Things I Didn’t Know

Here is my 2024 List:

* The Platypus is the only mammal who lays eggs. (maybe I already knew this, but I feel like I’m on a streak after wombat poop last year)

* In Greek mythology Pandora was the first woman, just like Eve. Institutional misogyny. Eve with the snake; Pandora with the box.

* Tetraphobia is fear of the number four, which, in Chinese, sounds similar to the word for death. Throughout China, the fourth floor is often “missing” from buildings. I don’t know about you, but every once in a while I feel like getting out on the 14th floor of a building and going up to each door, knocking and saying “you’re really on the 13th floor!” At BofA, the problem was resolved by making the 13^th floor a mechanical floor with no tenants.

* Apparently Bunsen (of the burner) and Erlenmeyer (of the flask) worked together in the same lab.

* A blatherskite is a person who talks at great length without making much sense.

* The term “Pale, Stale and Male” is not known to every English-speaker in the world, which is baffling because its so useful in describing… well… everything that’s wrong with this world.

* Wishcasting (which should have been 2024’s word of the year) is a portmanteau of wishing and forecasting, which means making a wish and pretending it’s a forecast.

* Invariant is the word for nouns whose single and plural forms are identical (moose, deer, salmon, aircraft and so on…)

* Bellend is British slang for an idiot.

* If you learned Yiddish from your friends, you probably don’t know the literal meaning of Putz and Schmuck.

Comments

[Daniel Dern]

Platypus-wise, close, but, per ( (to cite somplace other than Wikipedia, which will convey the same information) E. Britannica (which, I learned via NPR last week, is still going strong, albeit unprintedly :-), also the echidna, both being monotremes. "any member of the egg-laying mammalian order Monotremata" (Brit: https://www.britannica.com/animal/monotreme) ( here's Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monotreme)
Britannica goes on to say (among other things) "Monotremata is the most ancient living order of mammals." which sounds like the set-up for a joke by SJ Perlman or Groucho Marx. (Probably either a restaurant or religious-org joke.)

[Daniel Dern]

One more egg-laying thought: Would you include Edgar Rice Burroughs' Barsoomians (Martians), who similarly have eggs rather than live births?