› added 1 year ago

53

TIL that a beetle genus had the name Platypus first, and got it 7 years years before the duck bill platypus was classified, which is why its genus doesn’t have the name platypus in it.

Read more wikipedia.org

via reddit.com

awoGN TIL of the word "inkhorn", a 16th century derogrity term for scholars who excessively and awkwardly borrowed words from Latin. They introduced short-lived words like ("devulgate, obtestate, deruncinate, subsecive") but also gave us everday words like ("Celebrate, expectation, ingenious, mundane").
8lbV TIL that a group of American journalists formed a secret society ‘The Order of the Occult Hand’ whose only goal is to slip the meaningless phrase “It was as if an occult hand had…” past editors and into published articles
DQAMD TIL that the visual effects of the film, The Fountain, cost only a total of $140,000 on a budget of $35 million due to macro photographer Peter Parks’ creative solutions and a bare minimum of CGI.
GYwRG TIL when Philip Glass was composing Music in Twelve Parts, he only finished the first part as he intended for it to be played by 12 musicians; but when a friend took a listen and asked what the other 11 parts was gonna be like, Glass went on to compose the other parts as a challenge.
VMDe8 TIL the passenger pigeon once had a population of 3-5 billion birds in North America. Hunters killed tens of thousands of them every day, then ignored calls to protect them when their numbers dwindled, until the last wild one was shot and stuffed in 1902, and the last captive one died in 1912.