Alfred, Lord Tennyson, once said of Lord Byron, “I was fourteen when I heard of his death. It seemed an awful calamity; I remember I rushed out of doors, sat down by myself, shouted aloud, and wrote on the sandstone: BYRON IS DEAD!”
Archive
Miscellany
Thomas Edison is popularly credited with initiating the practice of saying “Hello” when answering the telephone. His rival Alexander Graham Bell preferred “Ahoy” (as used on ships) as a phone greeting and used it for the rest of his life. The first phone book, published in 1878, instructed users to begin conversations with “a firm and cheery ‘Hulloa.’ ” (To end conversations, it recommended “That is all.”) By 1889 telephone-exchange operators were known as “hello girls.”
In the law courts of democratic Athens in the fifth century bc, citizens on trial were compelled to offer their own defenses, often hiring speechwriters. “If I make a mistake in speaking, pardon me and treat it as due to inexperience rather than dishonesty,” pleaded one defendant, who had hired the orator Antiphon to compose the entire speech.
The first Olympic champion on record, Coroebus, was a cook. He won the sprint in 776 BC.
“If people would think more of fairies, they would soon forget the atom bomb,” Walt Disney quipped in 1948. President Dwight D. Eisenhower agreed: public fear of the atom bomb was growing, and in 1953 he assured Americans in his “Atoms for Peace” speech that war was not imminent and that nuclear technology had enormous potential for peacetime activity as well. Eisenhower then recruited Disney to produce a television program promoting the “peaceful atom.” In 1957, “Our Friend the Atom” aired on ABC, featuring animated cartoons and narration by Heinz Haber, a scientist who had worked in Nazi Germany and later became a technical consultant for Disney’s Tomorrowland theme park.
Leo Tolstoy, who opened a school for peasant children on his estate and organized relief efforts during famines in 1873 and 1891, later lost his charitable spirit. In 1903, in response to a visitor describing the poor at Moscow’s Khitrov market eating rotten eggs, fish, and fruit, Tolstoy declared that drunkenness and debauchery were responsible for such conditions, not misfortune. “They always have been bosyaki,” said Tolstoy about the beggars there, “and they always will be. They drink, are lazy, and that is all there is to it.”
“Darkness has come upon me,” a hymn in the Rig Veda laments. “O Dawn, banish it like a debt.” The morning light is here asked, suggested translator Wendy Doniger, to act as a collection agency—to “make good what darkness had incurred or ‘exact’ the darkness from night as one would exact money.”
“The history of the twentieth century should have taught us that it is important to shape circumstances before crises emerge, and to meet threats before they become dire,” reads the Statement of Principles for the Project for the New American Century, June 3, 1997. Among the signatories were Dick Cheney, Francis Fukuyama, Dan Quayle, Donald Rumsfeld, Paul Wolfowitz, and Jeb Bush—but not George W.
Although the Oxford English Dictionary lists the etymology of “hooligan” as unascertained, one of the three speculations is that it derives from a popular music-hall song of the 1890s about a rowdy Irish family that went by that last name.
An estimated one in ten Europeans is conceived in an Ikea bed.
As a young man, Giacomo Casanova spent his nights roaming through Venice, “thinking up the most scandalous practical jokes and putting them into execution,” he later wrote in his memoirs. “When we could get into bell towers, we thought it great sport to alarm the whole neighborhood by ringing the tocsin that announces a fire, or to cut all the bell ropes…The whole city was complaining of our nocturnal malefactions, and we laughed at the investigations that were made to discover the disturbers of the public peace.”
Including trademarks in books became crucial after the invention of the printing press; without stringent copyright laws, rival publishers could repurpose superiorly edited texts with impunity. Aldus Manutius of Venice, who employed Erasmus as a proofreader, called attention to his company’s “sign of the dolphin wound round the anchor.” Florentine printers were aping the mark, but in the frauds, “the head of the dolphin is turned to the left, whereas that of ours is well known to be turned to the right.”
Yemen’s parliament passed a law setting the minimum age for marriage at seventeen in 2009, having been spurred by the national attention given to the story of ten-year-old Nujood Ali, who was granted a divorce from a thirty-year-old man. The child-marriage legislation passed in parliament but was put on hold by conservative members, citing potential inconsistencies with Sharia law.
“The difference between us is very marked,” wrote Frederick Douglass to Harriet Tubman in 1868. “Most that I have done and suffered in the service of our cause has been in public, and I have received much encouragement at every step of the way. You, on the other hand, have labored in a private way. I have wrought in the day—you in the night.”
Sent to suppress elements of Nathaniel Bacon’s Rebellion in 1676, British soldiers made a soup seasoned with Datura stramonium, a hallucinogen, “the effect of which,” as an eighteenth-century historian put it, “was a very pleasant comedy; for they turned natural fools upon it for several days; one would blow up a feather in the air, another would dart straws at it with much fury, and another, stark naked, was sitting up in a corner, like a monkey, grinning and making mows at them.” D. stramonium became known as jimson weed, named after Jamestown, Virginia, where the soldiers had been sent.