› added 12 years ago

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TIL the term “River” in typography is when there are gaps in typesetting, which appear to run through a paragraph of text, due to a coincidental alignment of spaces.

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4XajX TIL: Action figures have been made as far back as the first century. Romans made clay figurines of gladiators.
VBnkZ TIL about Gödel's Loophole. While studying for his American citizenship test, Kurt Gödel believed he had found a flaw in the US constitution that would permit the American democracy to be legally turned into a dictatorship. Einstein advised him not to mention it during the test.
6EB1J TIL that the forbidden fruit in the Bible is never defined as an apple. It is in fact a mistranslation that originates from the fact that the tree is defined as as "the tree of knowledge of good and evil" and that in Latin, mălum means evil while the very similar word mālum means apple.
mx6kv TIL Tolkein popularised "dwarves" as the plural of "dwarf" to differentiate his fantasy dwarves from humans with dwarfism, for whom the correct plural was "dwarfs". The dwarf trope became so entrenched that "dwarves" is now widely recognised as the standard plural of "dwarf" even for humans
BrrmK TIL Shelley Duvall from the Shining is struggling with mental illness