Smack Toast: July 2005:

Interesting and some weird Language Facts

* The first word spoken on the moon was "okay."

* Seoul, the South Korean capital, just means "the capital" in the Korean language

* The name of all the continents end with the same letter that they start with

* The "you are here" arrow on maps is called an ideo locator

* The word "lethologica" describes the state of not being able to remember the word you want

* In English, "four" is the only digit that has the same number of letters as its value

* Q is the only letter in the alphabet that does not appear in the name of any of the United States

* The word "trivia" comes from the Latin "trivium" which is the place where three roads meet, a public square. People would gather and talk about all sorts of matters, most of which were trivial

* TYPEWRITER, is the longest word that can be made using the letters only one row of the keyboard

* "Speak of the Devil" is short for "Speak of the Devil and he shall come". It was believed that if you spoke about the Devil it would attract his attention. That's why when you're talking about someone and they show up people say "Speak of the Devil"

* The word "Checkmate" in chess comes from the Persian phrase "Shah Mat," which means, "the King is dead"

* The sentence "the quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog" uses every letter in the English language

* The only 15-letter word that can be spelled without repeating a letter is uncopyrightable.

* Canada is an Indian word meaning "Big Village"

* Stewardesses is the longest word typed with only the left hand

* The most common name in the world is Mohammed

* The longest non-medical word in the English language is FLOCCINAUCINIHILIPILIFICATION, which means "the act of estimating as worthless".

* Mafia in Old Arabic means 'sanctuary.'

* The longest word in the Old Testament is "Malhershalahashbaz."

* Karoke means 'empty orchestra' in Japanese.

* The first message tapped by Samuel Morse over his invention the telegraph was: "What hath God wrought?"

* The first words spoken by over Alexander Bell over the telephone were: "Watson, please come here. I want you."

* Papaphobia is the fear of Popes

* The Academy Award statue is named after a librarian's uncle. One day Margaret Herrick, librarian for the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, made a remark that the statue looked like her Uncle Oscar, and the name stuck.

* The first words spoken by Thomas Edison over the phonograph were: "Mary had a little lamb."

* The three words in the English language with the letters "uu" are: vacuum, residuum and continuum.

* A baby in Florida was named: Truewilllaughinglifebuckyboomermanifestdestiny. His middle name is George James

* 'Dreamt' is the only English word that ends in the letters 'mt'

* There are only four words in the English language which end in '-dous': tremendous, horrendous, stupendous, and hazardous

* The word 'Bye' is used in both English and Spanish meaning the same thing

* Pogonophobia: The fear of beards

* In Chinese, the words crisis and opportunity are the same

* The infinity character on the keyboard is called a "lemniscate"

* Good bye came from God bye which came from God be with you. So-long came from the Arabic salaam an the Hebrew shalom

* The word 'nerd' was first coined by Dr. Seuss in 'If I ran the Zoo'

* before Jets, Jet lag was called Boat lag

* The word "monosyllable" actually has five syllables in it

* There are no words in the English language that rhyme with silver and orange

* The letter "n" ends all Japanese words not ending in a vowel.

* It is believed that Shakespeare was 46 around the time that the King James Version of the Bible was written. In Psalms 46, the 46th word from the first word is shake and the 46th word from the last word is spear.

* 'Zorro' means 'fox' in Spanish

* You won’t find a "6" in Cameroon phone numbers--the native language has no sound for "x."


* Clans of long ago that wanted to get rid of their unwanted people without killing them would burn their houses down--hence the expression "to get fired."