Sorry, Wrong Answer

by Rod L. Evans, Ph. D.

  2. The S in Harry S. Truman’s name stands for nothing; technically, S was President Truman’s middle name. According to President Truman, his parents could not agree whether he should be named after Anderson Shipp Truman or Solomon Young, his grandfathers. Some people argue, logically speaking, that the S should not have a period after it, though some guides to usage assert that convention calls for a period. Truman’s full name was generally rendered as Harry S. Truman, and he did use letterhead with a period after the S.

  3. The motto about braving the snow and rain is not the official motto of the U.S. Postal Service, which has no official motto. The words are a paraphrase of the motto written by the Greek historian Herodotus, who was describing Persia’s mounted postal couriers of the fifth century BCE. The words are, however, associated with the U.S. Postal Service and are inscribed over the entrance to New York City’s General Post Office at Eighth Avenue and Thirty-Third Street.

  4. “His name is mud” does not come from the name of the physician who set assassin John Wilkes Booth’s broken bones, Dr. Samuel Mudd, who was, by the way, found guilty of conspiring to assassinate Lincoln and sent to prison. The expression dates back to the 1820s, when the word mud could describe a dull fellow or a fool.

  5. The word pig was not first used in the 1960s as a pejorative to describe the police. According to lexicographer Eric Partridge, during the early nineteenth century, pig came to be applied mainly to plainclothesmen in London. Note that, in other languages, long before the nineteenth century, some police were called pigs, as when the children of Israel condemned the Roman police authorities.

  6. The word describing the relative purity of gold is not carat, which describes a unit of weight for measuring precious stones and gems, but karat. A metric carat, by the way, is 0.2 grams, making a five-carat ruby weigh one gram. Karat expresses the relative purity of gold. Pure gold is assumed to have twenty-four parts or karats of gold. Fourteen-karat gold contains fourteen parts gold and ten parts alloy.

  7. There is no difference in meaning between flammable and inflammable, because both describe what can be easily set on fire. Inflammable is from the Latin inflammare and later from the Old English enflamen, meaning “to flame or burn.”

  8. E pluribus unum is not the official motto of the United States, which used to have that slogan as a motto, but is instead the motto of the Portuguese football club Sport Lisboa e Benfica, often abbreviated to Benfica. As noted, E pluribus unum used to be the national motto of the United States, but it was replaced by “In God we trust” in 1956.

  9. Corpus delicti (literally, “body of crime”) refers to the legal principle that a crime must be proved to have occurred before a person can be convicted of committing the crime. For example, no one can be properly convicted of larceny unless it can be proved that property was stolen. Similarly, someone cannot be properly convicted of arson unless it can be proved a criminal act resulted in the burning of property. In a murder case, the corpus delicti can include the corpse, but only a few jurisdictions require the actual production of a corpse to convict people of murder. The British serial killer John George Haigh, who murdered six persons in the 1940s, said that he decided to destroy the bodies of his victims with sulfuric acid because he believed—mistakenly—that convicting an accused of murder requires a body. Haigh had misinterpreted the Latin word corpus as designating a literal body rather than a figurative one.

  10. In Old English the word with meant “against,” as in “to fight with.”

  11. Of the languages listed the only one that is not Indo-European is Finnish (or Suomi), which is a member of the Finno-Ugric languages, which also include Estonian and Hungarian.

  12. The word primer in the sense described is pronounced prĭm-er and has a short i, as in the world rim.

  13. CISCO (the name of the corporation) is not an acronym but an abbreviated form of “San Francisco.” It was originally written as “cisco.”

  14. Rhythms is reportedly the longest English word without an A, E, I, O, or U.

  15. Arctic comes from the ancient Greek word for “bear,” arktos, because the constellation Ursa Major, the Great Bear, lies in the northern sky. Note that the word arctoid is a synonym for “ursine” (“pertaining to bears”).

  16. Comprise means “contains” or “includes,” as in “the whole comprises its parts”; consequently, it makes sense to say, “the organization is composed of several divisions,” but “the organization comprises several divisions.” The expression is comprised of makes no more sense than the expression is included of.

  17. Gallaudet (as in Gallaudet University) is not pronounced Gal-yoo-det but Gal-luh-det.

  18. The abbreviation i.e. (Latin for id est) means not “for example” (e.g.) but “that is.”

  19. Cherokee people don’t pronounce Cherokee in their tongue because Cherokee speech has no ch or r sound. The correct spelling and pronunciation is Tsalagi. The word Cherokee is a Creek Indian word meaning “people with another language.” Cherokee people prefer to call themselves Aniyounwiya, which means “the principal people.”

  20. The Oxford English Dictionary and most scholars reject the old explanation that sincere comes from Latin sine (“without”) and cera (“wax”); rather sincere comes from the Latin sincerus (“clean,” “pure,” “sound”). The story about the wax appears to be folk etymology. According to one popular story, dishonest Roman or Greek sculptors would cover flaws in their works with wax to deceive viewers. From that practice, sculpture “without wax” implied honesty in perfection. Regardless of whether that artistic practice existed, most scholars reject the implied explanation of the origin of sincere.

  Quiz 26

  World History

  1. The trenches on the Western Front of World War I stretched from the frontier of Switzerland to what English body of water?

  2. How many years was the Hundred Years’ War between England and France?

  3. What nationality was Cleopatra?

  4. Who was the first person to fly nonstop across the Atlantic Ocean?

  5. Where was Saint Patrick born?

  6. What literature inspired Mohandas Gandhi to practice passive resistance against the British rulers of India?

  7. What is the significance of Cinco de Mayo (May 5) in Mexico?

  8. Where did Marco Polo come from?

  9. During what war was napalm first used?

  10. What kind of animal most often received the UK’s Dickin Medal for animal gallantry between 1943 and 1949?

  11. Compared to the height of most men of his time and place, what’s true about Napoleon’s height?

  12. What object killed most British sailors in eighteenth-century sea battles?

  13. What shape did Columbus think the Earth was?

  14. In what building was Julius Caesar killed?

  15. What device did medieval knights use on their wives to keep them faithful as the knights left for the Holy Lands on the Crusades?

  16. Why were the followers of King James II/VII known as Jacobites?

  17. What did King John do to the Magna Carta in 1215?

  18. In what war were Molotov cocktails first used?

  19. Who erected the obelisks known as Cleopatra’s Needles?

  20. Who first proposed the French defensive structure called the Maginot Line?

  21. Who was the last Führer of Nazi Germany?

  Quiz 26 Answers

  World History

  1. The trenches on the Western Front stretched from the frontier of Switzerland not to the English Channel but to the coast of the North Sea. Much of the British war effort was aimed at preventing the Germans from reaching the English Channel.

  2. The Hundred Years’ War lasted 116 years. On May 24, 1337, French King Philip VI started the war between England and France by taking over the English duchy of Guienne. Then, in October 1337, English King Edward III, whose mother was the sister of three French kings, formally claimed the French throne and sent troops to Normandy. In 1453, after 116 yea
rs, the series of conflicts ended, as the French finally expelled the British from Guienne.

  3. Cleopatra was not Egyptian but part Macedonian, part Greek, and part Persian. Although she was the eldest daughter of Egyptian king Ptolemy XIII and ruler of Egypt during the time of Julius Caesar, Cleopatra was not Egyptian.

  4. The first person to fly nonstop across the Atlantic Ocean was not Charles Lindberg, who, in 1927, became the first person to fly solo across the Atlantic Ocean. The first aviators to fly nonstop over the Atlantic Ocean were Captain John Alcock and his copilot Arthur Whitten Brown, two British aviators who, in 1919, flew a twin-engine Vicker Vimy nonstop from Newfoundland, Canada, to Clifden, Ireland.

  5. Saint Patrick was not born in Ireland, of which he is the patron saint, but in England, where he spent much of his early life.

  6. The literature that first inspired Mohandas Gandhi to practice passive resistance was not Henry David Thoreau’s essay “Civil Disobedience” but the New Testament, the Bhagavad Gita, and Leo Tolstoy’s 1899 novel Resurrection . Note that Gandhi first used passive resistance in 1906 in a protest against the Indian Registration Ordinance of South Africa and did not read Thoreau’s “Civil Disobedience” until 1907.

  7. Cinco de Mayo isn’t Mexico’s Independence Day, which is on September 16, but instead is a regional holiday celebrated primarily in the state of Puebla, commemorating the Mexican victory over the French in the Battle of Puebla.

  8. Marco Polo was not from Venice but from Korcula, Croatia, which was a protectorate of Venice.

  9. Napalm was first used not in the Vietnam War but in World War II, during the bombing of Tokyo. On March 9, 1945, General Curtis LeMay ordered U.S. bombers to drop almost two thousand tons of napalm bombs on Tokyo.

  10. Carrier pigeons received thirty-two of the fifty-four Dickin Medals between 1943 and 1949. The medal, awarded for conspicuous gallantry and devotion to duty in service to British Commonwealth armed forces or civil emergency services, was also awarded to eighteen dogs, three horses, and one cat to acknowledge actions during World War II. After the war, the medal was officially replaced with the nonmilitary Silver Medal, also awarded by the UK’s veterinary charity, People’s Dispensary for Sick Animals (PDSA), founded by Maria Dickin.

  11. Napoleon was slightly taller than the average Frenchman of his day. In 1821, shortly before his death, Napoleon was recorded at 5 feet, 2 inches in French feet, which correlates to a measurement of 5 feet, 6½ inches in imperial feet, making Napoleon’s height slightly above average for his time and place. By the way, his being called the Little Corporal didn’t relate to his height but was a term of affection alluding to his camaraderie with ordinary soldiers.

  12. Most sailors killed in battle weren’t killed by contact from cannon balls but from splintered wood flying around decks at high speeds caused by the cannon balls.

  13. Columbus thought of Earth as pear shaped.

  14. Julius Caesar was not killed in the Capitol despite what William Shakespeare and many other people have thought but was killed near the statue of Pompey in a hall where the Senate sometimes met. The Senate House was in a different place from the Capitol.

  15. The belief that chastity belts were used during the Crusades is a modern myth. In fact, there is no credible evidence that chastity belts existed before the fifteenth century—more than a century after the last Crusade. The actual use, if any, of medieval chastity belts would have been extremely limited because the metal working then would have made it difficult to fashion a belt safe for long-term wear. The first known drawing of a chastity belt occurs in Konrad Kyeser’s Bellifortis, a fifteenth-century book on contemporary military equipment. The book features an illustration of the “hard iron breeches” worn by Florentine women. Because the diagram shows the key, some scholars think that it was the lady and not the knight who controlled access to the device. In museum collections, most “medieval” chastity belts have been removed as probably inauthentic. Often objects advertised as medieval chastity belts were manufactured in Germany in the nineteenth century. During that time, there was an upsurge in the sale of chastity belts, but those belts were designed to prevent males from masturbating, widely regarded as harmful. Ironically, chastity belts sold in modern Western countries today are typically used in sex play.

  16. Supporters of King James II/VII were called Jacobites because of the Latin word for “James” (Jacobus). By the way, James II was thus known when he was king of England and Ireland; he was known as James VII when he was king of Scotland.

  17. King John did not sign the Magna Carta but marked the document with his seal. Some historians doubt whether the king could even write.

  18. The expression Molotov cocktail and its referent did not originate in World War II; rather, according to Veikko Väänänen, in the Finnish scholarly journal Neuphilologische Mitteilungen (November 4, 1977), the Finns invented and named the Molotov cocktail at some point during the 1939 to 1940 Finnish-Russian War.

  19. Thothmes III erected Cleopatra’s Needles.

  20. The person who first proposed the French defensive structure called the Maginot Line was not André Maginot, the French minister of war in 1929 who hastened the construction of the fortification, but rather Paul Painlevé, a French mathematician who was twice prime minister of the French Third Republic.

  21. The last Führer of Nazi Germany was not Hitler but Karl Dönitz, chief naval commander, appointed Führer by Hitler in late April 1945. Retaining power for twenty-three days, Dönitz led Germany during the completion of the Baltic sealift, in which more than two million Germans were removed from the eastern districts of Germany before the Russian occupation. Dönitz received a ten-year sentence at the Nuremberg trials. After serving time in Spandau prison, he lived in what was West Germany until he died in 1980 at the age of eighty-nine.

  Quiz 27

  Famous People

  1. Generally speaking, how good a student was Einstein?

  2. Besides painting and describing birds, what other bird-related activities did James Audubon enjoy?

  3. How did the pop singer Cass Elliot die?

  4. From what law school did the famous lawyer Clarence Darrow graduate?

  5. Of Aunt Jemima, Sara Lee, and Betty Crocker, which two characters were inspired by real people?

  6. Of presidents John F. Kennedy, Lyndon Baines Johnson, Richard M. Nixon, Gerald R. Ford, and James Earl Carter, who was the first to be born in a hospital?

  7. As of 2009, who was the only U.S. president to be head of a labor union?

  8. Who was the first U.S. president to have his inauguration televised?

  9. Who was the first U.S. president to speak live on radio?

  10. The first U.S. ex-president to fly in an airplane flew in which year: 1910, 1933, or 1944?

  11. J. S. Bach was, in his time, most famous for what activity?

  12. What happened to actress Jayne Mansfield’s head when she was killed in a car accident on June 29, 1967?

  13. What is the inscription on W. C. Fields’s grave at Forest Lawn Cemetery in Glendale, California?

  14. In what wars or conflicts did Ernest Hemingway fight?

  15. Who discovered gold in 1848, sparking the California Gold Rush?

  16. What’s the name of the Missouri town where Mark Twain was born?

  Quiz 27 Answers

  Famous People

  1. Einstein was an excellent student. Yes, he began to speak later than the average child, but when he did begin to speak, he spoke in complete sentences. He was earning top grades and doing physics and calculus by his early teens. True, Einstein happened to fail a college entrance exam, but he was two years younger than the average applicant and earned a brilliant score in science and math. He failed the exam because of one subject—namely, French. After he brushed up on the humanities, Einstein passed the exam and was admitted the following year.

  2. Besides painting and describing birds, James Audubon spent a good deal of time killing them. He would kill more bird
s in a week than a duck hunter would kill in a whole season. He packed a rifle along with his palette and brushes. Quite the hunter and outdoorsman, he is said to have shot as many as a hundred birds a day.

  3. The pop singer Cass Elliot did not die by choking on a sandwich but by having a heart attack.

  4. Clarence Darrow never graduated from law school, though he studied law for a year at the University of Michigan. He was legally able to take the bar without having graduated.

  5. Even though Aunt Jemima wasn’t her real name and she didn’t invent the pancake formula, the person behind the icon Aunt Jemima was real—Nancy Green, who had been born a slave in 1834. An excellent cook known for her warmth, she was discovered at age fifty-nine by the pancake people, who called her Aunt Jemima. At the Chicago World’s Fair of 1893, she and the pancakes she represented attracted huge crowds. After the World’s Fair, the pancake formula sold like, well, hotcakes, making the product (and Nancy Green’s image) famous.Sara Lee was also inspired by a real person: the daughter of bakery entrepreneur Charlie Lubin, who put her name on cheesecakes when she was only eight years old. In 1956, Lubin sold his business to Consolidated Foods and worked there as an executive for many years. In 1985, Consolidated Foods changed its name to the Sara Lee Corporation. Although the person Sara Lee never had a management position in the company, she appeared in some ads and promotions and has been a philanthropist supporting education and the advancement of girls and women in science.

  Betty Crocker, a persona for General Mills since the 1920s, is quite fictitious. The surname Crocker was that of a company executive; her signature was that of a company secretary; and her radio voices were those of different actresses. In the 1930s, Betty Crocker acquired her face, a composite of several employees at General Mills. Even though Betty Crocker wasn’t real, she had the distinction of being rated one of the most famous women in America.