Writing Gooder

Every word nerd knows the rules–seven tiles, no peeking–but did you know that versions of Scrabble exist in Afrikaans, Arabic, Braille, Bulgarian, Catalan, Croatian, Czech, Danish, Dutch, Finnish, French, German, Greek, Hebrew, Hungarian, Icelandic, Italian, Malaysian, Norwegian, Polish, Portuguese, Romanian, Russian, Slovak, Slovenian, Spanish, Turkish, and Welsh?

…that it was originally known as Lexico?

…that there are 109 permissible two-letter combinations?

…that the highest you can score on the first turn is 126 points, with SQUEEZY or QUARTZY?

…the highest recorded hypothetical score is 1970 with BENZOXYCAMPHORS?

…that the highest score recorded in a single turn in competition was 392 with CAZIQUES [the plural of a West Indian chief]?

…I didn’t.

-George W. Bush is the first u.s. president to declare himself exempt from over 750 U.S. laws, sidestepping most of the bill of rights including the constitutional requirement that the president follow all laws. Yes, they mentioned it specifically to suppress tyranny.

-Ninety-nine percent of the natural gas used in the United States comes from North America.

-In Baltimore, Maryland, it is not legal to take a lion to the movies.

-In Singapore, it is illegal to sell or own chewing gum.

-In Natoma, Kansas, it’s illegal to throw knives at men wearing striped suits.

Good to know? 

…the Library of Congress in Washington, DC?  Here’s some stats:

Total of 134,517,714 items in the collections, including:

• 20,532,692 cataloged books in the Library of Congress classification system
• 11,591,309 books in large type and raised characters, incunabula (books printed before 1501), monographs and serials, music, bound newspapers, pamphlets, technical reports, and other printed material
• 102,393,713 items in the nonclassified (special) collections. These included:
  • 2,834,692 audio materials, such as discs, tapes, talking books, and other recorded formats
  • 59,469,053 total manuscripts
  • 4,807,827 maps
  • 14,047,798 microforms
  • 5,275,222 music
  • 14,299,103 visual materials, including:
    • 1,023,909 moving images
    • 12,476,824 photographs
    • 92,960 posters
    • 542,315 prints and drawings

Circulated nearly 23 million disc, cassette and Braille items to more than 500,000 blind and physically handicapped patrons.

Registered 520,906 claims to copyright.

Completed 933,430 research assignments for the Congress through the Congressional Research Service.

Ever wonder where the phrase “it’s raining cats and dogs” came from?

If you’ve corrected your child after he or she took this phrase literally, you may owe them a slight apology! The origin of this saying dates back to the 1600s. Poor drainage systems on buildings in the 17th century caused gutters to overflow, spewing out along with water, garbage and a few unexpected critters. It is possible that animals such as rodents lived in the thatched roofs and when it rained heavily, the dead carcasses would fall––undoubtedly unpleasant! As far as large dogs falling from the sky…well…that one will have to remain a mystery.

Read more strange phrase origins here!

 

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Before Julius Caesar invaded Gaul, everything that anyone wrote was on a long scroll.  Instead of turning the page, you rolled the page.  For reasons that are obvious, Caesar didn’t like this method.

So when he began writing the “Commentarrii de Bello Gallico” (The Gallic Wars), Caesar decided to write it in codex form, which is the same form any book takes today.  Actually, whether Caesar popularized it or invented it, I’m not sure, and I was unable to find any information as to that.  However, it is undisputed that  Caesar’s “The Gallic Wars” represented at least the first major use of the codex form.

Despite it’s greater efficiency, though, it still took another two centuries for it to overtake the scroll as the dominant literary form.  In fact, it didn’t until the early Christians began using the codex to publish copies of The Bible.  After the second century AD, almost everything in the Western World was written in a codex.

…that a new book is published every 3 minutes in the United States?  And every 2.6 minutes in the United Kingdom?

In 2005, 172,000 books were published in the United States, and 206,000 were published in the UK (respectively second and first in the world).   Together, that’s over 378,000 books a year, over 1,000 books a day, and about 43 new books every hour.

That’s a lot of books.

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