Interesting Facts

2nd July 862 – St. Swithun, Bishop of Winchester died. 1698 – Thomas Savery patented the first steam engine. 1776 – The Continental Congress adopted a resolution severing ties with Great Britain although the wording of the formal Declaration of Independence was not approved until July 4. 1777 – Vermont became the first American territory to abolish slavery. 1839 - 53 African slaves being transported to Cuba on the Spanish merchant ship La Amistad revolted against their captors led by Joseph Cinque. 1850 – The self-contained gas mask was patented by Benjamin J. Lane. 1853 – The Russian Army invaded Turkey, beginning the Crimean War. 1881 – Charles J. Guiteau shot and fatally wounded U.S. President James Garfield, who eventually died on September 19. 1897 – Italian scientist Guglielmo Marconi obtained a patent for radio in London. 1900 - The world's first rigid airship was demonstrated by Ferdinand Graf von Zeppelin on Lake Constance near Friedrichshafen, Germany...

Tesco supermarkets have decided to only sell straight croissants. (Why? Well because UK customers have complained they cannot spread jam properly on a traditionally curved croissant. Now you probably know that the croissant is a French pastry, but what you might not know is that the word is French for crescent, and if you look crescent up in the dictionary you will see that it describes the curved sickle shape of the waxing or waning moon.  Oh dear, this is becoming an interesting word post. Anyway, although I am suspicious of their reasons (it's far more likely that it's simply cheaper to produce straight pastries), Tescos should be able to sell their boringly straight pastries, but they shouldn't call them croissants, they should call them tout droit instead.) PS - I am aware that no self-respecting French person would put jam on their croissant.

According to the European Commission, British tourists visiting Disneyland in Paris are charged hundreds of pounds more than the French. (French authorities have been ordered to look into Disneyland's pricing policy for visitors from abroad, on the findings that British customers could be paying up to 15% more for one-day tickets, €1,870 (£1,327) compared with €1,346 (£955) for French ticketholders and Germans are even harder hit, paying €2,447 (£1,736). I wonder if you could simply get someone French to buy the tickets for you.) Thanks to Bubbli for sharing this one.

If you ever needed proof that remembering lists of words doesn't mean you can speak the language, here it is. 48-year-old New Zealander, Nigel Richards, is the French-language world Scrabble champion, but he can't speak French. (He is 3 times world Scrabble champion, 5 times US champion, and has won 12 titles in the King’s Cup championship in Bangkok, but became world Champion of Francophone Scrabble, after memorizing all possible words in the official French scrabble dictionary, with two to 10 letters. Throw those vocabulary lists away.)

There is a language taking over the world, and it isn't English; it's Emoji. (In a survey conducted by TalkTalk Mobile, 8 in 10 people use emoji symbols in emails and text messages, and 72% of British 18 to 25-year-olds said they found it easier to put their feelings across in emoji icons than in text. The 10 most popular emojis are as follows:- 1- Smiley Face 2- Crying with laughter 3- Love heart 4- Blushing 5- Thumbs up 6- Cheeky face 7- Blowing a kiss 8- Winking face 9- Confused 10- See no evil monkey However, different language speakers have their own preferences:- Canadians seemingly enjoy using the smiling poop emoji. The French use four times as many heart emojis than other languages. Flower and plant emojis, particularly the rose, are used at more than 4 times the average rate by Arabic speakers. Russian speakers use 3 times as many romantic emojis. Australians like emojis with a...

The French city of Grenoble is going to ban all advertising hoardings by next year. (They will scrap 326 advertising hoardings, including 64 large billboards by April 2015. The mayor has promised to replace the signs and billboards with trees and community noticeboards. They will be the first city in Europe to do so, although the French village, Forcalquier, implemented a similar ban back in 2009.)

According to a poll conducted by magazine Terre de Vins (Wine Country), most French people don't know much about wine. (71% of people surveyed said that they didn't know much about wine, of these 43% admitted to knowing nothing at all. Only 3% thought they were well versed in the subject, whilst 26% said they "knew enough." For me, wine is like art, I know what I like.)

Sticking to a fruity theme; Harrods are selling cherries at £4.65 a punnet. (Why is this interesting? Well there are only 25 cherries in a punnet you can do the math. That's a whopping £1.65 a cherry. Seemingly the French "Glamour-edoa" cherries, are supposedly the only cherries grown naturally that are ripe enough to eat this early.  That said, my neighbour is picking cherries off his tree as I type.  I wonder if he'll sell me one for a couple of Euros. As the Daily Mail wrote, "That's cherry expensive".) http://www.glamour-edoa.com

Loan words are words adopted from another language with little or no modification.    According to research by Philip Durkin, a senior editor of the Oxford English Dictionary, the most influential language on English is Latin. (According to Mr Durkin English contains around 13,000 words with Latin roots. The next most influential language is French with 6,000 words. (Borrowed - not stolen +Xeb eke  .) In fact, according to Mr Durkin's research, Hawaiian, Turkish, Zulu and Swahili have had more of an impact than Welsh and Cornish. Welsh ranked 30th. Cornish came in at 45th place. Even the word pasty came from France and not Cornwall.) Source: Borrowed Words by Philip Durkin

The British ate frogs' legs 8,000 years before the French. (Archaeologists at Stonehenge have found the remains of the cooked front leg of a toad, which has been dated to between 7000 and 8000 BC (or BCE for those who have been attending my sessions. I'm not sure if this isn't something we should simply leave for the French to claim.)

You may have heard that a new pope has been elected. Surprisingly quickly as well. Especially when you consider that the longest papal conclave took over 2 years. (Deliberations started in 1268, when Catholic cardinals met in the village of Viterbo to elect a new Pope. Monsignor Charles Burns, a retired archivist at the Secret Vatican Archives, told ABC News in 2005 that the villagers grew angry at how long the process was taking (there was a split between French and Italian factions), and locked the cardinals in a nearby palace (the term "conclave" actually refers to this — it means "with a key"). In the end, the process went on for so long that the villagers tried to starve the cardinals into making a decision, giving them only bread and water. They even tore the roof off the palace in a bid to expose the cardinals to the elements — you can still see the roof-less palace today: They chose Italian born Teobaldo Visconti, a man who was neither a cardinal nor ev...

Before you go off in a huff, love is a number - in tennis. (In France, where tennis became popular, the round nought on the scoreboard looked like an egg and was called 'l'oeuf,' which is French for 'the egg.'  Legend has it that when tennis was introduced in the US, Americans (mis)pronounced it 'love.') More about numbers here. Thanks Marianne

Aubergines were originally called "vatinganah" in Sanskrit, which means literally ‘fart, go away.’ Original Photo by Irene Kightley   CC by SA 2.0 (From Sanskrit, the word and the fruit travelled, morphed into Persian as badingan, then into Arabic as al-badhinjan.  The Spanish borrowed the term thinking that the Arabic definite article "al" was part of the word, so it went into the Catalan language as alberginia, where the French later picked it up as aubergine, and the English borrowed the word in the late 1700s. 1794, from Fr. aubergine, "fruit of the eggplant" (Solanum esculentum), dim. of auberge "a kind of peach," variant of alberge, from Sp. alberchigo "apricot" [OED]. Klein derives the French word from Catalan alberginera, from Arabic al-badinjan"the eggplant," from Pers. badin-gan, from Skt. vatin-ganah. So aubergine really means "fart go away". Americans know it as an eggplant, which IMHO isn...

French bank Societe Generale has started a new bank card especially for women. (The pink-and-gold-coloured "Pour Elle" bank card, offers holders up to €200 of handbag theft insurance and a dedicated hotline for up to two electrician, locksmith or other handyman callouts per year. And before you shout "sexism" a spokeswoman from the bank has said, "5% of the cardholders are men".)

Interesting Food?  Olympics? Have I gone mad? No, but I am incensed, because this little factlet is about French fries at the Olympics. The fast food chain  McDonald’s has been given sole rights to offer French fries by the International Olympic Committee, because they are the official restaurant sponsor for London 2012 and have paid a small fortune for the privilege. (The 800 other eateries at Olympic venues nationwide will be allowed to sell the British favourite fish and chips — but not chips on their own. A note posted at the Olympic venue reads, “Due to sponsorship obligations with McDonald’s, Locog have instructed the catering team they are no longer allowed to serve chips on their own. The only loophole to this is if it is served with fish. Please understand this is not the decision of the staff serving up your meals, who given the choice would gladly give it to you. However they are not allowed.” Now IMHO there is no problem - French fries are not chips...

Nick Clegg (the leader of the Liberal Democratic party and currently the Deputy Prime Minister of the UK), has a Master's Degree in European studies. (In fact he has some European connections: He is multilingual, and speaks English, Dutch, French, German, and Spanish. He also spent a gap year working as a ski instructor in Austria, and my favourite European link is that when he was 16 he served a community service sentence in Germany, when on an exchange trip in Munich, he and a friend got drunk and set fire to two greenhouses full of exotic plants.)

The Kepler space telescope has confirmed its first-ever planet in a habitable zone outside our solar system. ( Spinning around its (sun like) star about 600 light years away, Kepler-22b is 2.4 times the size of the Earth, putting it in a class known as "super-Earths", and has a year of 290 days.   The near-surface temperature is presumed to be about 22 degrees Celsius, but don't pack your bags just yet, as scientists do not know whether the planet is rocky, gaseous or liquid, so you wouldn't know what to pack - diving gear, climbing gear or breathing apparatus. Kepler is NASA's first mission in search of Earth-like planets orbiting suns similar to ours, and cost the US space agency about $US600 million, but it has already uncovered 1,094 more potential planets.   They aren't the only ones looking of course, French astronomers this year confirmed the first rocky exoplanet to meet key requirements for sustaining life.  To infinity and beyond!  Co...

According to a survey by hotels.com, 2 in 3 Britons cannot say anything in another language. (Now we're not talking about being able to speak a foreign language here, we are talking about the ability to say and understand one word in another language. And it's even more embarrassing to read that one fifth of those asked were even sure of what ‘bonjour’ means! (Sorry Xeb, Celine, Eflish and co.). One third – 34 per cent – said they were willing to make an attempt at speaking a foreign language while on holiday. One fifth (19 per cent) did not know the meaning of the French word for hello, one of the most recognisable foreign greetings in the world. And 63 per cent had no idea what the Dutch word ‘goedemorgen’ meant, despite the obvious similarities to our own ‘good morning’.  (Sorry April, Will and co.) Believe it or not, it is compulsory for all UK pupils to study a foreign language up to the age of 14 and French, German and Spanish are all on the national curr...

A lock of hair from former French emperor Napoleon Bonaparte sold for more than £8,600 (US$13,000) at an auction in New Zealand. (I have one question: "How far along are we in cloning technology?" One short little man in charge of France is enough.)

Britain has been voted the worst dressed country in Europe. (Yes, 40% of the people polled by Microsoft's price comparison site Ciao thought that Britain was the worst dressed nation, and Germany came second in the league of shame at 33 per cent. Fifteen per cent said the Spanish were least fashionable and 6 per cent chose the French. With a mere 3 per cent saying the Italians were the worst dressed. Personally I dislike any obsessive occupation with looking good all the time. Life's too short to worry about it.)