A 1551 municipal law in Lisbon regulated water at the Palacete Chafariz d’el Rei, segregating access across six spouts: the first for “slaves, freedmen, black people, mulattoes, and Indians”; the second for galley slaves; the fifth for “black and mulatto women and Indian women, both freed and captive”; and the sixth for white women and girls. White men and boys got the middle spouts, the third and the fourth.
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Gone to Greece to fight for the country’s liberation from Ottoman rule, Lord Byron, who financed a fighting force, noted in his journal on September 28, 1823, that he “did not come to join a faction but a nation—and to deal with honest men” and was dismayed to find that “they are such d——d liars; there never was such an incapacity for veracity shown since Eve lived in Paradise.” Nevertheless, he died there on April 19, 1824, after contracting a fever.
“I’m ashamed of you, dodging that way. They couldn’t hit an elephant at this distance,” said Maj. Gen. John Sedgwick not long before a Confederate bullet struck his skull and killed him.
In the winter of 1878, Friedrich Nietzsche diagnosed himself with “Baselophobia.” After slipping on black ice, developing constant headaches and a finger infection, and suffering a nine-day stretch of persistent vomiting, he had become convinced the city of Basel was killing him. His sister, Elisabeth, blamed his illness instead on his attempt “to imitate Diogenes” by practicing dietary asceticism.
Students at the Federal Polytechnic Institute in Zurich wrote to Carl Jung in 1949 to ask what effect he thought technology had on the human psyche. “The danger lies not in technology,” Jung responded, “but in the possibilities awaiting discovery.” The question regarding new discoveries was “whether man is sufficiently equipped with reason to be able to resist the temptation to use them for destructive purposes.” This, Jung concluded, “experience alone can answer.”
A Hindu myth holds that the universe began as soul in the form of man, who looked around, saw nothing, and felt afraid. “Therefore,” goes the story, “one who is all alone is afraid.” The man reflected, “Since there is nothing other than me, of what am I afraid?” His fear vanished, since a being only “becomes afraid of a second.” But he felt no joy, so he created a female companion: a second being, whom he could fear.
A 52-million-year-old fossilized tomatillo found in January 2017 revealed the fruit to be five times older than scientists had previously thought. “The initial discovery was a very big OMG moment,” said paleobotanist Peter Wilf. “I was like, ‘Wait a minute, wait a minute, wait a minute. Could it be? Could it be? Could it be? Really? Really? Really?’ Then I just went nuts.”
A section on law and justice in the Arthashastra, an ancient Indian manual of statecraft, describes an apparently coveted capital punishment. “Being gored to death by an elephant is as meritorious as having the sacred bath at the end of the ashvamedha horse sacrifice,” it reads. Anyone seeking this sentence is required to provide gifts of rice, wine, and garlands as well as “a piece of cloth to clean the tusks.”
Describing phalanx warfare, Thucydides wrote that “fear makes every man want to do his best to find protection for his unarmed side in the shield of the man next to him on the right.” The soldier farthest right must try to “keep his own unarmed side away from the enemy, and his fear spreads to the others who follow his example.” The effect of this fear, wrote the historian: “the right wing tends to get unduly extended.”
As a young man studying in Amsterdam, Vincent van Gogh on August 18, 1877, wrote to his brother Theo, “I breakfasted on a piece of dry bread and a glass of beer—that is what Dickens advises for those who are on the point of committing suicide, as being a good way to keep them, at least for some time, from their purpose.”
In The Canterbury Tales, Geoffrey Chaucer wrote, “Four o’ the clock it was, to make a guess; / Eleven foot long, or little more or less, / My shadow was, as at that time and place, / Measuring feet by taking in this case / My height as six.”
To combat widespread tardiness in the Ivory Coast, President Laurent Gbagbo in 2007 backed a Punctuality Night contest, which touted the slogan “African time is killing Africa, let’s fight it.” Nine prizes were awarded to the most punctual civil servants and businesspeople. Known to his colleagues as “Mr. White Man’s Time,” legal adviser Narcisse Aka won the first-place prize, a $60,000 villa.
“It is a sign of rain,” wrote the author of the fourth-century-bc Greek treatise On Weather Signs, “if a hawk perches on a tree, flies right into it, and proceeds to search for lice. Also, when in summer a number of birds living on an island pack together, if a moderate number collect, it is a good sign for goats and flocks, while if the number is exceedingly large, it portends a severe drought.”
“I don’t believe in miracles, because it’s been a long time since we’ve had any,” Joseph Heller said in an interview in 1988. Some sixteen hundred years earlier, St. Augustine had written, “Men say, ‘Why do not the miracles, which you talk about as having been worked, take place now?’ I might indeed reply that they were necessary before the world believed for the very purpose of making it believe.”
The American English term wooden nutmeg, meaning “anything false or fraudulent,” dates from 1829, when Connecticut traders were known to place fake wooden nutmegs in batches of real ones to defraud customers.