› added 9 years ago

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TIL English words for livestock (cow, sheep, chicken) are Germanic-based and the words for meats (beef, mutton, poultry) are French-based. This is because the people who raised the animals were Anglo-Saxon peasants and the people who ate them were Norman aristocrats.

b6mNZ TIL that a small city in Canada has been celebrating Wrestling Day on January 2nd, every year since 1959, where all the businesses are closed so that people can wrestle with their hangovers for an extra day after New Year’s Eve.
jNMWM TIL The reason we find some smells bad is because our brains have evolved to react with disgust to the smells of thing which are major disease vectors - things such as vomit or rotting carcasses. The greater the risk of disease, the more offensive you would find the smell.
YpoZZ TIL George Segal was one of the first American film actors to rise to leading man status with an unchanged Jewish surname, thus helping to pave the way for artists such as Dustin Hoffman and Barbra Streisand.
OGyG7 TIL that the flat iron steak was invented in 1998 by two university researchers who were given a grant by the beef industry to reduce waste and promote beef. By 2012, $80M of flat iron steaks were being sold annually.
AN7Xw TIL the 4B movement of millennial South Korean women seeks to create an online and offline world devoid of men, with the women refusing to engage in heterosexual dating, marriage, or childbirth. It was founded in response to extreme harassment of women in Korean society