by John Lloyd
The insufferably cute Easter Bunny is also a modern American invention. It’s a commercial sanitisation of the hare as fertility-rebirth-moon symbol. In Saxon culture, the hare was sacred to Eostre, the goddess of spring, which is where we get the word ‘Easter’.
Few animals have such rich mythological associations. From Ancient Egypt and Mesopotamia through to India, Africa, China and Western Europe, hares have been portrayed as sacred, evil, wise, destructive, clever and, almost always, sexy.
Maybe it’s because they are so fast – they can run at 77 kph (48 mph) and leap 2.5 metres (8 feet) in the air Or maybe it’s their astonishing fertility: a female hare (doe) can produce 42 leverets in a single year. Pliny the Elder believed eating hare would make you sexually attractive for up to nine days.
Hares and rabbits are not rodents but ‘lagomorphs’ (which derives from the Greek for ‘hare-shaped’). Lagomorphs are peculiar in being able to close their nostrils and choosing to eat their own droppings.
They do this for the same reasons cows chew the cud – to extract the maximum amount of nutrients and energy from their food. Unlike cows, hares and rabbits don’t get to stand around for hours ruminating.
The familiar spring ritual of ‘boxing hares’ is not a male dominance contest but a doe fighting off unwanted suitors.
What were Cinderella’s slippers made from?
Squirrel fur.
Charles Perrault, who wrote the familiar version of the story in the seventeenth century, misheard the word vair (squirrel fur) in the medieval tale he borrowed and updated for the similar-sounding verre (glass).
Cinderella is an ancient and universal story. A Chinese version dates back to the ninth century and there are over 340 other versions before Perrault’s. None of the early versions mentions glass slippers. In the ‘original’ Chinese story ‘Yeh-Shen’ they’re made of gold thread with solid gold soles. In the Scottish version ‘Rashie-Coat’ they’re made of rushes. In the medieval French tale, adapted by Perrault, her shoes are described as pantoufles de vair – slippers of squirrel’s fur.
One source says the vair–verre error occurred before Perrault and he merely repeated it. Others think glass slippers were Perrault’s own idea and that he intended them all along.
The OED states that vair, in use in English as well as French since at least 1300, comes from the Latin varius, ‘particoloured’, and refers to fur from a species of squirrel that is ‘much used for trimming or lining garments’.
Snopes.com states that Perrault could not have misheard vair as verre because vair ‘was no longer used in his time’. This seems extremely doubtful – the word was continuously in use in English until at least 1864.
Perrault was an upper-class Parisian author who rose to become Director of the Académie Française. His Tales of Mother Goose (1697), originally devised as Court entertainment and published under the name of his 17-year-old son, were immediately popular and opened up a new literary genre: the fairytale. Apart from Cinderella, his famous versions of classic tales include Sleeping Beauty, Little Red Riding Hood, Bluebeard and Puss-in-Boots.
As well as polishing up Cinderella – adding the mice, the pumpkin and the fairy godmother – Perrault reduced their peasant bloodthirstiness. In the medieval original, the ugly sisters cut off their toes and bunions to try on the slipper, and after the Prince marries Cinders, the King takes revenge on them and the wicked stepmother by forcing them to dance themselves to death wearing red-hot iron boots. Much of this bloodthirstiness was later reinstated by the Brothers Grimm.
In Three Contributions to the Theory of Sex, Freud claimed slippers were a symbol for the female genitals.
STEPHEN When the Ugly Sisters tried to slip into the slipper, they cut off their toes and their bunions to try and squeeze in and the slippers filled with blood.
JO They probably got that idea from Trinny and Susannah …
Where do loofahs come from?
Trees.
Not from the sea – that’ll be sponges you’re thinking of – loofahs grow on trees. They are a kind of gourd and are regarded as a tasty snack throughout Asia.
Smooth loofah (Luffa aegyptiaca) is a rampant, fast-growing annual vine that produces pretty yellow flowers and strange-looking fruits that are edible when immature and useful when fully grown. The vine can grow more than 30 feet (9 metres) long and scrambles over anything in its path.
Probably native to tropical Africa and Asia, it is grown throughout most of Asia and is cultivated commercially in the United States for export to Japan.
The immature fruits, 7.5 to 15 cm (3 to 6 inches) in length, can be stir-fried whole or sliced, or they can be grated and used in soups and omelettes. Any fruits longer than 10 cm (4 inches) need to be peeled because the skin becomes bitter.
Allowed to mature on the vine until they start turning brown and their stems go yellow, loofahs are easy to peel for use as back scrubbers, skin exfoliators or general kitchen pot scrubs.
What’s the strongest wood?
Balsa.
It’s the strongest wood in the world when measured in three categories of stiffness, bendability and compressibility – stronger than oak or pine.
Although it is the softest of woods, it is not, botanically, a softwood, but a hardwood. ‘Hardwood’ is a botanical term that describes broadleaved, mostly deciduous trees which are angiosperms (flowering plants such as balsa) as opposed to coniferous gymnosperms (non-flowering plants such as pine).
It is also light, of course, though it is not the lightest in the world – the lightest practical wood is a New Zealand native, the small whau tree (pronounced ‘phow’) which is used by Maori fishermen to make floats.
Balsa is Spanish for ‘raft’. Balsa wood is mothproof.
What do you get if you suck your pencil?
Nothing bad, apart from being told not to.
Pencils don’t contain lead and never have done. They contain graphite, one of the six pure forms of carbon, which is no more poisonous than the wood it’s wrapped in. Even the paint is now lead-free.
The confusion comes from the fact that sharpened lead was used for more than 2,000 years to draw on papyrus and paper.
The only deposit of pure, solid, graphite ever found was uncovered by accident in Borrowdale, Cumbria in 1564. It was protected by strict laws and armed guards and mined for just six weeks a year.
The so-called ‘black lead’ it produced was cut into thin square sticks to make the first pencils. English pencils were adopted quickly across Europe. The first recorded use was by the Swiss naturalist Konrad Gessner in 1565.
Henry David Thoreau, author of Walden, was the first American to successfully fire graphite with clay to make a pencil ‘lead’ but the big commercial breakthrough came in 1827, when Joseph Dixon of Salem, Massachusetts introduced a machine that mass-produced square graphite pencils at the rate of 132 per minute.
By the time he died in 1869, the Joseph Dixon Crucible Company was the world leader, producing 86,000 round cased pencils a day. Today (now called Dixon Ticonderoga) it is still one of the world’s leading pencil-makers.
Roald Dahl wrote all his books using a yellow Dixon Ticonderoga medium pencil. The traditional yellow pencil goes back to 1890 when Josef Hardmuth manufactured the first one at his Prague factory and named it after Queen Victoria’s famous yellow diamond, Koh-i-Noor (she’d called his luxury line ‘the Koh-i-Noor of pencils’). Other manufacturers copied it. In North America, 75 per cent of all pencils sold are yellow.
The average pencil can be sharpened seventeen times and can write 45,000 words or a straight line 56 km (35 miles) long.
The rubber attached to the end of a pencil is held in place by a device known as a ferrule. The patent was first granted in 1858, but they were unpopular in schools because teachers believed they encouraged laziness.
The ‘rubber’ in most pencils is actually made from vegetable oil, with a very small amount of rubber binding it together.
Have you ever slid down
a banister?
No, you haven’t.
Banisters are the thin struts that support the fat bit you sit on when you slide down – which is properly called a ‘balustrade’ or ‘handrail’.
With a stone staircase, the pillars that support the handrail are called ‘balusters’ and, strictly speaking, ‘baluster’ is the correct word for any upright support for a handrail on any kind of staircase. The word ‘banister’ (or, worse, ‘bannister’) is a misspelling of the original word. Though in common usage since at least 1667, Victorian dictionaries railed and blustered about the use of the word ‘banister’ as ‘improper’ and ‘vulgar’. However, you will be relieved to learn that it is now deemed acceptable.
The word ‘newel’ – the bit with a knob on that stops you sliding off the end of the balustrade – has also changed its meaning. It was originally the central pillar of a spiral. In due course, it came to mean any pillary bit associated with stairs, and eventually just the one at the end.
In modern French, a language with many fewer words than English, the word noyau serves as a multi-purpose term, meaning not only a newel post but also the stone or pit of a fruit, the kernel of a nut and the nucleus of an atom.
The word ‘baluster’ comes from the Greek balaustrion, meaning ‘the blossom of the wild pomegranate’ whose doublecurving, pear-shaped bulges resemble (and presumably were the inspiration for) classic balusters.
Sir Roger Bannister, the first man to run a mile in under four minutes, in Oxford on 6 May 1954, held the record for only forty-six days. John Landy of Australia beat his time by 11/2 seconds in Turku, Finland, just over six weeks later on 21 June.
JO When I was at college, I slid down a barrister.
STEPHEN Did you?
PHILL Did you hit yourself on the knob at the end?
Where was the log cabin invented?
Probably in Scandinavia 4,000 years ago.
The development of metal tools during the Bronze Age made them possible. As a quick-to-build, durable, warm form of building they were used widely across northern Europe.
The ancient Greeks may also have a claim, because although the ancient coniferous forests have now receded from the Mediterranean, there is a theory that the Minoan’s and Mycenaean’s one-roomed house or megaron was originally made from horizontal pine logs.
It was through the Swedish and Finnish settlements in Delaware in the 1630s that the log cabin reached America, its spiritual home. British settlers, incidentally, constructed their homes of wooden planks, not logs.
A museum in Hodgenville, Kentucky, proudly displays the famous log cabin in which Abraham Lincoln was born, though it was, in fact, built thirty years after his death. This is uncomfortably close to the old schoolboy howler: ‘Abe Lincoln was born in a log cabin he built with his own hands.’
Despite this ludicrous fakery, the US National Park Service solemnly tells tourists not to use flash photography, in case they damage the historic logs.
Where did Stone Age people live?
Put away that cliché.
‘Cavemen’ isn’t a good description of Stone Age or palaeolithic people. It’s part of the ‘couldn’t-care-less-about-anything-much-before-the-Romans’ school of history teaching, much favoured in the late nineteenth century. It’s not used by modern historians or archaeologists at all.
Palaeolithic humans were nomadic hunter-gatherers who occasionally used caves. There are 277 sites that have been identified in Europe – among them Altamira in Spain, Lascaux in France and Creswell Crags in Derbyshire. They left paintings and evidence of fires, cooking, rituals and burials, but they were not designed as permanent dwelling-places.
The earliest European cave art has been dated to 40,000 years ago, although the precise age is notoriously difficult to establish. Paint isn’t organic, so can’t be carbon-dated.
The most persuasive explanation of its function relates it to more recent cave painting among hunter-gatherer people in southern Africa and Australia. Here the paintings were the work of shamans, who entered the dark and often remote caves in order to connect with the spirit world. Another theory suggests they were simply palaeolithic teenage graffiti.
In northern China, an estimated 40 million people currently live in cave homes known as yaodong. As the human population of the entire planet in 8,000 BC was probably only five million, there are eight times as many cavemen now than there were people of any kind then.
People who live in caves are called troglodytes, from the Greek for ‘those who get into a hole’.
Other places where there have been troglodyte dwellings in modern times include Cappadocia in Turkey, Andalucia in southern Spain, New Mexico in the USA and the Canary Islands.
This may be the beginning rather than the end of a trend. Research from the University of Bath has demonstrated that an underground home uses 25 per cent less energy than a normal house.
What was the first animal to be domesticated?
a) Sheep
b) Pig
c) Reindeer
d) Horse
e) Dog
Around 14,000 years ago, palaeolithic hunter-gatherers on what is now the Russian/Mongolian border learned to lure reindeer away from their huge migratory groups and breed them to create their own small herd.
Reindeer were like walking corner-shops, offering meat, milk, and fur for clothing. It is possible that they trained dogs at the same time to help them domesticate the reindeer.
Today, there are about three million domesticated reindeer, most of them in the wastes of Lapland, which stretches across Sweden, Norway, Finland and Russia.
The Lapps, who herd them, prefer to call themselves the Sami. Perhaps they don’t know that Sami is ancient Swedish for ‘chavs’.
‘Caribou’ is the North American name for reindeer. It comes from xalibu, ‘one who digs’ in the Mi’Maq (or Micmac) language of eastern Canada. Reindeer/caribou use their large feet to dig through to the lichen beneath the snow. Lichens provide two-thirds of a reindeer’s food.
Reindeer are nomadic and travel up to 4,800 km (3,000 miles) a year, the mammal travel record. They’re fast, too, reaching speeds of 77 kph (48 mph) on land and 9.6 kph (6 mph) in water. Because of a clicking tendon in their feet, a herd of migrating reindeer sounds like a castanet convention.
Here are the estimated dates for domestication of the major animals:
Reindeer c.12,000 BC
Dogs (Eurasia, North America) c.12,000 BC
Sheep (SW Asia) 8,000 BC
Pig (SW Asia, China) 8,000 BC
Cattle (SW Asia, India, N Africa) 6,000 BC
Domestication is different from taming. It implies selective breeding. Elephants can be tamed, but are not domesticated.
ALAN What’s that Tony Hancock joke? Where he sees the reindeer head on the wall in the gentlemen’s club, and says, ‘Cor! He must have been shifting when he hit the other side of that wall!’
What was odd about Rudolf the Red-nose Reindeer?
He was a girl.
Despite being called Rudolph and referred to as ‘him’, like all Santa’s reindeer ‘he’ must in fact have been female. Male reindeer lose their antlers at the beginning of the winter. Females keep their antlers until they give birth in the spring.
Reindeer/caribou are the only female deer to have antlers. They are shed and regrow every year. They are shorter and simpler than those of the males but still grow at a rate of more than 2.5 cm (1 inch) a day, making them the fastest-growing tissue of any mammal.
The other possibility is that Rudolph was a eunuch. The Sami sometimes castrate male reindeer, thus enabling them to keep their antlers, and to carry especially heavy loads.
Where do turkeys come from?
Despite being native to North America, the domesticated turkeys that graced the tables of the Pilgrim Fathers had travelled out with them from England.
Turkeys first reached Europe in the 1520s, brought back from their native Mexico first to Spain and then sold throughout the c
ontinent by Turkish merchants. They quickly became a favourite food for the richer classes.
By 1585, turkey had become a Christmas tradition in England. Norfolk farmers set to work to produce a heavier-breasted, more docile version of the wild bird. The Norfolk Black and the White Holland were both English breeds reintroduced to America, and most domestic turkey now consumed in the USA derives from them.
From the late sixteenth century, English turkeys walked the 160 km (100 miles) from Norfolk to Leadenhall Market in London each year. The journey would take three months and the birds wore special leather boots to protect their feet.
A flock of 1,000 turkeys could be managed by two drovers carrying long wands of willow or hazel with red cloth tied on the ends. Traffic jams were caused by the vast flocks entering London from Norfolk and Suffolk in the weeks before Christmas.
Turkeys have nothing to do with Turkey. They were called ‘Turkie cocks’ in England because of the traders who supplied them. Maize, also originally from Mexico, was once called ‘turkie corn’ for the same reason.
In most other countries – including Turkey – they were named after India, perhaps because the Spanish returned with it from the ‘Indies’ (as America was called).