Make Millions Of Coals Go In There.
A couple of nights ago, I dreamt that I was being strangled by a Furby. They don't even have arms!
Anyway, I have been musing on the wonders of the Internet. One of the things I like most about the Internet is the way you can learn all sorts of pointless trivia as you leap about from page to page.
Therefore, here is a pointless trivia entry! Tell me something interesting in the comments, and then everyone who comes by can read it and go 'ooh, I never knew that'. (If your interesting fact comes from a particular field, such as 'biology' or 'linguistics' or 'literature', you could put that in the comment title so people can see at a glance whether it's something in which they would be particularly interested, but that's entirely optional.)
A couple of things to start us off:
- The reason the letters 'i' and 'j' have dots: in Latin texts written in the first millennium AD, 'm' and 'n' were each formed entirely of downward strokes, called 'minim strokes': three for 'm', two for 'n'. 'i' was a single minim stroke, and so the dot was introduced, because otherwise an 'n' and an 'i' next to each other would look exactly the same as an 'm'. 'j' was derived from 'i' (it was originally simply 'I' with a flourish) and therefore kept the dot. (The dot over a lowercase 'i' or 'j' is called a 'tittle', incidentally.)
- It's recently been bothering me that many clock and watch faces inconsistently use 'IIII' rather than 'IV' to represent four whilst still using 'IX' to represent nine. It seems that nobody knows exactly why this is the case, but here is a page of interesting theories.
Feel free to link to this entry if you'd like to draw from a wider pool of knowledge (you should, of course, feel equally free not to link to this entry; there's no pressure). Let's make this the best collection of potential pub quiz answers ever.
Anyway, I have been musing on the wonders of the Internet. One of the things I like most about the Internet is the way you can learn all sorts of pointless trivia as you leap about from page to page.
Therefore, here is a pointless trivia entry! Tell me something interesting in the comments, and then everyone who comes by can read it and go 'ooh, I never knew that'. (If your interesting fact comes from a particular field, such as 'biology' or 'linguistics' or 'literature', you could put that in the comment title so people can see at a glance whether it's something in which they would be particularly interested, but that's entirely optional.)
A couple of things to start us off:
- The reason the letters 'i' and 'j' have dots: in Latin texts written in the first millennium AD, 'm' and 'n' were each formed entirely of downward strokes, called 'minim strokes': three for 'm', two for 'n'. 'i' was a single minim stroke, and so the dot was introduced, because otherwise an 'n' and an 'i' next to each other would look exactly the same as an 'm'. 'j' was derived from 'i' (it was originally simply 'I' with a flourish) and therefore kept the dot. (The dot over a lowercase 'i' or 'j' is called a 'tittle', incidentally.)
- It's recently been bothering me that many clock and watch faces inconsistently use 'IIII' rather than 'IV' to represent four whilst still using 'IX' to represent nine. It seems that nobody knows exactly why this is the case, but here is a page of interesting theories.
Feel free to link to this entry if you'd like to draw from a wider pool of knowledge (you should, of course, feel equally free not to link to this entry; there's no pressure). Let's make this the best collection of potential pub quiz answers ever.