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All of this is by way of coming around to the somewhat paradoxical observation that we speak with remarkable laxness and imprecision and yet manage to express ourselves with wondrous subtlety--and simply breathtaking speed. In normal conversation we speak at a rate of about 300 syllables a minute. To do this we force air up through the larynx--or supralaryngeal vocal tract, to be technical about it--and, by variously pursing our lips and fl..
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Bill Bryson |
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It is perhaps little wonder that the end of Victorianism almost exactly coincided with the invention of psychoanalysis.
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victorian-age
psychoanalysis
victorian-era
victorian
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Bill Bryson |
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26a425d
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The dinosaurs, built of concrete, were a kind of bonus attraction. On New Year's Eve 1853 a famous dinner for twenty-one prominent scientists was held inside the unfinished iguanodon. Gideon Mantell, the man who had found and identified the iguanodon, was not among them. The person at the head of the table was the greatest star of the young science of palaeontology. His name was Richard Owen and by this time he had already devoted several p..
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Bill Bryson |
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1c2d6e6
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If you have ever wondered why radio and television stations always have call signs beginning with W or K, the answer is that those letters were assigned to American airwaves by an international convention held in London in 1912. The United States was given the call letters A, N, W, and K. A and N were reserved respectively for the army and navy. The other two were given to public broadcasters.
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Bill Bryson |
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874b4ca
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I have long known that it is part of God's plan for me to spend a little time with each of the most stupid people on earth, and Mary Ellen was proof that even in the Appalachian woods I would not be spared.
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Bill Bryson |
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f1b5b81
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So Whitney's gin not only helped make many people rich on both sides of the Atlantic but also reinvigorated slavery, turned child labor into a necessity, and paved the way for the American Civil War. Perhaps at no other time in history has someone with a simple, well-meaning invention generated more general prosperity, personal disappointment, and inadvertent suffering than Eli Whitney with his gin.
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Bill Bryson |
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In 1964, the largest earthquake ever recorded in North America rocked Alaska with 200,000 megatons of concentrated might, the equivalent of 2,000 nuclear bombs. Almost 3,000 miles away in Texas, water sloshed out of swimming pools. A street in Anchorage fell twenty feet. The quake devastated 24,000 square miles of wilderness, much of it glaciated. And what effect did all this might have on Alaska's glaciers? None.
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Bill Bryson |
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f1b0b06
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nostalgia such as can be known only by those who remember the days of hot metal typesetting and noisy composing rooms
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Bill Bryson |
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Travel is like love, mostly because it's a heightened state of awareness, in which we are mindful, receptive, undimmed by familiarity and ready to be transformed. That is why the best trips, like the best love affairs, never really end." All love affairs, all long-term relationships--travel included--demand that we keep an element of mystery alive and kicking."
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Bill Bryson |
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1eab431
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As early colonists employed odd spellings, so too they often brought unexpected pronunciations with them. This was particularly the case in Virginia, where the leading families had a special fondness for pronouncing their family names in improbable ways, so that Sclater became "Slaughter," Munford became "Mumfud," Randolph was "Randall," Wyatt was "Wait," Devereaux was "Deverecks," Callowhill was "Carroll," Higginson was "Hickerson," Norswo..
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Bill Bryson |
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45bb6b3
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The Appalachians are the home of one of the world's great hardwood forests
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Bill Bryson |
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a5d73d2
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explanations, like dreams, only make sense while they're happening.
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Bill Bryson |
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E Pluribus Unum, "One from Many," was taken from, of all places, a recipe for salad in an early poem by Virgil.)"
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Bill Bryson |
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Magazines boomed, too. Advertising revenues leaped 500 percent in the decade, and many publications of lasting importance made their debut: Reader's Digest in 1922, Time in 1923, the American Mercury and Smart Set in 1924, The New Yorker in 1925. Time was perhaps the most immediately influential
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Bill Bryson |
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4dde293
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Above all, the 1920s was a golden age for newspapers. Newspaper sales in the decade rose by about a fifth, to 36 million copies a day--or 1.4 newspapers for every household. New York City alone had twelve daily papers, and almost all other cities worthy of the name had at least two or three.
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Bill Bryson |
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244a301
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Look at yourself in the mirror and reflect upon the fact that you are beholding ten thousand trillion cells, and that almost every one of them holds two yards of densely compacted DNA, and you begin to appreciate just how much of this stuff you carry around with you.
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Bill Bryson |
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4943f62
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Baseball remains one of the most fertile grounds for inventive wordplay in American life. Among the more notable--and on the face of it more bewildering--recent neologisms are to dial 8 for a home run and Linda Ronstadt for a good fastball. Dial 8 comes from the practice among hotels of requiring customers to dial 8 for a long-distance line. Linda Ronstadt, more complicatedly, is an allusion to her song "Blue Bayou," the significance of whi..
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Bill Bryson |
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d93e200
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The murder of poor Albert Snyder had one other unusual feature: the people responsible were caught. That didn't actually happen much in America in the 1920s. New York recorded 372 murders in 1927; in 115 of those cases no one was arrested. Where arrests were made, the conviction rate was less than 20 percent. Nationally, according to a survey made by the Metropolitan Life Insurance Company--and it is notable that the best records were kept ..
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Bill Bryson |
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ada8f96
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If all the ice sheets melted, sea levels would rise by 60 metres.
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Bill Bryson |
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c26a4a2
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Absolute brain size does not tell you everything - It is relative size that matters, a point that is often overlooked.
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Bill Bryson |
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934ad2c
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She had, I realized, Retail Tourette's Syndrome, a compulsion to blurt advice. There was nothing she could do about it.
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Bill Bryson |
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7f6a215
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If you have a morbid fear of peanut butter sticking to the roof of your mouth, there is a word for it: arachibutyrophobia... And there's a word for describing a sudden breaking off of thought: aposiopesis... When you are just dropping off to sleep and you experience that sudden sensation of falling, there is a word for it: it's a myoclonic jerk.
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Bill Bryson |
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2d5fcc4
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Some of these words deserve to be better known. Take velleity, which describes a mild desire, a wish or urge too slight to lead to action. Doesn't that seem a useful term? Or how about sluibbergegullion, a seventeenth-century word signifying a worthless or slovenly fellow? Or ugsome, a late medieval word meaning loathsome or disgusting.
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Bill Bryson |
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If talking pictures could be said to have a father, it was Lee De Forest, a brilliant but erratic inventor of electrical devices of all types. (He had 216 patents.) In 1907, while searching for ways to boost telephone signals, De Forest invented something called the thermionic triode detector. De Forest's patent described it as "a System for Amplifying Feeble Electric Currents" and it would play a pivotal role in the development of broadcas..
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Bill Bryson |
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b61ef08
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By comparison, the practice of one Frank Huntington Beebe of keeping two mansions side by side--one to live in, one to decorate over and over--seems admirably restrained.
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Bill Bryson |
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designed and built the world's first municipal park. This park so captivated the American landscape architect Frederick Law Olmsted that he modeled Central Park in New York on it.
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Bill Bryson |
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From this I think we can conclude that the definitive English holorime has yet to be written. However, an old children's riddle does seem to come close. It is the one that poses the question "How do you prove in three steps that a sheet of paper is a lazy dog?" The answer: (1) a sheet of paper is an ink-lined plane; (2) an inclined plane is a slope up; (3) a slow pup is a lazy dog."
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language
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Bill Bryson |
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1583e9f
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The belief that "and" should not be used to begin a sentence is without foundation. And that's all there is to it."
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Bill Bryson |
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noticed on my city map that just up the road was the Musee International de la Croix-Rouge et du Croissant-Rouge (the International Museum of the Red Cross and Red Breakfast Roll), which sounded much more promising to me.
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Bill Bryson |
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25e24dd
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That is why, for instance, horses in New England (as in East Anglia) neigh, while those in the middle states of America (and the Midlands of England) whinny.
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Bill Bryson |
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For anyone of a rational disposition, fashion is often nearly impossible to fathom. Throughout many periods of history--perhaps most--it can seem as if the whole impulse of fashion has been to look maximally ridiculous. If one could be maximally uncomfortable as well, the triumph was all the greater.
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Bill Bryson |
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Dressing impractically is a way of showing that one doesn't have to do physical work.
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Bill Bryson |
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e864d2e
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In a sense William Shakespeare's greatest achievement in life wasn't writing Hamlet or the sonnets but just surviving his first year.
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Bill Bryson |
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2b36891
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It is extraordinary to think that before he settled in London and became celebrated as a playwright, history provides just four recorded glimpses of Shakespeare--at his baptism, his wedding, and the two births of his children.
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Bill Bryson |
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1c5cac1
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Never has the promise of glowing skin been more dangerously apt than in the early years of the twentieth century when radium was commonly used as a featured ingredient in beauty products. (credit 7.11)
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Bill Bryson |
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Although the Spirit of St. Louis looked metallic, and was often described as such in newspaper reports, only the nose cowling was actually of metal. With only a thin layer of canvas between the pilot and the outside world, the Spirit of St. Louis was deafeningly noisy and unnervingly insubstantial. It would have been rather like crossing the ocean in a tent.
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Bill Bryson |
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ea16a22
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Not incidentally, lead's symbol is Pb, for the Latin plumbum, the source word for our modern plumbing.) The Romans also flavored their wine with lead, which may be part of the reason they are not the
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Bill Bryson |
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7aa86f5
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Rich women, including the queen, made themselves additionally beauteous by bleaching their skin with compounds of borax, sulfur, and lead--all at least mildly toxic,
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Bill Bryson |
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fe3a1d2
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Alexander von Humboldt, yet another friend, may have had Agassiz at least partly in mind when he observed that there are three stages in scientific discovery: first, people deny that it is true; then they deny that it is important; finally they credit the wrong person.
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Bill Bryson |
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e656f98
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The best indicator of personal risk is whether you have fallen much before. Accident proneness is a slightly controversial area among stair-injury epidemiologists, but it does seem to be a reality. About four persons in ten injured in a stair fall have been injured in a stair fall before.
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Bill Bryson |
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a26b897
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Exhausted by the stresses, Phillip was called home after four years, and retired to Bath. Apart from founding Sydney, he had one other notable achievement. In 1814, he managed to die by falling from a wheelchair and out of an upstairs window.
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Bill Bryson |
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bb0ef24
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Unluckier still was Guillaume Le Gentil, whose experiences are wonderfully summarized by Timothy Ferris in Coming of Age in the Milky Way. Le Gentil set off from France a year ahead of time to observe the transit from India, but various setbacks left him still at sea on the day of the transit--just about the worst place to be since steady measurements were impossible on a pitching ship. Undaunted, Le Gentil continued on to India to await th..
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Bill Bryson |
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df9d675
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Unluckier still was Guillaume Le Gentil, whose experiences are wonderfully summarized by Timothy Ferris in Coming of Age in the Milky Way . Le Gentil set off from France a year ahead of time to observe the transit (of Venus) from India, but various setbacks left him still at sea on the day of the transit--just about the worst place to be since steady measurements were impossible on a pitching ship.
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humor
resilience
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Bill Bryson |
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c77b251
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It is a painful irony that silent movies were driven out of existence just as they were reaching a kind of glorious summit of creativity and imagination, so that some of the best silent movies were also some of the last ones. Of no film was that more true than Wings, which opened on August 12 at the Criterion Theatre in New York, with a dedication to Charles Lindbergh. The film was the conception of John Monk Saunders, a bright young man fr..
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Bill Bryson |