The first known legal use of the phrase act of God was in a 1581 English case concerning property inheritance. It referred, in that instance, to death, declared by the judge to be among “those things which are inevitable by the act of God, which no industry can avoid, nor policy prevent.”
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Cornbread, hot biscuits, wheat bread, and fried chicken were among the foods that Mark Twain said couldn’t be cooked north of the Mason-Dixon line.
In 1967 Bobby and Ethel Kennedy participated in the tenth annual Hudson River Whitewater Derby. Bobby’s kayak capsized in the freezing water; he was hurtled down the rapids. The next day Ethel attempted the course, accompanied by a ski expert and a mountain guide; the trio’s canoe tipped over three times. “A rescue party’s been sent up the river to get Mrs. Kennedy, who is on a rock,” an announcer told those waiting at the finish. “She’s having a bad day.”
In one of the earliest references to the tragedy of the commons—a concept that describes how people use natural resources to their advantage without considering the cost to society—the economist William Forster Lloyd asked in 1833, “Why are the cattle on a common so puny and stunted? Why is the common itself so bare-worn and cropped so differently from adjoining enclosures?”
Humpback whales, which have a sonic range of at least seven octaves, create songs between the length of a modern ballad and a symphony movement, possibly because their attention span is similar to that of humans. Their tunes also contain repeated refrains that form melodic rhymes, suggesting that, like humans, they use these as mnemonic devices.
A king in twelfth-century-bc China enjoyed women wearing dangling pearls and jade in a “Hair-knot Which Sways at Every Step”; the emperor who built the Great Wall favored the “Hair-knot Which Rises Above the Clouds”; Tang women wore the “Hair-knot of the Homing Bird”; and a writer in the last years of the Manchu dynasty offered the name “Hair-knot of Disintegration and Homeless Wandering” for a style of the day. “The times are indeed out of joint!” he wrote. “I tremble to think of what is to come.”
While uniting rival clans into a nation in the third millennium bc, China’s Yellow Emperor is said to have established prohibitions against feuding by making a gruesome example of one rebellious leader—peeling the man’s skin off to use for target practice, stuffing his stomach to make a ball to kick around, and fermenting his flesh and bones into a bitter broth to drink.
According to a biographer, Honoré de Balzac called out on his deathbed for Dr. Horace Bianchon, a fictional creation that appeared in thirty-one of his stories. “Send for Bianchon,” the novelist said to his attending physician.
In Either/Or: A Fragment of Life, published in 1843, Søren Kierkegaard wrote, “What philosophers say about actuality is often just as disappointing as it is when one reads on a sign in a secondhand shop: pressing done here. If a person were to bring his clothes to be pressed, he would be duped, for the sign is merely for sale.”
At a seance in the White House in 1862, Nettie Colburn Maynard, the medium, recalled that, after losing consciousness, she, channeling Daniel Webster, spoke for over an hour, during which President Abraham Lincoln was assured that the Emancipation Proclamation he had written but not signed would be “the crowning event of his administration and life” and that he needed to “stand firm” against dissenters. Arthur Conan Doyle later speculated that it “may have been one of the most important [moments] in the history of the United States.”
Andean legends tell of pishtacos, bogeymen who steal their victims’ fat. In colonial times they were said to be Franciscan monks who used the fat as church-bell grease or holy oil. By the 1960s they were sometimes represented as workers who used it to lubricate modern factory machinery or airplane engines.
Thomas Edison is popularly credited with initiating the practice of saying “Hello” when answering the telephone. His rival Alexander Graham Bell preferred “Ahoy” (as used on ships) as a phone greeting and used it for the rest of his life. The first phone book, published in 1878, instructed users to begin conversations with “a firm and cheery ‘Hulloa.’ ” (To end conversations, it recommended “That is all.”) By 1889 telephone-exchange operators were known as “hello girls.”
In 1710 the mayor of Albany, New York, presented four American Indian chiefs at the court of Queen Anne in London. Along with their visit to Buckingham Palace, the Mohawk and Mohican men attended a performance of Macbeth at the Queen’s Theater in Haymarket. The performance was interrupted by the audience, which demanded to see the faces of the visiting chiefs.
Ahead of a visit from Hannah Arendt in 1971, Mary McCarthy purchased anchovy paste, which she knew Arendt enjoyed. When McCarthy pointed out where to find it in her cupboard, Arendt looked displeased. “She had a respect for privacy, separateness,” McCarthy later wrote. “I knew I had done something wrong in my efforts to please. She did not wish to be known, in that curiously finite and, as it were, reductive way. And I had done it to show her I knew her—a sign of love, though not always—thereby proving that in the last analysis I did not know her at all.”
Llamas, alpacas, guinea pigs, turkeys, and ducks were among the animals indigenous to the New World that Christopher Columbus encountered on his second voyage there in 1493. On that trip he introduced from the Old World horses, pigs, cattle, sheep, and goats. “A large whale was taken betwixt my land, butting on the Thames and Greenwich,” wrote London dweller John Evelyn in his diary on June 3, 1658. “It was killed with a harping iron, struck in the head, out of which spouted blood and water by two tunnels, and after a horrid groan, it ran quiet on shore and died.”