› added 11 years ago

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TIL when Alexander the Great was a child, his tutor rebuked him for wasting so much incense during a sacrifice to the gods. Years later, Alexander conquered Gaza and sent back 18 tons of the spices to his old tutor with a note telling him not to be stingy with the gods.

5YAQP TIL: In 1982 Xerox management watched a film of people struggling to use their new copier and laughed that they must have been grabbed off a loading dock. The people struggling were Ron Kaplan, a computational linguist, and Allen Newell, a founding father of artificial intelligence.
JYB0l TIL that the word "ninja" is actually pronounced "shinobi" in the native kun'yomi kanji reading. It is a shortened form of "shinobi-no-mono," which translates closely to "stealthy person." "Ninja" is an on'yomi, a pronunciation of the names of the two Japanese letters that make up the term.
d8wbj TIL that whenever Queen Elizabeth is talking with someone, she uses her handbag to signal coded messages to her staff to indicate how the conversation is going.
kJWE4 TIL George Michael worked and re-worked his song "Careless Whisper" for 2 and half year's before finally releasing it. He went thru 8 saxophonists before finally settling on Steve Gregory who was able to play the riff exactly as Michael heard it in his head. The song topped charts in ten countries
Z8pra TIL Kathleen Hanna accidentally coined the term '"Smells like Teen Spirit". Teen Spirit is a deodorant for young girls, which she thought Kurt smelled like.