Interesting Facts

The WHO (World Health Organisation) has new rules for avoiding offensive names for new diseases. (The new guidelines are aimed at removing the stigma that can be inflicted by diseases that use the names of people, places, and animals. The new guidelines called “The Naming of New Human Infectious Diseases” would discourage names like Spanish flu, German measles, Ebola, swine flu , bird flu, Rift Valley Fever, Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease, monkey pox, and MERS (Middle East respiratory syndrome), and encourage the use of more neutral, generic terms, such as severe respiratory disease or novel neurologic syndrome. Under the new guidelines, Marburg disease (named after a city in Germany) might have been called filovirus-associated haemorrhagic fever, while Ebola (named after a river) might have been filovirus-associated haemorrhagic fever.) Source

England Premier League Club, Manchester City, has advised footballers from abroad to watch Teletubbies to improve their English. iframe width="420" height="315" src="//www.youtube.com/embed/L_g8AJU7O6E?rel=0" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen> Alvaro Negedro has a better idea - he's going to teach Manchester how to speak Spanish:- )

Zorro is Spanish for Fox. (The Sword of Fox!  It doesn't have the same ring, does it? And let's face it slashing a Z with a sword is cooler than slashing an F.) This one is for  +Fernando Lestau   and   +João Crespo .  ;)

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...

The word avocado comes from "aguacate" in Spanish.  (Even more interestingly the Spanish word aguacate comes from "ahuacatl" in Nahuatl, the native language of Mexico, which refers to a certain intimate part of the male anatomy, the testicle. I'll never be able to think of avocados in the same way again.)

The name mosquito is Spanish for “little fly”. (I wonder what Spanish for "annoying little blood sucker" is?)

Spanish is spoken by around 500 million people in more than 20 countries. According to the Spanish in the World website, the following countries have a Spanish-speaking population greater than 100,000. Mexico - 106 million Colombia - 44 million Spain - 44 million Argentina - 39 million United States - 31 million Venezuela - 25 million Peru - 25 million Chile - 16 million Guatemala - 14 million Ecuador - 13 million Cuba - 11 million Bolivia - 8.7 million Dominican Republic - 8.5 million El Salvador - 6.8 million Honduras - 6.8 million Nicaragua - 5.5 million Paraguay - 4.5 million Costa Rica - 4 million Puerto Rico - 3.6 million Uruguay - 3.4 million Panama - 3 million

Spanish Flu, the influenza epidemic that killed 50 million people in 1918/9, was known as French Flu in Spain. (Now we just blame birds and piggies.)

The Spanish flu virus that killed 50 million people in 1918-19 was probably a strain that originated in birds. (I became worried about this when my doctor asked me if I would like a flu jab for the first time. Then I realised it's probably because of my age - sigh.)

The Spanish smoke more Gauloise cigarettes than the French. (Give up now!) http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/health/4217010.stm