Although the Oxford English Dictionary lists the etymology of “hooligan” as unascertained, one of the three speculations is that it derives from a popular music-hall song of the 1890s about a rowdy Irish family that went by that last name.
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As a youth, the writer V.S. Naipaul struggled with hysteria. He described watching the film The African Queen while at Oxford: “Just when Bogart said something to Katharine Hepburn about sleeping one off or something, I could take it no longer and left the cinema. What form did it take? One was terrified of human beings. One didn’t wish to show oneself to them.” Naipaul claimed he cured himself over a two-year period. “Intellect and will,” he said, “intellect and will.”
Georges Cuvier, founder of the field of paleontology, wrote in 1812 that examination of the strata of the earth revealed “traces of revolutions.” He surmised, “Innumerable living beings have been the victims of these catastrophes; some have been destroyed by sudden inundations, others have been laid dry in consequence of the bottom of the seas being instantaneously elevated. Their races have become extinct and have left no memorial of them, except some small fragment which the naturalist can scarcely recognize.”
According to his nephew, Pliny the Elder liked to rise in the middle of the night and study by lamplight. “Admittedly, he fell asleep very easily,” Pliny the Younger wrote, “and would often doze and wake up again during his work.”
In her journal about life as a lady-in-waiting at Heian court, Sei Shonagon expresses her delight in men who keep a transverse flute tucked away in the breast of their robes. “There really is nothing more marvelous,” she writes. “And it’s delightful to discover beside your pillow at daybreak the handsome flute that your lover has inadvertently left behind him.”
Opening night of Henry James’ Guy Domville, on January 5, 1895, was “an unmitigated disaster,” James wrote in a letter, “hooted at, as I was hooted at myself, by a brutal mob, and fruitless of any of the consequences for which I have striven.” The play’s reception, he wrote, “has completely sickened me with the theater and made me feel, at any rate for the present, like washing my hands of it forever.”
In the late eighteenth century, yellow fever was widespread in the Caribbean; case-fatality rates among British troops there were as high as 70 percent. The fate of French troops sent to Saint-Domingue to suppress a slave rebellion was even worse. “Evidence suggests the troops were actually an expeditionary force with intentions to invade North America through New Orleans and to establish a major holding in the Mississippi valley,” wrote the authors of a 2013 scholarly paper. Mortality from the disease thwarted Napoleon’s “secret ambition to colonize and hold French-held lands, which later became better known as the Louisiana Purchase.”
A longtime practice of European peasants was to bring cows and sheep inside for the night. If one could ignore “the nastiness of their excrements,” a late seventeenth-century visitor to Ireland opined, “the sweetness of their breath” and “the pleasing noise they made in ruminating or chewing the cud” might lull a person to sleep. A visitor to the Hebrides noted, however, that while urine was regularly collected and discarded, the dung was removed only once a year.
In September 1776, fearing illness from night air, John Adams asked Benjamin Franklin to close the window of their room in a New Jersey inn. “I believe you are not acquainted with my Theory of Colds,” Franklin responded, launching into “a harangue upon air and cold and respiration and perspiration” in favor of leaving windows open. “I was so much amused,” Adams wrote in his journal, “that I soon fell asleep and left him and his philosophy together.”
Euripidean drama requires “the sudden jolt of the machine” to clarify the characters’ “peculiar sense of the political,” writes classicist John Snyder. “The deus ex machina breaks in because that is what history does…outside forces, irrational, nonhuman in origin and agency, yet utterly human at the same time, make people do what they do.”
Southern women during the Civil War chewed on newspapers, believing an ingredient in the ink whitened their faces.
In a behavior known as “transient sexual mimicry,” male giant cuttlefish can assume the behavior and coloring of female cuttlefish in order to bypass larger males and impregnate their desired mates.
A doctoral student in economics at Harvard University in 2004 compared the rise and fall of temperatures to the likelihood of witch trials in Europe, discovering that they often formed an inverse relationship. The average temperature between roughly 1520 and 1770 was two degrees lower than previous centuries, leading to crop failure and economic instability. The majority of trials and executions for witchcraft occurred during the period, known as the “little ice age.”
Egyptian pop singer Sherine Abdel-Wahab was sentenced to six months in prison in 2018 for insulting the Nile. Asked by a fan to perform her hit song “Have You Drunk from the Nile?,” Abdel-Wahab responded, “You are better off drinking Evian,” informing the fan that the waters of the Nile can lead to schistosomiasis, a disease also known as snail fever, which has plagued Egypt for so long that strains have been found in excavated pharaonic-era mummies.
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.