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TIL cucumber is not only a fruit but also a type of squash, related to pumpkins.

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jdQR TIL Even though he was teenager during the Great Depression of the 1930s, John F. Kennedy said in an interview with TIME that he “didn’t really learn about the depression until [he] read about it at Harvard.”
0wnGy TIL Scrooge's famous cry for the poor to die and thereby 'decrease the surplus population' was most likely a reference to Thomas Malthus who had written a generation before about the economic dangers of a lack of war, plague and famine.
KOL06 TIL that the worlds first democratic federal government is thought to be the First Nations Iroquois Confederacy established sometime in the late 17th to early 18th century. That was before the revolutions in Europe.
9YpY6 TIL the verb 'to snipe' originated in the 1770s among soldiers in British India where hunter skilled enough to kill a particularly elusive bird, the snipe, were called 'snipers'. This is also the origin of the term 'snipe hunt' to describe an impossible task.
X0Jar TIL in 1970 author Jilly Cooper lost the only manuscript for her erotic novel 'Riders' on a London bus. It was never found. Devasted, she took another 14 years to begin writing it again. It went on to became an international bestseller and kicked of the "bonkbustrr" genre.