› added 8 years ago

45

TIL of the French essayist and grammarian Dominique Bouhours, whose dying words were “I am about to - or I am going to - die: either expression is correct.”

Read more wikipedia.org

via reddit.com

x6AKo TIL that Eratosthenes used the distance between two cities (Alexandria to Syene) to estimate the earths circumference, and he was only off by roughly 100mi
JYJo4 TIL that “verklempt” is not a Yiddish word. It just sounds a lot like the Yiddish word that means the same thing - “farklempt”
Kyb4 TIL that Satanists performed a “Pink Mass” on the grave of Fred Phelps’ mother in order to turn her into a lesbian in the afterlife
JbP8 TIL a young Xhosa girl had a vision instructing the tribe to kill all the cattle and destroy the crops, as a sacrifice to the ancestors who would rise up and drive the white settlers into the sea. Thus began the ‘Great Cattle Killing’ after which over 40,000 Xhosa died in the resulting famine.
KYlY6 TIL Moray eels have two sets of jaws: the oral jaws and the pharyngeal jaws