› added 11 months ago

88

TIL about “English as She is Spoke”, a Portuguese-English translation guide, written by an author that had no grasp of English. He used a Portuguese-French and then a French-English guide for help instead. The resulting book was read by both Mark Twain and Abraham Lincoln to have a good laugh.

Read more wikipedia.org

via reddit.com

16yn7 TIL Captain Francesco Schettino caused the Costa Concordia disaster, leading to 32 deaths, because he was distracted trying to impress a woman. Even after the crash, he didn’t tell anyone for over an hour about the massive hole in the ship and was more worried about coming up with an excuse.
O98e TIL of a bank in Italy that holds their wealth in cheese rather than currency
xVWbD TIL in the 1970s "Wimpy Bars" (one of the era’s largest fast food restaurant chains in the UK) used to refuse entry to women on their own after midnight. This may have been on the assumption that they were prostitutes.
WkvAB TIL A report by the American Psychological Association found that while pop music was becoming increasingly sexualized, age recommendations and content disclaimers actually "unintentionally and paradoxically attract youth to age-inappropriate media".
yVbLa TIL that Able Archer 83 was a war exercise conducted by NATO that panicked the Soviets into thinking they were really being attacked and so nearly launched a nuclear retaliation in response; it is now considered to be the nearest that mankind went into nuclear war since the Cuban Missile Crisis