Trivia and a Short History of Bookstores
By: Arlene Miller
S E E D E D C O N T E N T
Word Trivia and More
This blog post contains some interesting trivia about language and other things. At the end is a short article about the history of bookstores.
Last week I wrote about how I was going to blog about the history of bookstores, but I had lost my notes and had probably thrown them away because I could picture the piece of paper they were written on. Well, I don't know what I was picturing because I found them….on the Notes app on my phone. I assume those are what I was looking for….but they really were not detailed enough to write a post anyway, so I will write a short bit at the end of this post. A friend sent me these "facts" about English and other things. I have written about word trivia in previous posts and spoke about it in some of my talks. Sometimes, a couple of these tidbits will turn out not to be true. So believe at your own risk…
S tewardesses is the longest word typed with only the left hand.
And lollipop is the longest word typed with your right hand.
No word in the English language rhymes with month, orange, silver , or purple . Poets and songwriters probably know this.
Our eyes are always the same size from birth, but our nose and ears never stop growing.
The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog uses every letter of the alphabet.
The words racecar, kayak and level are the same whether they are read left to right or right to left (palindromes)
T here are only four words in the English language that end in dous : tremendous, horrendous, stupendous, and hazardous .
There are two words in the English language that have all five vowels in order: abstemious and facetious .
Typewriter is the longest word that can be made using the letters only on one row of the keyboard.
A cat has 32 muscles in each ear.
A goldfish has a memory span of three seconds.
A jiffy is an actual unit of time: 1/100th of a second.
A shark is the only fish that can blink with both eyes.
A snail can sleep for three years.
Almonds are a member of the peach family.
An ostrich's eye is bigger than its brain.
Babies are born without kneecaps. They don't appear until the child reaches 2 to 6 years of age.
February 1865 is the only month in recorded history to not have a full moon.
In the last 4,000 years, no new animals have been domesticated.
If the population of China walked past you, eight abreast, the line would never end because of the rate of reproduction.
Leonardo Da Vinci invented the scissors.
Peanuts are one of the ingredients of dynamite!
Rubber bands last longer when refrigerated.
The average person's left hand does 56 percent of the typing.
The cruise liner, QE 2 moves only six inches for each gallon of diesel that it burns.
The microwave was invented after a researcher walked by a radar tube and a chocolate bar melted in his pocket.
The winter of 1932 was so cold that Niagara Falls froze completely solid.
There are more chickens than people in the world.
Winston Churchill was born in a ladies room during a dance.
Women blink nearly twice as much as men.
All the ants in Africa weigh more than ALL the Elephants!!
Some trivia about bookstores :
Ben Franklin owned the first bookstore in the United States, which was combined with his printing press.
I was surprised to hear that some of the first bookstores were very large book departments in major department stores like Neiman Marcus. They did very well, but eventually disappeare
New York and other large cities had book stalls out on the street lined up, some run by people who loved books and others run by drug addicts and the homeless.
Eventually, independent bookstores came into being, some specializing. There were black bookstores, Nazi bookstores, and white supremacist bookstore
Then the big box stores like Barnes and Noble and Borders came along. And then came Amazon and blew everything else away! Borders is gone, but Barnes and Noble remains.
And there are still some independents flourishing. I lived near two small chain independents when I lived in northern California. One, Copperfields, was where I launched all my grammar books. They were absolutely wonderful to me and other indie authors. They are still around as is Book Passage, which has two or three stores and is a little more snobbish. But then I have never tried to get my books in there since my first book was brand new. It is a wonderful store that also has a YouTube channel where you can see and hear some authors. I saw many wonderful authors (including Jimmy Carter) at those two indie bookstores.
PLEASE EXCUSE THE FORMAT AND FONT QUIRKS IN THIS POST! THAT IS WHAT HAPPENS WHEN YOU TRY TO CUT AND PASTE!
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Because of the short bookstore history at the end of the article I was going to post this article in the Books group, but decided that more members would open and read this in the Non-Political group.
Was Winston Churchill born in a ladies room during a dance?
Bullshit!!! Snopes says
Now I don't believe a lot of the trivia she posted. Note that the author did say this: " Sometimes, a couple of these tidbits will turn out not to be true. So believe at your own risk…"
Actually when I read the item about the newly born Churchill, I couldn’t help but wonder: why was he in the ladies room anyway?
And beyond that—. While in the ladies room, while did he feel the urge to dance? 🧐
His mother was purported to have taken him there, and maybe she danced a little too vigorously.
pretty good
Of course!
Why do you think so?
Buzz are you familiar with The Strand bookstore in NYC? IIRC it was on Broadway and 12th St (just south of Union Square).
( I don’t know if they still exist ) ???
City Lights? (San Francisco).
Paris 5th arondissement: all the bookstands by the Seine.
No.
Never been to France.
No.
Actually two of those were just a long shot. But I actually thought you might have been to The Strand because it was quite famous at one point and near the edge of Greenwich Village. And IIRC you mentioned that at one tine you had lived in NY.
But it might have closed by then-- and at the time you were in NYC you might have found closer bookstores to visit.
I never lived in NY, but was in the State many times and NYC quite often as well as a tourist, a vistor and even once to represent a client. The only actual home I had in the USA was in Florida.
I finally decided to switch this article over to the Books group in case anyone wants to comment on the books aspect of the article.
I'm wondering how many people here actually read books?
(Most everything now is online).
I have to admit that the most recent books I've read were on my kindle-type ereader that a good friend loaded and sent to me. I do have books and have read real books here. One in particular I would recommend is Journey to the West.
I dont read books anymore, I dont like the small print. There are online services where you can listen to books including a few free ones such as Internet Archive, Gutenberg Project, and Librivox. Most of , but not all, the books on these services are not new though.
Scribd and Audible have pay subscriptions where you can listen to new (and old) books.
With the right software you can create your own audiobooks.
I've been aware of Gutenberg for a long time, but I don't have the patience to use it. Inf fact, unless it's something I'm really interested in, I don't have the patience to read some of the novel-sized seeds some members post on NT. The best time I find for even using my ereader is when I'm on the subway or in a taxi/UBER.
but our nose and ears never stop growing.
Regarding noses never stopping growing-- that's especially true in the case of politicians!
Well, actually they DO stop growing when we are fully grown, but I'm not so sure about politicians some of whom seem to have brains and hearts that shrink.