I think today we should get a little more intellectual than the run-of-the-mill limericks and off-color jokes. After blogging for more than fifteen years I’ve become a true lover of words. Another plus about words is that they come together to form books, lots and lots of books. Every year when I make my New Year’s resolutions, I normally have one requiring that I read at least one hundred books for the year. I have never ever not accomplished that resolution. The only thing I enjoy more than writing words is reading those written by others, it’s just the coolest thing ever. So today this post will be a short trivia lesson about words, language, and books. I hope you find them interesting . . .

• One of the greatest orators of all time – Demosthenes was once a stutterer who stubbornly trained himself out of it, reportedly by putting pebbles in his mouth and practicing speaking aloud.

• The Polish actress Helena Modjeska was popular with audiences for her realistic and emotional style of acting. She once gave a dramatic reading in her native tongue at a dinner party of people who did know the Polish language, and her listeners were in tears when she finished. It turned out she had merely recited the Polish alphabet.

• The French philosopher Rene Descartes sarcastically speculated that monkeys and apes actually have the ability to speak but choose not to.

• The inhabitants of a slum called Trastevere, near Rome, speak a dialect all their own. They claim to have more than 2000 vulgar words to describe human genitalia.

• The phrase “What a guy!” is a cry of derision in Great Britain and a cry of adoration in the United States.

• The average daily issue of the Congressional Record carries more than 4 million words – the approximate equivalent of 20 long novels. It is printed and published overnight.

• A forty-five-letter word connoting a lung disease, pneumonoultramicroscopicsilicovolcanoconiosis, is the longest word in Webster’s Third New International Dictionary. The longest word in the Oxford English Dictionary means the act of estimating something as worthless- floccipaucinihilipilification, which has twenty-nine letters.

• The Scottish writer Robert Bontine Conningshame Graham, who had won a seat as a Liberal member of Parliament in 1886, was suspended from the House of Commons for having the audacity to use the word “damn” in a public speech.

• The word “ozone” got its name from the Greek ozo, which means “I smell.” It was first officially used in 1840.

• All of the world’s main alphabets have developed from an alphabet invented 3600 years ago in the Middle East and known as the North Semitic Alphabet.

EVERYTHING YOU ALWAY WANTED TO KNOW

(But were afraid to ask)