Month: September 2016

Sarah Tubert is captain of the National Deaf Volleyball team, which recently won gold at the World Deaf Championships, but athletics isn’t her only talent. Here she performs her ASL translation of “Alexander Hamilton” from the Broadway musical. If you’re a Hamilton fan, you’ll appreciate how she manages to convey the complex verbal syncopations in the rhythm of her delivery—and even if you’ve listened to the song 500 times, you might discover something new in this translation to a visual modality.

Roanoke: The Real History of the Lost Colony and How Its Legend Haunts Pop Culture. Read up on the real story before you see the American Horror Story version.
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24 Delightful Beauty And The Beast Secrets. It’s hard to believe the film is already 25 years old.
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This Bride’s 15-Year-Old Dog Made It To Her Wedding Just Before He Died. His was a life well-lived.
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Who would you cast to play Andy Warhol in a movie about his life? And then see who got the role.
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10 Bizarre Moments in Presidential Elections. None of them are as bizarre as the 2016 race.
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How much does your vote count? While swing state votes count more than others, we’ll never know for sure until it’s all over.   
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Why are creepy clowns terrorizing America? Because there’s nothing more terrifying than clowns.
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5 Delightful Science Experiments From 100 Years Ago. You could do these today, if you can find the materials.

By some accounts, the average person owns 19 pairs of shoes. But it’s not just our closets that are overflowing with sneakers, loafers, pumps, and wedges. It’s also our vocabulary. Here are 10 words hiding a secret, etymological shoe obsession.

1. SLIPSHOD

In Middle English, if you wanted to say something was “wearing shoes,” you would say it was shod. Shod simply means “shoed.” This old past participle form of the verb to shoe has largely been worn out in the lexicon, but it does survive as a compound in some familiar adjectives, like slipshod. Slipshod literally means “wearing slippers.” Slippers are loose-fitting, which is how slipshod eventually came to describe something “sloppy” and “careless.”

2. ROUGHSHOD

When horseshoes are roughshod, the nails aren’t yet worn down. This helps keep the horse from slipping, but it also does a number on the terrain, hence the domineering disregard associated with the idiom to ride roughshod.

3. SCRUPLE

Someone who rides roughshod over someone else’s ideas or feelings certainly isn’t a very scrupulous fellow. Scruples, which niggle one’s conscience, derive from the Latin scrupulus, literally a “small pebble.” The famed Roman orator and statesman Cicero used scrupulus as a metaphor for a “cause of anxiety”—something that worries you, like a little stone stuck in your shoe.

4. SABOTAGE

Saboteurs aren’t deterred by any rocks in their footwear. Instead, they deliberately ruin—or sabotage—something with their boots. Way back when, in French, a sabot was a “wooden boot,” which inspired saboter, “to make noise with sabots.” Such clomping was employed as a metaphor for malicious destruction. Sabotage concerned a very specific destruction when English adopted the word in the 1910s: workmen destroying company property while on strike.

5. CIABATTA

Italians love their shoes and Italians love their food. Fortunately, they’ve found a way to bring those two loves together. Ciabatta literally means “slipper,” whose shape, as the story goes, lent its name to the Italian bread. The word ciabatta is related to Spanish for “shoe,” zapato, from the same root that gave French the sabot in sabotage.

6. CALZONE

The Italians don’t just eat their slippers. They also eat their trousers. While calzones can feature all sort of tasty fillings, etymologically the dish is stuffed with calzoni, “drawers” or “hose,” as the folded dough resembles folded clothing. The Italian calzoni is fresh out of the oven of calceus, the Latin for “shoe.” Discalceate, also from calceus, is a very fancy way of saying “take off your shoes.”

7. CAUSEWAY

One would think causeway, like the famed Giant’s Causeway in Northern Ireland, is a simple compound of cause and way. But the word actually joins causey and way. Causey is an obsolete word for “embankment” and might trek back to the Latin calciare, “to tread” or “stamp with the heels.” This verb is related to that same calceus, “shoe,” a word further grounded in calx, “heel.” A variant of Latin’s calx may also yield caligula, “little boot,” which became the nickname of the Roman emperor Caligula, reputed to have accompanied his father in war as a toddler, dressed in a military uniform fitted for his small size, including the boots.

8. BROGUE

Some think that this term for a distinctive, Celtic accent is named for “the speech of one who wears brogues,” or shoes. Brogue is from the Old Irish broce, “shoe,” from the same ancient root that gives English the word breeches.

9. REVAMP

Today, when we revamp something, we “renovate” and “improve” it. But if you revamped something before the early 1800s, you were providing a shoe with a new vamp. A vamp makes up the top part of shoe between the toe and heel. The word originally meant “stocking” or “sock” in Middle English, from the French avanpié, “the front (avant) part of the foot (pié).” Musicians will vamp when they are improvising, “patching together” a part on the spot much like a cobbler revamped an old, worn-down shoe.

10. WELT

Shoemakers will also be familiar with welt. Most of us probably think of welt as a swollen mark on the flesh caused by a lash or blow. But going back into 1400s, welts were strips of leather sewn above the sole of a shoe. Such strips were thus likened to the raised, ridge-like welts left on the skin. Ill-fitting shoes can cause blisters, but welterweight boxers cause welts, one theory for their name.

If you love the ambience of candlelight but dislike handling matches or lighters, Gizmodo reports that a company called LuDela has created a candle that can be lit and extinguished with a smartphone. The LuDela Smart Candle is made from wax, and its flame is real—but its wick is controlled by a downloadable app.

Here’s how the smart candle works: Each battery-powered purchase comes with a shell-like wax base and a smaller 30-hour candle that you stick inside. Simply tap your phone’s touchscreen to ignite or reduce the candle’s flame, and when the wax core finally melts, refill the base with a fresh one.

The LuDela Smart Candle costs $99. See how it works in the video above, or visit the company’s website for more information.

[h/t Gizmodo]

Banner image courtesy of LuDela.

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Forget bathrobes and Bibles—former guests at the Wayside Inn in Sudbury, Massachusetts have stolen valuable antiques like silverware and historic documents. The hotel first opened as Howe’s Inn and Tavern in 1716, and today advertises itself as the country’s oldest operating inn. Now, as part of the Wayside’s 300th anniversary celebration, The Boston Globe reports, the hotel is extending thieves an offer of reprieve: Return the goods, and you won’t be questioned—just forgiven.

Innkeeper Steve Pickford told The Boston Globe that he borrowed the idea from other hotels that provide guests with similar amnesty bargains. People can return missing items—which include dishes, pewter serving pieces, and even wall decorations, among other things—to the inn’s front desk, or deliver them to him, he says. They can return the goods at any time, even after the anniversary celebration ends.

Most notably, a mysterious guest once made off with a copy of the Declaration of Independence that belonged to original innkeeper David Howe’s son, Ezekiel. The document survived a fire in December 1955—but it disappeared soon after. Pickford hopes to recover it and display it inside the historic inn (hopefully near a burglar alarm this time).

[h/t Boston Globe]

Know of something you think we should cover? Email us at tips@mentalfloss.com.

It’s easier than ever to get yourself to a pub—just order an inflatable one for the backyard. 

The inflatable Irish pub, spotted by Food & Wine, is the adult successor to the bouncy castle. All you have to do is stick it on a patch of grass or a driveway (it doesn’t have a floor) and get ready to party. 

Boston-based PaddyWagon is a full-service pub-themed party caterer, with a cozy inflatable bar that fits as many as 80 people. The company provides Irish food and menus, along with music and entertainment from the Emerald Isle, if you so desire. The pop-up pubs come in multiple sizes, in case you want to host a really intimate inflatable bar gathering in your backyard. 

The beer slingers at PaddyWagon aren’t the only ones who will deliver you a blow-up booze fest. Ireland’s Inflatable Pub Company rents 33-foot-long blow-up buildings that come in several different designs and are painted to look like traditional pubs—whether with musty brick or timber framing. The temporary saloons cost about $435 to rent and come with a bar counter, benches, and lights. And if you live outside the country, not to worry: If you’re willing to buy one outright, the Inflatable Pub ships worldwide. 

If inflatable isn’t your style, there’s also The Shebeen, a rentable Irish pub on wheels. 

[h/t Food & Wine]

Know of something you think we should cover? Email us at tips@mentalfloss.com.

Banner image courtesy of iStock.