Uncle John’s Impossible Questions & Astounding Answers (30 page)

Zucchetto
means “little gourd” in Italian. What does this have to do with Roman Catholic clerics?

The olallieberry is a cross between the loganberry and the youngberry created by S. J. Harvey in 1937. In the Chinook language,
ollalie
means “berry,” so in essence, “olallieberry” means “berry berry.” That should not be confused with
beriberi
, a disease that results from a deficiency of thiamine. The word “beriberi” came from either an Arabic phrase
bhur-bhari
(“sailor’s asthma”), or a Sinhalese phrase meaning “I cannot. I cannot.” Neither berry nor disease should be confused with the 1977
Saturday Night Live
catchphrase by Garrett Morris as fictional Mets infielder Chico Escuela, who said, “Baseball has been berry, berry good to me.”

Medieval monks spent long, cold winters beneath the high ceilings of massive European cathedrals. (This was before central heating.) Making matters colder was the monks’
tonsure
hairstyle—the hair was shaved from the top of the scalp, leaving just a fringe around the edges. Body heat escapes through a bare head, so the monks needed a small cap to cover the bald spot. Ironically, the answer came from the Jewish
kippah
, or
yarmulke
—a skullcap that the monks jokingly renamed the
zucchetto
because it makes the wearer’s head resemble a gourd. It’s still worn by European clergy. So the next time you see the pope, say, “What’s up, Mr. Pumpkin-head!” (On second thought, don’t.)

Which came first, books or libraries—and by how many years?

Why does
meteorology
refer to weather and not meteors?

Are you enjoying a cup of joe right now? Bet you don’t know who the original “Joe” was. Turn the page to find out.

The library came first. Five thousand years before the first books were mass-produced in the 1200s, ancient Sumerian libraries collected clay tablets that contained a variety of information, from business transactions to theology lessons.

Blame Aristotle. He coined the term
meteorology
in 340 B.C. In Greek,
meteora
basically meant “stuff in the sky” (except for birds). So Aristotle called snow
aqueous meteor
; wind,
aerial meteor
; rainbows,
luminous meteor
; and lightning and shooting stars,
fiery meteor
. Over time, the term
meteor
lost all its other skyward meanings except for “shooting star.” However, the term
meteorology
has remained—it means the study of rain, wind, lightning, and snow.

Josephus Daniels (1862–1948) was appointed Secretary of the Navy by President Woodrow Wilson in 1913. Good news: Daniels paved the way for women to join the Navy. Bad news: He abolished the officers’ wine rations from ships. From that time on, the strongest drink aboard navy vessels was coffee. Either in his honor (or with scorn), sailors later began referring to a cup of coffee is as a “cup of joe.”

The mafia has thugs. So do political parties and schoolyards. But most of these folks are saints compared to the original thugs. Who were they, and what dastardly deeds did they do?

We get the word
thug
from the Thuggees, a centuries-old criminal society in India. Originally called
Thags
, their name comes from the Sanskrit
sthaga
, meaning “deceiver.” Killing and robbing people in British Colonial India up until the 1830s, the Thuggees were about as bad as they came.

Their modus operandi: Several Thuggees would infiltrate a band of travelers (who banded together to avoid getting robbed) and pretend to be a part of the group. After gaining their trust, the Thuggees would wait for the right time to strike, when the band was far from the safety of any settlements. Then, usually around dusk, as the travelers broke into smaller groups, each Thuggee would join one of the groups and then wait for a prearranged signal—usually some kind of animal call. When it came, the Thuggees attacked. Using belts or scarves, they simultaneously strangled the strongest member of each little group, quickly and quietly so that no one could cry out and warn the others. From there, it was a simple task to pillage the rest of the camp.

It’s said that the Thuggees murdered by strangulation because spilling blood was against their religion. (It was quieter, too.) The murders were committed in honor of Kali, the Hindu goddess of destruction, who was depicted with a necklace of severed human heads. During the two centuries they practiced their “craft,” the Thuggees were responsible for at least 50,000 and maybe as many as two million deaths.

suortxedibma fo etisoppo eht s‛tahW What’s the opposite of ambidextrous?

What’s the only language in history that was created solely by and for women?

The opposite of
ambidextrous
is
ambisinistrous
, yet another of history’s right-handed jabs at lefties. The Latin term for “right-handed” is
dextera
. It came to mean “skillful” and gave us the word
dexterity
. So in effect,
ambidextrous
means “right-handed on both sides.” On the other hand, the Latin
sinistra
(“left-handed”) began as the word for the lone pocket on a toga, which was on the left side. (Who knew togas had pockets?) The Romans, and many other early cultures, distrusted lefties because they were different. In time, the word
sinister
came to mean first “clumsy,” and later “evil.” If a Roman citizen was very clumsy, they were called
ambisinistrous
, meaning they were “left-handed on both sides.”