference between a pigeon and a dove?
A: No difference except in the origin of the words: Pigeon comes from the French, dove from old English.

Danish Proverb No. 714C: "Faults are thick where love is thin."

Q: Where'd this country's sheep come from?
A: First flocks were bought in France and Switzerland by the London Company and shipped in 1609 to Jamestown, Va.

Hindus speak of six, not just four, seasons: spring, summer, the rains, autumn, winter and the dews.

It was Hippocrates, the Father of Medicine, who suggested a woman with a small bustline could enlarge it by singing, loudly and often.

Christopher Columbus on his explorations expected to find people of such ancient origin that they'd speak Hebrew, so he took along Jewish interpreters.

It's a matter of record that the preferred food delicacy of the Roman Emperor Elagabalus was camel's heels.

Q: What are "polemics"?>
A: Waging war with words, sort of. "Polemics" comes from the Greek for "war."

In the Love and War files about old China is a notation that a bride was permitted to go through her planned wedding ceremony, even if her groom had just died. Thus, she immediately could assume her new status of widowhood.

The color combination most likely to get your attention is black on yellow. Traffic researchers learned that, but they didn't learn why. Some scientists now think the reason dates way back. To when humans had to be deathly afraid of things yellow and black. Tigers. Wasps. Some lizards. Certain poisonous plants.

Skeletal remains show nobody who lived 10,000 years ago in that place now known as Pakistan had dental cavities.

It was a ritual among the Incas to bury selected children alive high above the permafrost line in the Andes. These remains have been found on more than 100 mountain peaks. They are the best preserved mummies in the world.

Q: If there are no finger foods in Finland, how does a Finn eat an apple?
A: Spears, peels, slices and eats it with a knife and fork.

Rabbit is all white meat.

In Leonardo da Vinci's kitchen notes are designs of gadgets to roll spaghetti, press garlic and slice eggs.

A lifelong trainer of horses says the techniques of his trade haven't changed at all in the last eight centuries.

Last time there was a February 30 was in 11 B.C.

An ancient Polish proverb ranks the intensity of love that others feel for you in this descending order: No. 1. Mother's. No. 2. Dog's. No. 3. Sweetheart's.

Q: Two of Europe's capital cities are built each on seven hills? Rome. And what's the other?
A: Lisbon.

In Sioux, "thi" meant "dwell" and "pi" meant "used for." That wound up in rough translation as "tepee."

Q: What was Britain called before it was named Britain?
A: First known name was "Albion." That meant "white land." So called by Celts or Gauls, presumably as they looked out toward the white cliffs of Dover.

Aristotle defined women as "mutilated males" without souls. Why he so long was regarded as a bright fellow I do not know. Women didn't think he was all that swift.

There was another kind of "straw man" — besides the scarecrow — in early America. Ship captains paid cash to kidnappers by body count for the drugged and drunken men they shanghaied in port cities. Those hired shanghaiers sometimes threw in a few "straw men" — stuffed sacks dressed in men's clothing. In the ship's dark depths, the captain's body counter often couldn't tell the difference.

Russia's Czar Peter the Great was afraid to cross bridges.

Q: Who was the ancient scholar who committed suicide by voluntary starvation?
A: Eratoshtenes. Born in 276 B.C. at Cyrene, Libya. Educated in Athens, Greece. Died about 194 B.C. in Alexandria, Egypt. He was going blind. Even back then, many realized the Earth was a globe. He was the first known to have calculated its circumference.

Contrary to previous report: When the year 999 slipped over to 1000 at the turn of the last millennium, the Latin date was written: CMXCIX. So advises retired professor Dr. Cliff Tremblay, who taught the history of mathematics.

In India's Konorak, statues decorate the ancient Surya Temple, and some of same are said to be so risque, they startle approaching visitors on the stairs below, and in such wide-eyed, open-mouthed stance, those shocked newcomers sometimes fall backward and injure themselves. Critics said, "Drape the statues or put in handrails." The government took bids on handrails.

Most cultures have had their liquor drinkers, but in none known have women been heavier drinkers than men.

Rulers of ancient Rome required offspring to care for their family's elderly. With a decree called "The Stork's Law." So named because storks had been seen to offer extended wings of support to their aged parents.

A fox hunts alone. A Love and War man item, if ever I've seen one.

Correct, in England, the Speaker of the House is not allowed to speak.

Q: Doesn't the mane stand erect on some breeds of horses?
A: On just one, the only wild breed, Przhewalski's.

Most of the fabric patterns on the oldest dress known — India's sari — are designed by computer now.

Q: Which is the oldest known holiday?
A: New Year's Day. Babylonians celebrated it a couple of millennia B.C. on what would now be around March 25th.

Yiddish Proverb: "If you want to give God a good laugh, tell Him your plans."

Those who know their dogs contend the German Shepherd is not an ancient breed closely related to the wolf. It's relatively recent, purposely crossbred to bring out that wolf look.

The common bamboo of Japan — Ma-dake — grows four feet in 24 hours. No other plant grows faster.

Kim sounds like nothing more than the nickname for Kimberly, however spelled, but in fact, Kim comes from the Old English for "ruler."

Fossil teeth of human beings suggest to scholars that people started out as vegetarians. But made a change, mothered by necessity no doubt. Today's vegetarians cite fossil teeth as proof of what nature intended.

Q: Says here Egypt's pyramids are three miles south of where they were built. Who moved them? And how?
A: Landmass movement. It's continual. Nothing on earth is where it was when the pyramids were built.

Aristotle ate crickets.

Can you contradict the claim that the Nile is the only river on Earth that flows from the equator into the temperate zone?

Not all historians agree with those who say the earliest sheep in North America came from France in 1609. Others report Coronado brought over the Churro sheep from Spain in 1540.

Q: How did leprosy, once epidemic in Europe, come to be relatively rare?
A: Nobody knows.

The early pilgrims celebrated Thanksgiving, but outlawed Christmas.

That word "sphinx" came from the Greek meaning "strangler."

Q: Where are those islands called the "Dry Turtles"?
A: "Dry Tortugas"? They're 10 small keys south of Key West. Ponce de Leon so named them in 1513. "Dry" because there was no drinkable water source on them. "Tortugas" for the "turtles" all over them.

Old Rome used freed slaves as firemen. When fires broke out, roads around them bogged down with private vehicles. So the firemen became traffic cops, too. Those freed slaves turned into a pretty powerful group of officers. They were called "Vigiles." You can tell which word we got from that.

Before electric lighting, almost every grownup on earth knew that the moon rises about 50 minutes later every night than the night before, but hardly anybody remembers that anymore.

Might be stretching it to say the boomerang was invented in Poland, but it's true that the first known boomerang, carved from a mammoth's tusk about 23,000 years ago, turned up in what's now Poland.

Q: What did knights wear under their helmets?
A: Liners stuffed with horsehair, tied below the chin.

Chinese Proverb: "A clear conscience never fears the midnight knock."

The Irish "sionnachuighim" means "I play tricks." It's where we got the word "shenanigan."

Off Galway Bay on Ireland's west coast are the Aran Islands, a barren batch of rocks indeed. Yet locals there grow all the vegetables they need. Without soil? Correct. They haul sand and seaweed up from the shore, there to wash and compost same. Seaweed is rich in a garden's necessary nutrients. Take along some seeds, and you'll never starve on a desert island.

All racing camels are female.

History indicates the Tasmanians never committed adultery. They're extinct, you know.

Story goes an elegant cloth of woven silk once was worn only by kings of France. So it was called "cord of the king." Or "corde du roi" in French. It supposedly came down to us as "corduroy." But research suggests no such king's-cord name was ever used in France.

All African elephants grow tusks. Among Asian elephants, some but not all of the males grow tusks. In Sri Lanka, only seven out of 100 males grow tusks. More about elephants' tusks coming up. Patience.

Chile's oldest mummy is 3,400 years older than Egypt's oldest mummy. Insofar as it's now known. Don't chisel it in stone. Heretofore unknown mummies still turn up.

Q: Can you eat the meat of that shellfish called the conch straight out of its shell?
A: Indeed. But it's better after you tenderize it.

When you play chess in Poland, your bishop is not a bishop but a "messenger." In Germany, it's a "runner." In Italy, an "ensign." In Russia, an "elephant." In France, a "jester."

Q: If you go back 1,000 years, which was the largest city in what's now the United States?
A: Cahokia. A Native American settlement in southern Illinois with about 30,000 people.

The Persian Emperor Cyrus the Great loved his horse. Unfortunately, his horse drowned in a river. Cyrus sentenced the river to death.

Q: How long does it take to grow garlic?
A: Nine months. Just like a baby.

Scalping has been common among combatants of different races. The color and texture of the scalp hair served as positive proof of an enemy kill. That atrocity for trophy is ancient.

Q: Where'd our word "nix" come from?
A: The German "nicht" or "nichts" for "nothing."

The word "cream" comes from the Greek "khriein" meaning to anoint. That's also the root of "Christ" as "anointed one."

If you trace "hurrah" through "huzzah" back far enough, you'll get to this dying cry of a Norseman: "On to paradise."

In the hills within north central Italy is a nation of 24 square miles. It has an official name only part of which you've ever heard, I'll warrant: Most Serene Republic of San Marino. At last report, it had 21,537 people, not even half as many as work in the 110-story twin towers of New York's World Trade Center.

First female head of state in world history — insofar as the record shows — was Egyptian Pharaoh Mastkare Hatshepsut. Even as women in general have suffered sever discriminations from the beginning, so have women in particular held extraordinary power. And just as most kings have accepted — nay, promoted — slavery of men, so have most queens condoned the servitude of their sisters.

Q: Which of the renowned kings or queens reputedly never bathed at all?
A: That might be Empress Anne who ruled Russia during the 18th century. She wasn't much for water. However, history records she did wipe herself down daily with melted butter.

"The devil lurks in square corners." That was a superstition of the Middle Ages. Builders kept it in mind for centuries thereafter. Saint Veran is a tiny village in the French Alps. Its houses are of logs or stone or both. In not a one of them do any walls meet at a 90-degree angle.

"Mafia" comes from a tenth-century Arabic word meaning "sanctuary."

Q: Name the man who asked that his body be thrown into the ocean so his wife couldn't carry out her threat to dance on his grave?
A: One Samuel Baldwin of Hampshire, England. It was done in 1736. His notes suggest Baldwin dedicated much of his life and that much of his death to preventing his wife from having her way.

When musk oxen fight musk oxen, it's always ox to ox — no two ever gang up on one. You can say this, also, about sheep and goats. But you cannot say it about men and monkeys.

Those who look into the horrors of torture have come up with this terrible truth: Human beings can survive injuries that break all the bones in their bodies.

Chinook Indians had a special term for the tribesman with a big stomach. "Hieu" meaning "plenty" and "macamuc" meaning "to eat." It's how we came by that comfortable bit of vernacular for a very important person — "high mucky muck."

Those who think they can estimate the Intelligence Quotients of bygone personalities say Rembrandt's IQ was about 110. They dare not offer an estimate of Leonardo da Vinci's.

Romans in the reign of Emperor Titus, A.D. 79 to 81, used little hollow tubes filled with boiling water. The first curling irons. Presumably.

Q: Why didn't Queen Nefertiti of Egypt ever ride a camel?
A: Weren't any camels there in her time, the 14th century B.C. To get to North Africa, those animals had to go from lower North America up through what's now Alaska, across the natural bridge to Siberia, and slowly, ever so slowly, down through Asia. Took them a while.

Popcorn came before corn.

Byzantine medics were given bonuses for each of the wounded men they carried alive off their battlefields. Benevolent? No, not in the Florence Nightingale mode 10 centuries later. Those early commanders feared they'd run out of soldiers, and they needed more soldiers to kill more soldiers. It was in a time when Byzantine law prescribed such criminal punishments as nose slitting, tongue cutting and eye gouging.

Q: If the first blacks brought to America were not slaves, what were they?
A: Indentured servants, not considered slaves then. They arrived in Virginia 42 years before the first slaves came in 1661. The indentured blacks and their descendants contributed mightily to the events of history, but were not written into it.

Ge'ez is an ancient tongue no longer generally spoken in Ethiopia. But it is spoken in Ethiopic Church services, only there. How many of the devout actually understand any of it is debated nowadays.

Q: The horse chestnut tree is so called because its shelled nut looks like the eye of a horse, right?
A: Not quite. Early Americans thought the nut looked like the eye of a deer, so called it a Buckeye. But according to the Encyclopaedia Britannica, that horse chestnut name originated in Turkey, "where the nuts were fed to horses to cure broken wind."

"Taps" dates back to the Thirty Years War, 1618-1648. Not the well-known bugle call. That came along much later. But the name "Taps" to signal the military day's end. At bedtime, the provost visited each military unit to tap the bung into every keg and mark it with chalk. The chalked markings were checked the next day to make sure the keg hadn't be reopened after "taps."

Q: Did you ever find out who authored the first full-length novel in human history?
A: Research suggests it was "The Tale of Genji" written by a Japanese woman named Murasaki Shikibu. Between the 970s and the 1020s B.C., as the Western world measures time. This was before Buddhism crowded Japanese women out of the literary life.

An expectant mother must be given whatever food she craves, otherwise she could lose her baby. Such was the erroneous belief in Colonial days. The record shows that in 1625 an Elizabeth Hamer took to court one Dr. Pott, first name unknown, claiming his prescribed diet caused her miscarriage. He failed to include in it "a piece of hog's flesh," she complained. If he'd known she craved pork, he would have been liable, ruled the court. But he didn't know. Case dismissed.

Q: How many names are given to babies born into the British royal family?
A: Four, customarily.

Contestants in the ancient Olympics were penalized instantly for infractions of the rules. Judges carried not whistles but whips.

Q: What do you call that empty space between the cork and liquid in a bottle?
A: The "ullage."

Charles VIII of France had a little problem with his feet. One had six toes. So he started wearing shoes with broad square tips. This was why men's show fashion all over Europe near the end of the 15th century dictated square-tipped duck's beak shoes.

You may regard the monarch of Great Britain as Queen Elizabeth II. But in Scotland, she's Elizabeth I. Scotland was not part of the United Kingdom when the first Elizabeth was on the throne.

Some rich Romans of old kept moray eels as pets.

It was Marco Polo who revealed to the Western world that the Chinese used paper money.

Q: If William Shakespeare wasn't a drunk, why did Voltaire refer to him as "that drunken fool"?
A: Voltaire's misjudgment of Shakespeare didn't stop there. He regarded Shakespeare's writings as junk.

It was the custom of women in ancient Egypt to pluck all the hair from their heads and then buff their scalps to a high shine.

Q: When you talk about something without getting to the point, you're said to "beat around the bush." Where'd that term come from?
A: Hunter lingo. It refers to the brush beaters long used by hunters to drive quarry animals out of cover.

Bolivian Indians treat arthritis pain with ant stings.

Q: What do you say to the Irish greeting "Top of the morning to you"?
A: "And the rest of the day to yourself." That's the traditional reply.

The sorcerer of old worked his magic spell with some sort of charm called a "mascot." Whence our word "mascot" with its updated definition.

Scallions are the only sort of onion commonly used in traditional Japanese cooking.

Sheep and goats are exceedingly fond of rape, which some city folk may be surprised to learn is an herb akin to mustard. It's grown most particularly around Tisdale, Saskatchewan, a place also widely known for its beekeepers. The postmark, "Tisdale, Land of Rape and Honey." It was rejected.

Palomino is a color, not a breed.

Q: Peanuts came from Africa, did they not?
A: Not originally. They've been traced back to Brazil and Peru, around 950 B.C. Portuguese traders took them to Africa in 1502. Slave ships brought them back to the Western Hemisphere. In the United States, they were raised for market and first sold about 1845 in Nashville, Tenn.

Some scholars believe more than a fourth of all the gold every mined is in sunken ships on the floors of seas.

The Agua is a dead volcano in Guatemala. Heavy rains filled the great hollow cone with water, making a deep crater lake, and the torrents turned the mountainsides to mud. Then came the earthquake. Not an eruption, just powerful tremors. The weight of the water inside cracked open the crater walls, undamming the deluge. At 2 a.m. on an autumn morning in 1541, mud engulfed the then capital of Ciudad Vieja at the foot of the flow, burying more than 1,000 people. That's how the volcano got its name Agua, meaning water.

Q: If the Egyptian mummies aren't the oldest, which mummies are?
A: The Chinchoro along the northern coast of Chile. They date back 7,000 years. The Chinchoro kept their mummies close at hand so they could repaint them from time to time, fix their wigs and touch up their colored clay coverings.

The camel is a better swimmer than the horse, but why is a mystery. In Arabian environs, the camel does not frequent a watery world, not usually. Ask a few camels where they learned to swim, and they'll just shrug, I imagine.

Ancient healers dried plants to make medicines. That clarifies why our word "drug" comes from an old German word meaning "to dry."

Q: What was the first western-world book that didn't quote the Bible or writers of antiquity?
A: "The Prince," 1513, the original dirty-tricks treatise of politics by Niccolo Machiavelli. He's the fellow who wrote: "There is no avoiding war; it can only be postponed to the advantage of others."

History shows lotteries started centuries ago, grew popular, then fell out of favor off and on ever since. Research reveals they've failed invariably after street players learned clever crooks were fixing the drawings. As long as the players believed the games were straight, they remained successful.

When you say you feel a little "groggy," if ever, you allude to the word "grog," the British sailor's term for watered rum.

Reindeer, shmeindeer, the Netherlands' St. Nicholas rides a horse.

It was an ancient legal tradition that a widow had the right to remain for 40 days in the house of her deceased husband. What she was supposed to do thereafter is not in the record at hand.

The word "gas" is common to almost all languages. A flemish chemist named Jan van Helmont coined it about 1625. And because no synonym existed in any old language, his word simply was accepted by all.

Q: Where'd we get the "jack" in "jackknife"?
A: Probably from the name of the maker of the first folding knife, a 17th century Belgian identified as Jacques de Liege — Jack of Liege.

Mouse, Falcon, Elephant and Scorpion — those were some of the names of Egyptian kings before the Pharaohs took over.

Seventeenth-century poet John Donne kept an open coffin in his study. He climbed into it every now and then to remind himself of the fragility of the mortal cord. What good it did him to remain so aware of death-in-a-box, I don't know. But he knew, evidently. He kept the thing open and waiting, like a taxi with the meter running.

That bay leaf tin on your spice shelf has a story in it. What's therein comes from the sweet bay laurel, a broadleaf evergreen with glossy deep-green leaves. Since antiquity, wreathes of it have been awarded as crowns to all sorts of notables. Poets. Soldiers. Scholars. Public speakers. Athletes. Philosophers. Even politicians.

Q: Everybody knows about smallpox, but is there any such thing as "big pox"?
A: "Great pox" was a common term four centuries ago for syphilis. Smallpox then identified numerous other maladies. Actual smallpox has been eradicated entirely, but great pox is still around.

There was a time in northern Europe when cultists during winter lighted enormous bonfires in the hope of coaxing the sun back north. You can try it, but it doesn't work.

Q: Who invented the soda straw?
A: Ancient Egyptian brewers, probably. To taste beer abrewing without first skimming it.

Earliest auctions on record at hand go back to 450 B.C. in Babylon, where young women in good physical condition were sold on the block.

Through France's Normandy runs the River Vire, in the Vau de Vire valley. A 15th-century songwriter named Oliver Bassel lived there. His convivial tunes were so popular that all such music was identified with his home. It eventually gave us the word "vaudeville."

Man invented the big guns long before the little guns. Cannons around 200 B.C.E. Hand-held firearms around 1300 C.E.

Q: Where did we get the word "venereal"?
A: From the name Venus, goddess of love. And the name Venus came from the Sanscrit "vanas," which had to do with physical desire.

Jurors in Medieval England were not fed until they had reached a decision.

Q: I take it eggs Benedict was invented by some chef named Benedict. Where did he work?
A: Research reveals "Benedict" in this menu term is a variation of Benedick, a character in Shakespeare's "Much Ado About Nothing." The allusion is to a newly married man, supposedly suggesting "a marriage between the eggs and the ham." Or so one authority states.

England's King Henry I decreed the standard linear measure of one foot was to be a third of the length of his arm. That happened to be 36 inches. Remarkable, is it not, that the length of one man's arm could dictate the eventual measurements of so many of the world's structures?

"Alfalfa" comes from the Arabic "Al-fac-facah" meaning "the father of all foods." Lots of people have eaten alfalfa. Seeds, sprouts and leaves. That's reported by an outfit that sells alfalfa.

Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley got her idea for the "Frankenstein" novel from the writings of some alchemy experimenters who claimed to have produced a sort of test-tube baby.

The ancient Hebrews believed the kidneys dictated the emotions.

Q: Humans have obtained three valuable products from bees — honey, wax and ... what's the third?
A: Mead. From fermented honey. It was big among drinkers of yesteryear.

In Tibet once, salt cakes stamped with Kublai Khan's imperial seal were used for money.

Proud of your Irish ancestry? Teach your dog to put up its paw when you say, "Tabhair dom do lamh." That's the canine shake-hands instruction in Gaelic.

What most of us thought we knew about gypsies was wrong. their first homeland was northern India, the Punjab. When they migrated into Europe, they were labeled as displaced Egyptians, so were called gypsies, then identified as wandering Romanians, because in their native language Romanes they call themselves Romanies. They were neither Egyptian nor Romanian. The linkups to those countries are persistent word-of-mouth mistakes.

That country classic "The Streets of Laredo" goes back to an old English tune wherein the young hero did not die of bullet wounds but of a social disease.

A "thimble" originally was called a "thumb bell," but you knew that.

Q: When was the private bedroom invented?
A: Invented? Never, mind, that'll work. It was not customary for people to sleep in private bedrooms until about 500 years ago. Before then, family members bundled together in a common bedding place.

William Shakespeare coined more than 1,700 words. Presumably. Their first known use was in his poems and plays. Studious researchers found he used 20,138 different words in all his works. So 8.5 percent of his entire written vocabulary were words he made up.

Q: What give key lime pie its name — a special recipe or a special lime?
A: A special lime. Its tree went from Asia to Spain to the Caribbean. Finally, to the Florida Keys, whence the "key" in "key lime."

When a male camel takes an interest in a female camel, he wards off other interested males by spitting in their eyes.

Q: Who invented the fortune teller's crystal ball?
A: One John Dee, a contemporary of Shakespeare. In 1580, it was. Dee made a name for himself as a mathematician while warden of Manchester College in England.

An unidentified feline fancier says: "Thousands of years ago, cats were worshiped as gods, and cats have never forgotten it."

Q: Why is Harris tweed of Scotland called "Harris"?
A: It's woven on Harris Island in Scotland's Outer Hebrides.

Connoisseurs speak of the interior of a cheese as its "paste."

To treat baldness, naturopaths for centuries prescribed varieties of plants with hairy roots.

A footprinted trail of an animal is called a "pug."

That the horses of Shetland are exceedingly small is known by all. Few realize, though, that the cattle of Shetland are likewise diminutive.

Early Romans made napkins of asbestos and laundered them in fire.

The raspberry sound, otherwise known as the Bronx cheer, was a common expression in the old Roman senate. File that under "Why Rome Fell."

It is from the Greek word for "science of poisons" that we get our word "pharmacology."

At one time in ancient Rome nobody under the age of 30 could drink wine legally. Not because of any moral enlightenment. There was a shortage of wine.

Q: What got the Navajo started making those beautiful woolen blankets?
A: Spaniards showed up with sheep in Navajo country, and the Navajos acquired some.

Primitive tribes believed they acquired the qualities of the animals they ate. Those who wanted to be swift longed for deer or antelope. Those who admired strength hoped for bear or bull. Some ate birds, too, but that never worked.

Never scrub a sculpture.

The Welsh make bread out of seaweed. Or did.

"To break bread" once was a literal term. Bread of England 700 years ago was so lightly leavened it couldn't be sliced but had to be broken.

Into the stone sidewalks of ancient Rome were carved the borders of special places where pedestrians could pause to play hopscotch, jacks, dice, or whatever.

Pheasants have been seen to get drunk on old grapes.

Divorce was permitted under ancient Chinese law, but only if the divorcing husband could find some home to take in the wife he wanted to divorce. Nor could he divorce his wife if he'd been poor when he married her but since had become rich. And one other thing: If his wife mourned the deaths of his parents for three years, he couldn't divorce her thereafter.

Q: What's the most common name of English kings?
A: Henry. With a king count of eight.

Sheepherders long have claimed the black sheep is smarter than the other sheep. Maybe, maybe not. Science does not know, though, the black sheep has a sharper sense of smell, and that may give it a notable edge.

Am told you have to cook duck longer than any other bird you might choose to eat.

Q: You said Queen Victoria was the first of the European monarchs to close the bathroom door. What did earlier monarchs do?
A: Treated the bath as a social affair. Thereat, both men and women welcomed visitors. Some but not all tubs were half-covered. In plusher palaces, they were oftentimes placed in a circle of chairs.

Strong evidence in the tombs suggests tuberculosis was rampant in ancient Egypt.

In old China the penalty for stealing a Pekinese was death.

Q: Why do we cross our fingers for luck?
A: Early Christians, for safety's sake, chose not to cross themselves in public. But they duplicated the reverential gesture in secret by crossing their fingers. It came from that.

In ancient Rome, a thief caught in the act of stealing could be made the slave of the person said thief tried to steal from.

Q: If know the names of the kings in a playing card deck traditionally are David, Alexander, Caesar and Charles. What are the names of the queens?
A: Argine, Esther, Judith and Pallas.

People used Roman numerals at the last turn of the millennium. When the year 999 slipped over to 1000, the written date became easier to remember. It changed from DCCCCLXXXXIX to M.

Historically in the marble quarries of Italy's Carrara, some man got hurt every day, another killed every month. Yet nobody really knows what made marble quarrying there the most dangerous of peacetime jobs. Researchers conjecture that Italian men took so much pride in the danger that they ran risks on purpose. But that's a stretch.

In the era of the American Revolution, it took a lot of wood to build a sailing warship. A 100-gun vessel, according to one shipwright's notes, used just about all of an 80-acre oak forest.

In Georges de La Tour's 1621 painting called "The Fortune Teller," an old Gypsy woman sits in a city coffee house, reading the palm of a vain young aristocrat while her daughter squeezes a tiny metal clipper to snip the pompous fellow's watch from its chain. some but not all language scholars think that's where we got the phrase "clip joint."

Q: What's the world's oldest known trademark?
A: "Vesuvinum." It was on wine jars recovered from Pompeii debris after the Vesuvius eruption of 79 A.D.

Persian proverb: "Two things indicate weakness — to be silent when it's time to speak and to speak when it's time to be silent."

Q: "What's the oldest organized spectator sport in America?"
A: Horse racing, certainly. First horse track here was laid out on Long Island in 1665.

When French builders added to a structure something not included in the original design, they called it an "Hors d'Oeuvre." Later chefs took up ther term for snack servings.

Q: What's a typical breakfast in Scotland?
A: Might be oatmeal, kippers, bread and oatcakes with marmalade. A kipper is a herring or salmon, split, salted and smoked.

Our word "melancholy" comes from the old Greek "Melas" meaning "black" and "Chole" meaning "bile." Those ancients thought it was black bile in their systems that made them blue. Not so, no. Aside: Our Language man likes "blue" better than "depressed." Psychiatrists own "depressed." "Blue" belongs to us.

Q: Glass in medieval cathedral windows is thicker at the bottom than at the top. Because glass is fluid so flows downward, right?
A: That's one notion. Another is antique handmade glass was unevenly thick, and glassmakers reasonably elected to put the thickest, and strongest, edge at the bottom.

Race-winning camels generally cost more than race-winning horses.

Q: If the owl is so stupid, how come it's always called wise?
A: Goes back to the ancient Greeks. It was the symbol of Athena, goddess of wisdom. That bird, so silent in the night, sees well, hears well and flies well. But smart it's not.

In the French court of Louis XIV, only the King and Queen could sit in chairs with arms.

The deadly Japanese martial art that uses nothing but a fan is called "tessenjutsu."

Q: Where does a one-hump camel jockey sit?
A: Behind the hump.

Nigeria is quite a mix. Of about 250 ethnic groups. It's a hub.

Under the Norman laws of old England, a man convicted of adultery paid his fine to the king, but a woman convicted of adultery paid her fine to the church.

Wordworkers contend the term "cold shoulder" started in medieval France when annoyed hosts served chilled mutton instead of hot beef to unwelcome visitors. Our Love and War man doubts the claim. Even if it did begin that way, says he, it has been perpetuated since, minus the mutton, without benefit of beef, in the bedrooms of the western world. The cold shoulder, he says, is not a figure of speech. It is the sometime condition of the unfriendly night, the first syllable in the body language of irreconcilable differences.

The Duke of Wellington had a big nose. So "duke" became a glib word for "nose." Then somebody referred to a fist as a "duke buster." It stuck for a while, but was too clumsy to last. Eventually, a fist was just called a "duke."

Something else Europe has in common with Antarctica is neither has any native parrots, and you can't say that about the other continents.

Early turquoises came from Iran, not Turkey, but in their shipment through Turkey they picked up the French word for Turkish in their name.

First gypsum quarries were in the Montmartre of Paris. What they produced became known first as plaster, then as "Plaster of Paris."

Cobra is short for "cobra de capello" meaning hooded snake.

Q: How long is the shelf life of popcorn?
A: Can only report that archaeologists have popped 1,000-year-old popcorn.

"Out West" in China is the Xinjiang region wherein lies the desert called the Takla Makan. It was named by the Turks who more than 2,000 years ago trekked the old Silk Road. The name translates as "You go in and you don't come out."

On a tea plant, the farther up the leaf from the stem, the higher its caffeine content.

The Dutch word "bradewijn" means "wine that has been burned" — an allusion to wine distilled over fire — and out of it came our word for "brandy."

Q: What's the title of the national anthem of San Marino?
A: Has no title. No words, either.

An archeologist now working in Egypt believes about three out of 10 artifacts ancient Egyptians left behind remain undiscovered.

Q: Ancient Egyptian portraits show the head in profile but the eyes to the front? Was that on purpose?
A: It was. And ritualized to make sure the gods would recognize the individuals depicted. So say today's scholars.

It's writ that Aristotle, tutor of Alexander the Great, profoundly influenced Western thought. Maybe so, don't know. He taught this: "People with big ears tend to chatter overmuch about nothing in particular." Not the profoundest of his profundities maybe.

Many but not all scholars believe the oldest continuously inhabited city in the western world is Spain's Cadiz.

In 1680, Maryland colonists noted in their records they ran out of supplies so fought off starvation by eating oysters. Also around 1680, an unknown in Egypt devised leavened bread. And in 1680, too, somebody in Hamburg, Germany, used a cymbal for the first time in an orchestra. One more thing in 1680: Hykos tribesmen invaded Egypt and beat the Egyptians decisively under the burning sun — simply because the invaders wore sandals and the invaded did not.

All writings of words descended from drawn pictures.

Q: What's the oldest psychiatric disorder described in any literature?
A: Depression.

It's now known some ancient Egyptians fed their statues every day.

Q: Do deer in the wild ever die of old age?
A: Rarely, if ever.

One way to kill an elephant was run underneath it and jab it in the bladder with a short spear. At least, that's how the young African pygmy did it, traditionally, to prove his courage. That proved it, all right. The frenzied elephant spun, trunk swinging, to go for a wipeout. The miracle is Africa lost more elephants than pygmies in this ritual.

"Siberia" means "sleeping land."

"Ammonia" is so called because it was first made near the temple of Amen in Libya. From camel dung, as you may have read.

Early Spaniards thought a stone was only an emerald if when placed on an anvil it could withstand a mighty blow with a heavy hammer. They were wrong. But on the coast of Ecuador, it's now known, Pizarro's men so powdered countless bushels of real emeralds.

Few realize cocoa got to Europe before tea did. Before coffee, too.

During the Middle Ages, an occasional convict was put into a prison cell with two bushels of wheat — to serve a sentence of however long it took that prisoner to eat that wheat.

When New York City was still called New Amsterdam — in 1661, this — high-minded locals set up an evening school especially for those children who worked all day in what later came to be known as sweat shops.

A Huguenot named Bernard Palisay expressed the opinion in 1589 that fossils were the remains of living creatures. Those who didn't agree burned him at the stake.

Q: Can a tree be an herb?
A: Two can, I'm told. The juniper and the willow.

Claim is the Roman Emperor Domitian was so accurate with a bow he could put four arrows between the spread thumb and fingers of a volunteer's hand. Where'd he get the volunteer?

Q: Can you tell me the only game the Koran specifically prohibits Moslems from playing?
A: Chess.
Reader-contributed clarification

The suit of armor is not what saved the knight on horseback. Weapons experts calculate the point of a charging rider's accurate lance struck with three times the penetrating force of a high-powered bullet. It was the deflecting shield that saved the knight.

Q: Where's "Lutetia"?
A: That was an ancient name for Paris.

The North African for centuries ate the gladiolus. The flower was pretty, quite so, but it was that underground stem called the corm that prolonged the life of the hungry. The gladiolus was another of nature's numerous early care packages.

Q: What do seersucker, calico and chintz have in common?
A: Each was created in India. As were paisley, cashmere, crewel and madras. India has long been tall in textiles.

It was in 1687 that clockmakers first started putting not just one but two hands on clock faces. Memorable year, that one. Paris Opera Director Jean Baptiste Lully stabbed himself in the foot with his long baton that year. And died of blood poisoning therefrom.

Was a time when some people somewhere used the red scalps of woodpeckers for money.

Prescribed punishment for giving away silk secrets in old China was "death by torture."

Italian Proverb No. 392C: "Rice born in water must die in wine."

You also can say this about the people of Peru — they had popcorn first.

"Woo" is the Polish equivalent of "wow."

Catherine de Medici dipped snuff. She was reputed to be the first woman in Europe to use tobacco in any form. Maybe so. Still, that credit more likely belongs to some girlfriend of a sailor who brought it home.

In old Ethiopia, traditionally, the bride's jewelry was removed after the wedding, but its likeness was tattooed on her skin.

A kitchen mechanic advises: Wrap cheese loosely. Moisture within cheese lets mold form. A loose wrap lets moisture escape.

Both Socrates and Plato believed students learn best from teachers who speak well rather than from writers who write well.

"Fiscal" traces back to a Latin word meaning "moneybag."

What Leonardo Da Vinci really was trying to do when he invented scissors was demonstrate leverage.

Massachusetts in 1646 made it unlawful to smoke within five miles of any townsite.

In the Middle Ages, it was not a punishable crime to murder a traveling musician.

The pre-Inca Indians of Peru worshipped peanut butter. Not just the kids. Everybody.

Q: Is it not true that people named Chamberlain descend from the English Royal household's Lord Chamberlain whose main job was to lay wood in the fireplaces?
A: Not exactly. The Lord Steward managed that line of work, and left progeny named Steward. The Lord Chamberlain's job was to light the fires, and he left descendants named Chamberlain.

Until about a century ago, a pearl was more valuable than a diamond.

Long ago in Southern France, a donkey got loose in a vineyard at the Abbey of Marmoutier, and chewed up a lot of vines. Horrified monks thought their next grape crop would be ruined. But no, it turned out to be the best crop ever. Pruning helps, they realized, and grateful vintners have been pruning ever since.

American Indians used maple syrup before they used honey. There were bumblebees but no honeybees hereabouts until the colonists brought them over.

Q: Did religious people in Biblical t