Selected winners of the Bookseller/Diagram Prize for Oddest Title of the Year, awarded annually by Bookseller magazine to the book published that year with the strangest title:
The Joy of Chickens (1980)
Versailles: The View From Sweden (1988)
How to Avoid Huge Ships (1992)
Bombproof Your Horse (2004)
Of these, I think “How to Avoid Huge Ships” is my favourite, and my vote for this year’s prize is “Afterthoughts of a Worm Hunter”.
More at the Wikipedia page.
Today’s apt phobia. Also, things you will not be able to say after five beers.
Dammit, just got lost in Wikipedia for an hour.
I’ve spent the last hour reading about the Titanic and her sister ships, naval disasters and various other nautical matters.
DAMN YOU WIKIPEDIA!!!
(Via pterodactyls)
I’m intrigued as to whether this is a list of quite fantastic trees from Britain, or if Wikipedia as a whole has had a complete brain-freeze when it came to titling this page.
EDIT: It turns out that it is actually a list of 50 trees selected as worthy of honouring the Queen’s Jubilee in 2002. Utterly, utterly ridiculous. Makes me wonder what else was listed in that year…
Reblogged from: pterodactyls
Originally posted on: Pterodactyls
Euphemism Treadmill, on Wikipedia.
These are words that I use “affectionately” towards the girlfriend. Handy to know their etymology.
I couldn’t help but smirk all the way through reading this article. Be sure to check out the other entries in the ‘Exploding Animals’ category at the bottom of the page.
Things I did not know until today:
Queen Victoria’s birth name was actually Alexandrina Victoria. We could still be referring to “Alexandrian” or “Alexandrinian” times if she didn’t become the first British monarch to assume a Regnal Name when taking the throne.
That became en vogue in the first half of the 20th century, until our current queen responded “Why, my own name; what else?” when asked what her regnal name would be. Good ol’ Bess.
EDIT: Ooh, also: The King of Norway is 62nd in line to the British throne.
I like this hypothesis because of a) its name, and b) its content. Seriously, that’s a great name for any kind of hypothesis. Much better than the Smith theorem, or even Hawking black holes which are pretty cool. The hypothesis concerns how language shapes our thoughts, or vice-versa. It’s a really interesting topic if you like languages and their influence on society. EDIT: Forgot to mention that my favourite book of all time, 1984 by George Orwell, takes this idea and runs with it. It’s truly frightening that it could in fact be possible, eventually: The purpose of Newspeak was not only to provide a medium of expression for the world-view and mental habits proper to the devotees of Ingsoc, but to make all other modes of thought impossible. Incidentally, while browsing the Wiki around this topic, I stumbled across a list of protologisms, which are words coined recently with an eye to getting them into general use. At the moment they’re very niche, but look how verbs like “photoshop” and “google” quickly became everyday.
At the train station I use for work, there is a sign at the end of the platform which reads: Drivers - Don’t forget to lower your pantographs It amuses me every time I see it, on a base level. I can’t help but think that it’s a relic from Edwardian times, and “pantograph” is an old word for underwear, even though I was almost certain that it wasn’t. Now, thanks to the wonders of the web, specifically Wikipedia, a 2-second google search has informed me that pantographs are the metal contraptions on top of trains that connect them to overhead power lines. Consider me fully informed.
