- Afternoonified
A society word meaning “smart.” Forrester demonstrates the usage: “The goods are not ‘afternoonified’ enough for me.” - Arfarfan’arf
A figure of speech used to describe drunken men. “He’s very arf’arf’an’arf,” Forrester writes, “meaning he has had many ‘arfs,’” or half-pints of booze. - Back slang it
Thieves used this term to indicate that they wanted “to go out the back way.” - Bags o’ Mystery
An 1850 term for sausages, “because no man but the maker knows what is in them. … The ‘bag’ refers to the gut which contained the chopped meat.” - Bang up to the elephant
This phrase originated in London in 1882, and means “perfect, complete, unapproachable.” - Batty-fang
Low London phrase meaning “to thrash thoroughly,” possibly from the French battre a fin. - Benjo
Nineteenth century sailor slang for “A riotous holiday, a noisy day in the streets.” - Bow wow mutton
A naval term referring to meat so bad “it might be dog flesh.” - Bricky
Brave or fearless. “Adroit after the manner of a brick,” Forrester writes, “said even of the other sex, ‘What a bricky girl she is.’” - Bubble Around
A verbal attack, generally made via the press. Forrester cites The Golden Butterfly: “I will back a first-class British subject for bubbling around against all humanity.” - Butter Upon Bacon
Extravagance. Too much extravagance. “Are you going to put lace over the feather, isn’t that rather butter upon bacon?” - Cat-lap
A London society term for tea and coffee “used scornfully by drinkers of beer and strong waters … in club-life is one of the more ignominious names given to champagne by men who prefer stronger liquors.” - Church-bell
A talkative woman. - Chuckaboo
A nickname given to a close friend. - Collie shangles
Quarrels. A term from Queen Victoria’s journal, More Leaves , published in 1884: “At five minutes to eleven rode off with Beatrice, good Sharp going with us, and having occasional collie shangles (a Scotch word for quarrels or rows, but taken from fights between dogs) with collies when we came near cottages.” - Cop a Mouse
To get a black eye. “Cop in this sense is to catch or suffer,” Forrester writers, “while the colour of the obligation at its worst suggests the colour and size of the innocent animal named.” - Daddles
A delightful way to refer to your rather boring hands. - Damfino
This creative cuss is a contraction of “damned if I know.” - Dizzy Age
A phrase meaning “elderly,” because it “makes the spectator giddy to think of the victim’s years.” The term is usually refers to “a maiden or other woman canvassed by other maiden ladies or others.” - Doing the Bear
“Courting that involves hugging.” - Don’t sell me a dog
Popular until 1870, this phrase meant “Don’t lie to me!” Apparently, people who sold dogs back in the day were prone to trying to pass off mutts as purebreds. - Door-knocker
A type of beard “formed by the cheeks and chin being shaved leaving a chain of hair under the chin, and upon each side of mouth forming with moustache something like a door-knocker.” - Enthuzimuzzy
“Satirical reference to enthusiasm.” Created by Braham the terror, whoever that is. - Fifteen puzzle
Not the game you might be familiar with, but a term meaning complete and absolute confusion. - Fly rink
An 1875 term for a polished bald head. - Gal-sneaker
An 1870 term for “a man devoted to seduction.” - Gas-Pipes
A term for especially tight pants. - Gigglemug
“An habitually smiling face.” - Got the morbs
Use of this 1880 phrase indicated temporary melancholy. - Half-rats
Partially intoxicated. - Jammiest bits of jam
“Absolutely perfect young females,” circa 1883. - Kruger-spoof
Lying, from 1896. - Mad as Hops
Excitable. - Mafficking
An excellent word that means getting rowdy in the streets. - Make a stuffed bird laugh
“Absolutely preposterous.” - Meater
A street term meaning coward. - Mind the Grease
When walking or otherwise getting around, you could ask people to let you pass, please. Or you could ask them to mind the grease, which meant the same thing to Victorians. - Mutton Shunter
This 1883 term for a policeman is so much better than “pig.” - Nanty Narking
A tavern term, popular from 1800 to 1840, that meant great fun. - Nose bagger
Someone who takes a day trip to the beach. He brings his own provisions and doesn’t contribute at all to the resort he’s visiting. - Not up to Dick
Not well. - Orf chump
No appetite. - Parish Pick-Axe
A prominent nose. - Podsnappery
This term, Forrester writers, describes a person with a “wilful determination to ignore the objectionable or inconvenient, at the same time assuming airs of superior virtue and noble resignation.” - Poked Up
Embarrassed. - Powdering Hair
An 18th century tavern term that means “getting drunk.” - Rain Napper
An umbrella. - Sauce-box
The mouth. - Shake a flannin
Why say you’re going to fight when you could say you’re going to shake a flannin instead? - Shoot into the brown
To fail. According to Forrester, “The phrase takes its rise from rifle practice, where the queer shot misses the black and white target altogether, and shoots into the brown i.e., the earth butt.” - Skilamalink
Secret, shady, doubtful. - Smothering a Parrot
Drinking a glass of absinthe neat; named for the green color of the booze. - Suggestionize
A legal term from 1889 meaning “to prompt.” - Take the Egg
To win. - Umble-cum-stumble
According to Forrester, this low class phrase means “thoroughly understood.” - Whooperups
A term meaning “inferior, noisy singers” that could be used liberally today during karaoke sessions.
For our latest podcast, artist Danica Novgorodoff made this beautiful illustration of Ötzi (AKA the Iceman).
Want to know more about the man with the lustrous beard? Take a listen.
Here’s an awesome little piece of history:
Archaeologists in the Burnt City have discovered what appears to be an ancient prosthetic eye. What makes this discovery exceptionally awesome is the striking description of how the owner and her false eye would have appeared while she was still alive and blinking:
[The eye] has a hemispherical form and a diameter of just over 2.5 cm (1 inch). It consists of very light material, probably bitumen paste. The surface of the artificial eye is covered with a thin layer of gold, engraved with a central circle (representing the iris) and gold lines patterned like sun rays. The female remains found with the artificial eye was 1.82 m tall (6 feet), much taller than ordinary women of her time. On both sides of the eye are drilled tiny holes, through which a golden thread could hold the eyeball in place. Since microscopic research has shown that the eye socket showed clear imprints of the golden thread, the eyeball must have been worn during her lifetime. The woman’s skeleton has been dated to between 2900 and 2800 BCE.
So she was an extraordinarily tall woman walking around wearing an engraved golden eye patterned with rays like a tiny sun. What an awesome sight that must have been.
[via TYWKIWDBI]
Wow.
Bruno Munari - Speak Italian: The Fine Art of the Gesture
“Speak Italian was first published in 1958 by artist, photographer and sculptor Bruno Munari. The photographs capture something from a time long since past, but the gestures themselves are still as current as can be. The book (a bilingual edition) was reissued a number of years ago by Chronicle Books.”
is anyone actually allowed to look this celestial, I don’t understand
this person looks like they straight up descended from the heavens on a cloud of tastefully subdued knitwear
Mark Twain, in Nikola Tesla’s laboratory. According to the University of Virginia, the photograph was taken in the spring of 1894. As an article in Century Magazine stated,
Mr. Tesla invites attention to-day, whether for profound investigations into the nature of electricity, or for beautiful inventions in which is offered a concrete embodiment of the latest means for attaining the ends most sought after in the distribution of light, heat, and power, and in the distant communication of intelligence. Any one desirous of understanding the trend and scope of modern electrical advance will find many clues in the work of this inventor.
So, does this mean I can go about believing that Mark Twain and Nikola Tesla were bros?
@KathleenMRooney Most mind-blowing fact I’ve encountered all month, scurvy-related or otherwise.
What a wee little part of a person’s life are his acts and his words! His real life is led in his head, and is known to none but himself. All day long, the mill of his brain is grinding, and his thoughts, not those of other things, are his history. These are his life, and they are not written. Everyday would make a whole book of 80,000 words—365 books a year. Biographies are but the clothes and buttons of the man—the biography of the man himself cannot be written. MARK TWAIN
When Boomer was lost on the battlefield in Taji, Iraq, his brothers in arms gave him a funeral. The tribute involved a 21-gun salute, and the awarding of both a Purple Heart and a Bronze Star Medal. All in recognition, according to a soldier who has worked with Boomer’s comrades, of Boomer’s heroism and of the many lives he had saved on the battlefield.
It was a funeral that was typical in every way but one: Boomer was a machine. He was a MARCbot, an inexpensive robot designed to seek out and disarm explosives. He — Boomer was, apparently, a he — saved soldiers’ lives as he tooled his way into dangerous zones, taking one for the team in the most selfless way possible. The tributes in Taji, be they figurative (the Bronze Star) or more literal (the firearmed salute), recognized all this. “Some people got upset about it,” the soldier recalls of Boomer’s improvised funeral, ”but those little bastards can develop a personality, and they save so many lives.”
The little bastards do save lives. Their personalities, however, aren’t so much developed as they’re imposed by their human minders. In the heat of battle, and in the chaos of war zones, soldiers, it seems, tend to humanize their robotic aides. They develop emotional attachments to the machines that put themselves in harm’s way so the humans don’t have to.
Read more. [Image: U.S. Marine Corps photo by Lance Cpl. Bobby J. Segovia/Wikimedia Commons]
It’s funny how science fiction universes so often treat humans as a boring, default everyman species or even the weakest and dumbest.
I want to see a sci fi universe where we’re actually considered one of the more hideous and terrifying species.
How do we know our saliva and skin oils wouldn’t be ultra-corrosive to most other sapient races? What if we actually have the strongest vocal chords and can paralyze or kill the inhabitants of other worlds just by screaming at them? What if most sentient life in the universe turns out to be vegetable-like and lives in fear of us rare “animal” races who can move so quickly and chew shit up with our teeth?
Like that old story “they’re made of meat,” only we’re scarier.
HOLY SHIT THEY EAT CAPSAICIN FOR FUN
YOU GUYS I HEARD A HUMAN ONCE ATE AN AIRPLANE.
A HUMAN CAN KEEP FIGHTING FOR HOURS EVEN AFTER YOU SHOOT IT
humans are a proud warrior race with a pantheon of bloody gods: Ram-Bo, Schwarzenegger, etc.
REMOVING A LIMB WILL NOT FATALLY INCAPACITATE HUMANS: ALWAYS DESTROY THE HEAD.
WARNING: HUMANS CAN DETECT YOU EVEN AT NIGHT BY TRACKING VIBRATIONS THROUGH THE ATMOSPHERE
WARNING: HUMANS CAN REPRODUCE AT A RATE OF 1 PER SPACEYEAR. DESTROY INFESTATIONS IMMEDIATELY
THE HUMAN MOUTH HAS OVER THIRTY OUTCROPS OF BONE AND POWERFUL JAW MUSCLES.
HUMAN BITES CAN BE FATALLY INFECTIOUS EVEN TO OTHER HUMANS
WARNING: HUMANS CAN AND WILL USE IMPROVISED WEAPONS. SEE CLASSIFIED DATA LABELED J. CHAN.
HUMANS CAN PROJECT BIOWEAPONS FROM ALMOST EVERY ORIFICE ON THEIR BODY. DO NOT INHALE
OH GOD THE HUMANS FIGURED OUT DOOR HANDLES OH GOD OH GOD
More seriously, humans do have a number of advantages even among Terrestrial life. Our endurance, shock resistance, and ability to recover from injury is absurdly high compared to almost any other animal. We often use the phrase “healthy as a horse” to connote heartiness - but compared to a human, a horse is as fragile as spun glass. There’s mounting evidence that our primitive ancestors would hunt large prey simply by following it at a walking pace, without sleep or rest, until it died of exhaustion; it’s called pursuit predation. Basically, we’re the Terminator.
(The only other animal that can sort of keep up with us? Dogs. That’s why we use them for hunting. And even then, it’s only “sort of”.)
Now extrapolate that to a galaxy in which most sapient life did not evolve from hyper-specialised pursuit predators:
- Our strength and speed is nothing to write home about, but we don’t need to overpower or outrun you. We just need to outlast you - and by any other species’ standards, we just plain don’t get tired.
- Where a simple broken leg will cause most species to go into shock and die, we can recover from virtually any injury that’s not immediately fatal. Even traumatic dismemberment isn’t necessarily a career-ending injury for a human.
- We heal from injuries with extreme rapidity, recovering in weeks from wounds that would take others months or years to heal. The results aren’t pretty - humans have hyperactive scar tissue, among our other survival-oriented traits - but they’re highly functional.
- Speaking of scarring, look at our medical science. We developed surgery centuries before developing even the most rudimentary anesthetics or life support. In extermis, humans have been known to perform surgery on themselves - and survive. Thanks to our extreme heartiness, we regard as routine medical procedures what most other species would regard as inventive forms of murder. We even perform radical surgery on ourselves for purely cosmetic reasons.
In essence, we’d be Space Orcs.
I do hope you realize I’m going to be picking up this stuff and running with it right?
Our jaws have too many TEETH in them, so we developed a way to WELD METAL TO OUR TEETH and FORCE THE BONES IN OUR JAW to restructure over the course of years to fit them back into shape, and then we continue to wear metal in out mouths to keep them in place.
We formed cohabitative relationships with tiny mammals and insects we keep at bay from bothering us by death, often using little analouge traps.
And by god, we will eat anything.
- We use borderline toxic peppers to season our food.
- We expose ourselves to potentially lethal solar radiation in the pursuit of darkening our skin.
- We risk hearing loss for the opportunity to see our favorite musicians live.
- We have a game where two people get into an enclosed area and hit each other until time runs out/one of them pass out
- We willingly jump out of planes with only a flimsy piece of cloth to prevent us from splattering against the ground.
- Our response to natural disasters is to just rebuild our buildings in the exact same places.
- We climb mountains and risk freezing to death for bragging rights
- We invented dogs. We took our one time predators and completely domesticated them.
- On a planet full of lions, tigers and bears, we managed to advance further and faster than any other species on the planet.
Klingons and Krogan and Orcs ain’t got shit on us
I’m sitting here, flat whating at how this has grown. I remember when it was a small, baby post.