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TIL that a murderer named William Chester Minor made enormous contributions to the writing of the Oxford English Dictionary while he was in a mental asylum.

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via ift.tt

7rkoO TIL in the 1940s baseball umpires were called “guessers.” Anyone who questioned their calls were known as secondguessers, which is how the word second-guess was introduced to the English language.
DNWJ TIL During WWI, Dominic “Fats” McCarthy was awarded the Victoria Cross after he, virtually unaided, killed 22 Germans, captured 5 machine guns, 50 prisoners, and half a kilometer of the German front. When it was over even the prisoners he’d captured patted him on the back for what he’d done.
D1PRg TIL that Thomas Jefferson bred and raised a special type of geese in order to supply himself with quill pens.
Qeke TIL in 1981 a man named Roger Fischer had an idea for a volunteer to have ICBM launch codes put in their chest cavity. In the event of an emergency, the volunteer would carry a knife to be killed with. It was meant to force the personal killing of one man to start the impersonal killing of millions.
VMyg0 TIL Pablo Picasso worked up until the day he died at age 91; literally painting till 3 am on Sunday, April 8th, which was just hours before his death. His last well known self-portriat was done a little less than a year before his death, entitled Self Portrait Facing Death