› added 6 years ago

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TIL that ‘nickname’ isn’t actually the proper word and it’s actually ‘ekename’. But when saying it to be grammatically correct you say ’an ekename’, then through speech it gradually morphed into ‘a nekename’ (nickname)

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b68mj TIL of Vivienne Hole, the only member of the Entertainments National Service Association (ENSA) killed during WWII. ENSA provided entertainment to British armed forces personnel. Hole was killed when her driver accidentally drove into a minefield.
PoKL TIL the small cloth placed over the back of your chair on a plane or a train is called an ‘antimacassar’. They are so named because they were originally used to protect the fabric of the chair from macassar oil; a very famous hair product in the Victorian period.
DLGp TIL that public hangings at the West Virginia State Penitentiary were stopped in 1931 when a prisoner was decapitated by the hanging process
R7VKl TIL about Marion Stokes, a Philadelphia woman who began taping whatever was on television in 1979 and didn't stop until her death in 2012.. The 71,000 VHS and Betamax tapes she made are the most complete collection preserving this era of TV. They are being digitized by the Internet Archive.
NXypQ TIL when D.B. Cooper hijacked NOA flight 305 in 1971, this was the 'Golden Age of Hijackings' with an average of 1 hijacking every 5 days. Amazingly, until Cooper successfully parachuted out of the plane at 10,000 feet into the freezing cold with $200,000, hijacking a plane was not a federal crime.