• Sneezing may be a symptom of pregnancy. Expectant mothers often sneeze for no apparent reason.
• Snoop Dogg's real name is Cordozar Calvin Broadus Jr.
• The typical pine cone is female.
• The first World Wide Web search engine was called Wandex.
• According to a recent study, 87% of women use scissors as their first throw when playing "Rock, Scissors, Paper."
• "Anhedonia" is an inability to experience pleasure from normally pleasurable experiences.
• Ancient Greeks believed wearing amethysts would help keep a person from becoming drunk.
• The original Scrabble game didn't have a board. It was played with tiles only.
• Alfred Hitchcock had a morbid fear of eggs (ovaphobia).
• The risk of having an auto accident is about four times higher for drivers using cell phones (whether handheld or hands-free).
• The U.S. has the highest dog population in the world. France has the second highest.
• In a typical restaurant, customers get 27 cents worth of food for each dollar they spend.
• In casinos, $50 bills are known as "frogs" and are considered by many to be bad luck.
• During the ice age, there were six-foot tall "mammoth penguins."
• Bubbles in champagne were seen by early wine makers as a highly undesirable defect, one that should be prevented.
• "Typhlobasia" is the practice of closing one's eyes when kissing.
• Just less than one quarter of the people in the world are vegetarians.
• William Howard Taft was the first golfer to become President.
• It is tradition in countries such as Venezuela and Peru to wear yellow underwear on New Year's Day for good luck throughout the coming year.

A few years after I was born, my Dad met a stranger who was new to our small Michigan town. From the beginning, Dad was fascinated with this enchanting newcomer and soon invited him to live with our family. The stranger was quickly accepted and was around from then on.

As I grew up, I never question ed his place in my family. In my young mind, he had a special niche. My parents were complementary instructors: Mom taught me good from evil, and Dad taught me to obey. But the stranger...he was our storyteller. He would keep us spellbound for hours on end with Adventures, mysteries and comedies.

If I wanted to know anything about politics, history or science, he always knew the answers about the past, understood the present and even seemed able to predict the future! He took my family to the first major league ball game. He made me laugh, and he made me cry. The stranger never stopped Talking, but Dad didn't seem to mind.

Sometimes, Mom would get up quietly while the rest of us were shushing each other to listen to what he had to say, and she would go to the kitchen for peace and quiet. (I wonder now if she ever prayed for the stranger to leave.) Dad ruled our household with certain moral convictions, but the stranger never felt obligated to honor them. Profanity, for example, was not allowed in our home... Not from us, our friends or any visitors. Our longtime visitor, however, got away with four-letter words that burned my ears and made my dad squirm and my mother blush. My Dad didn't permit the liberal use of alcohol, but the stranger encouraged us to try it on a regular basis. He made cigarettes look cool, cigars manly and pipes distinguished. He talked freely (much too freely!) about sex. His comments were sometimes blatant, sometimes suggestive, and generally embarrassing.

I now know that my early concepts about relationships were influenced strongly by the stranger. Time after time, he opposed the values of my parents, yet he was seldom rebuked... And NEVER asked to leave.

More than fifty years have passed since the stranger moved in with our family. He has blended right in and is not nearly as fascinating as he was at first. Still, if you could walk into my parents' den today, you would still find him sitting over in his corner, waiting for someone to listen to him talk and watch him draw his pictures.

His name?.... .. .

We just call him 'TV.'

... as he stepped onto the moon and left earthlings puzzled over the difference between "man" and "mankind." In 1980, Jimmy Carter, accepting his party’s nomination, paid homage to a former vice president he called Hubert Horatio Hornblower. A year later, Diana Spencer reversed the first two names of her betrothed in her wedding vows, and thus, as Prince Charles Philip supposedly later joked, actually married his father. On Tuesday, Chief Justice John Roberts joined the Flubber Hall of Fame when he administered the presidential oath of office apparently without notes. Instead of having Barack Obama "solemnly swear that I will faithfully execute the office of President of the United States," Chief Justice Roberts had him "solemnly swear that I will execute the office of President to the United States faithfully." When Mr. Obama paused after "execute," the chief justice prompted him to continue with "faithfully the office of President of the United States." (To ensure that the President was properly sworn in, the chief justice re-administered the oath Wednesday evening.)

How could a famous stickler for grammar have bungled that 35-word passage, among the best-known words in the Constitution? Conspiracy theorists and connoisseurs of Freudian slips have surmised that it was unconscious retaliation for Senator Obama’s vote against the chief justice’s confirmation in 2005. But a simpler explanation is that the wayward adverb in the passage is blowback from Chief Justice Roberts’s habit of grammatical niggling.

Language pedants hew to an oral tradition of shibboleths that have no basis in logic or style, that have been defied by great writers for centuries, and that have been disavowed by every thoughtful usage manual. Nonetheless, they refuse to go away, perpetuated by the Gotcha! Gang and meekly obeyed by insecure writers.

Among these fetishes is the prohibition against "split verbs," in which an adverb comes between an infinitive marker like "to," or an auxiliary like "will," and the main verb of the sentence. According to this superstition, Captain Kirk made a grammatical error when he declared that the five-year mission of the starship Enterprise was "to boldly go where no man has gone before"; it should have been "to go boldly." Likewise, Dolly Parton should not have declared that "I will always love you" but "I always will love you" or "I will love you always."

Any speaker who has not been brainwashed by the split-verb myth can sense that these corrections go against the rhythm and logic of English phrasing. The myth originated centuries ago in a thick-witted analogy to Latin, in which it is impossible to split an infinitive because it consists of a single word, like dicere, "to say." But in English, infinitives like "to go" and future-tense forms like "will go" are two words, not one, and there is not the slightest reason to interdict adverbs from the position between them.

Though the ungrammaticality of split verbs is an urban legend, it found its way into The Texas Law Review Manual on Style, which is the arbiter of usage for many law review journals. James Lindgren, a critic of the manual, has found that many lawyers have "internalized the bogus rule so that they actually believe that a split verb should be avoided," adding, "The Invasion of the Body Snatchers has succeeded so well that many can no longer distinguish alien speech from native speech."

In his legal opinions, Chief Justice Roberts has altered quotations to conform to his notions of grammaticality, as when he excised the "ain’t" from Bob Dylan’s line "When you ain’t got nothing, you got nothing to lose." On Tuesday his inner copy editor overrode any instincts toward strict constructionism and unilaterally amended the Constitution by moving the adverb "faithfully" away from the verb.

President Obama, whose attention to language is obvious in his speeches and writings, smiled at the chief justice’s hypercorrection, then gamely repeated it. Let’s hope that during the next four years he will always challenge dogma and boldly lead the nation in new directions.

Steven Pinker

Steven Pinker is a psychology professor at Harvard and the chairman of the usage panel of The American Heritage Dictionary.

• Scientists say the higher your I.Q. The more you dream.
• The largest cell in the human body is the female egg.
• The smallest is the male sperm.
• You use 200 muscles to take one step.
• The average woman is 5 inches shorter than the average man.
• Your big toes have two bones each while the rest have three.
• A pair of human feet contain 250,000 sweat glands.
• A full bladder is roughly the size of a soft ball.
• The acid in your stomach is strong enough to dissolve razor blades.
• The human brain cell can hold 5 times as much information as the Encyclopedia Britannica.
• It takes the food seven seconds to get from your mouth to your stomach.
• The average human dream lasts 2-3 seconds.
• Men without hair on their chests are more likely to get cirrhosis of the liver than men with hair.
• At the moment of conception, you spent about half an hour as a single cell.
• There is about one trillion bacteria on each of your feet.
• Your body gives off enough heat in 30 minutes to bring half a gallon of water to a boil.
• The enamel in your teeth is the hardest substance in your body.
• Your teeth start developing (in your gums) 6 months before you are born.
• When you are looking at someone you love, your pupils dilate, they do the same when you are looking at someone you hate.
• Blondes have more hair than dark-haired people.

Someone in MI-5 (Military intelligence-internal) got the idea of printing escape maps on silk. It's durable, can be scrunched-up into tiny wads, and unfolded as many times as needed, and makes no noise whatsoever. At that time, there was only one manufacturer in Great Britain that had perfected the technology of printing on silk, and that was John Waddington, Ltd. When approached by the government, the firm was only too happy to do its bit for the war effort. By pure coincidence, Waddington was also the U. K. Licensee for the popular American board game, Monopoly.

As it happened, 'games and pastimes' was a category of item qualified for insertion into 'CARE packages', dispatched by the International Red Cross, to prisoners of war. Under the strictest of secrecy, in a securely guarded and inaccessible old workshop on the grounds of Waddington's, a group of sworn-to-secrecy employees began mass-producing escape maps, keyed to each region of Germany or Italy where Allied POW camps were located (Red Cross packages were delivered to prisoners in accordance with that same regional system). When processed, these maps could be folded into such tiny dots that they would actually fit inside a Monopoly playing piece.

As long as they were at it, the clever workmen at Waddington's also managed to add:

1. A playing token, containing a small magnetic compass
2. A two-part metal file that could easily be screwed together
3. Useful amounts of genuine high-denomination German, Italian, and French currency, hidden within the piles of Monopoly money!

British and American air-crews were advised, before taking off on their first mission, how to identify a 'rigged' Monopoly set ----- by means of a tiny red dot, one cleverly rigged to look like an ordinary printing glitch, located in the corner of the Free Parking square! Of the estimated 35,000 Allied POWS who successfully escaped, an estimated one-third were aided in their flight by the rigged Monopoly sets.

Everyone who did so was sworn to secrecy indefinitely, since the British Government might want to use this highly successful ruse in still another, future war.

The story wasn't de-classified until 2007, when the surviving craftsmen from Waddington's, as well as the firm itself, were finally honoured in a public ceremony.

Anyway, it's always nice when you can play that 'Get Out of Jail Free' card!

A: Long ago, dishes and cookware in Europe were made of a dense orange clay called 'pygg'. When people saved coins in jars made of this clay, the jars became known as 'pygg banks.' When an English potter misunderstood the word, he made a bank that resembled a pig. And it caught on.

Q: Did you ever wonder why dimes, quarters and half dollars have notches, while pennies and nickels do not?

A: The US Mint began putting notches on the edges of coins containing gold and silver to discourage holders from shaving off small quantities of the precious metals Dimes, quarters and half dollars are notched because they used to contain silver. Pennies and nickels aren't notched because the metals they contain are not valuable enough to shave..

Q: Why do men's clothes have buttons on the right while women's clothes have buttons on the left?

A: When buttons were invented, they were very expensive and worn primarily by the rich. Because wealthy women were dressed by maids, dressmakers put the buttons on the maid's right. Since most people are right-handed, it is easier to push buttons on the right through holes on the left. And that's where women's buttons have remained since.

Q: Why do X's at the end of a letter signify kisses?

A: In the Middle Ages, when many people were unable to read or write, documents were often signed using an X. Kissing the X represented an oath to fulfill obligations specified in the document. The X and the kiss eventually became synonymous.

Q: Why is shifting responsibility to someone else called 'passing the buck'?

A: In card games, it was once customary to pass an item, called a buck, from player to player to indicate whose turn it was to deal. If a player did not wish to assume the responsibility, he would 'pass the buck' to the next player.

Q: Why do people clink their glasses before drinking a toast?

A: It used to be common for someone to try to kill an enemy by offering him a poisoned drink. To prove to a guest that a drink was safe, it became customary for a guest to pour a small amount of his drink into the glass of the host. Both men would drink it simultaneously. When a guest trusted his host, he would then just touch or clink the host's glass with his own.

Q: Why are people in the public eye said to be 'in the limelight'?

A: Invented in 1825, limelight was used in lighthouses and stage lighting by burning a cylinder of lime which produced a brilliant light. In the theatre, performers on stage 'in the limelight' were seen by the audience to be the center of attention.

Q: Why do ships and aircraft in trouble use 'mayday' as their call for help?

A: This comes from the French word m'aidez -meaning 'help me' -- and is pronounced 'mayday,'

Q: Why is someone who is feeling great 'on cloud nine'?

A: Types of clouds are numbered according to the altitudes they attain, with nine being the highest cloud If someone is said to be on cloud nine, that person is floating well above worldly cares..

Q: Why are zero scores in tennis called 'love'?

A: In France , where tennis first became popular, a big, round zero on scoreboard looked like an egg and was called 'l'oeuf,' which is French for 'egg.' When tennis was introduced in the US , Americans pronounced it 'love.'

Q: In golf, where did the term 'Caddie' come from?

A: When Mary, later Queen of Scots, went to France as a young girl (for education & survival), Louis, King of France, learned that she loved the Scot game 'golf.' So he had the first golf course outside of Scotland built for her enjoyment. To make sure she was properly chaperoned (and guarded) while she played, Louis hired cadets from a military school to accompany her. Mary liked this a lot and when she returned to Scotland (not a very good idea in the long run), she took the practice with her. In French, the word cadet is pronounced 'ca-day' and the Scots changed it into 'caddie.'

At the Arch Street Quaker Meeting in Philadelphia, one of the most unusual veterans' ceremonies unfolds at first light every Nov. 10 at what has to be one of the most obscure of tourist sites.

A handful of U.S. Marines and Marine Reserve Officers' Training Corps cadets from the nearby University of Pennsylvania assemble before an unmarked marble slab rising out of the grass, according to Navy Lt. Cmdr. Andrew J. McNiven. In silence, as they have for nearly 20 years, the young Marines place a wreath before the stone, salute and walk off as quietly as they came.

"Samuel Nicholas is buried here," explained Helen J. File, for 28 years the facilities director at the world's largest Quaker meeting house. "He was the Quaker who organized the Marines."

Nicholas was a wealthy Quaker when president Alexander Hamilton of the Continental Congress commissioned him on Nov. 28 in 1775 as the first Marine officer and, by extension, the first commandant of the Marines, said his great-great-great-great-granddaughter Diana Spies Pope, a medical researcher at a in state.

The problem then was that his desire to support independence from England conflicted with the Quaker "peace testimony" against all wars, File said. "They threw Nicholas out when he went to lead the Marines," she said. And when the college ROTC Marines in 1991 asked for permission to hold public ceremonies on Nov. 10, which the corps regards as its founding day, the Quakers refused because there "were strong feelings" against soldiers on the grounds, File said. "So I told [the Marines] to come early and do it quietly," she said, acknowledging that her husband, John, was a 20-year Marine, and both were concerned that there is no recognition of Nicholas in Philadelphia, no statue or guided tours of his home site just around the corner from Independence Hall.

"What's the harm in letting the youngsters come, as long as they're quiet and don't bring guns?" she asked. "When Nicholas died, the Quakers took him back and buried him here. So the truth is that he built the Marines, even if that makes people uncomfortable."

The Samuel Nicholas "stone" lies unmarked in the grass near the far northeastern gate across from the Betsy Ross House.

Even more surprising, and of greater relevance to most bridge players, is that other research has shown that you do not have to start when you're an adolescent to train your hippo - it can be prodded into activity at any age, given the right stimuli. The more complex the stimulus, the greater the challenge, the quicker the rewards are achieved. Many examples are given, from taking up crosswords to learning a new language - and that one is a beaut. Bridge, above all things, is the learning of a new, multi-faceted language, and proof of it's efficacy is the observation that eventually all bridge players die of many ailments, but rarely of demetia-related illness.

And here's another fact: you don't have to be clever to see the benefits. Bridge is not just for intellectuals, but for pretty well anyone who is prepared to make the effort, take the time, and train their hippo to be a good defender against the Alzheimer enemy.

So, if you have never thought of bridge as anything more than an old fuddy-duddy game, think again. There's clubs all over, most have courses at which you can learn a socially orineted, inexpensive yet challenging mental exercise, where you continually improve your performance, and where your hippo will trumpet victory. Well, your memory will improve, anyway.

And for long-term players: your memory has to be good - so remember the time you started learning, and treat newcomers with kindness and encouragement. They too want a happy hippo.

The US standard railroad gauge (distance between the rails) is 4 feet, 8.5 inches. That's an exceedingly odd number. Why was that gauge used? Because that's the way they built them in England, and English expatriates built the US Railroads.

Why did the English build them like that? Because the first rail lines were built by the same people who built the pre-railroad tramways, and that's the gauge they used.

Why did 'they' use that gauge then? Because the people who built the tramways used the same jigs and tools that they used for building wagons, which used that wheel spacing. Okay! Why did the wagons have that particular odd wheel spacing?

Well, if they tried to use any other spacing, the wagon wheels would break on some of the old, long distance roads in England, because that's the spacing of the wheel ruts.

So who built those old rutted roads? Imperial Rome built the first long distance roads in Europe (and England) for their legions. The roads have been used ever since.

And the ruts in the roads? Roman war chariots formed the initial ruts, which everyone else had to match for fear of destroying their wagon wheels.

Since the chariots were made for Imperial Rome, they were all alike in the matter of wheel spacing. The United States standard railroad gauge of 4 feet, 8.5 inches is derived from the original specifications for an Imperial Roman war chariot.

And bureaucracies live forever. So the next time you are handed a specification and wonder what horse's arse came up with it, you may be exactly right, because the Imperial Roman army chariots were made just wide enough to accommodate the back ends of two war horses.

Now the twist to the story

When you see a Space Shuttle sitting on its launch pad, there are two big booster rockets attached to the sides of the main fuel tank. These are solid rocket boosters, or SRBs. The SRBs are made by Thiokol at their factory at Utah. The engineers who designed the SRBs would have preferred to make them a bit fatter, but the SRBs had to be shipped by train from the factory to the launch site. The railroad line from the factory happens to run through a tunnel in the mountains. The SRBs had to fit through that tunnel. The tunnel is slightly wider than the railroad track, and the railroad track, as you now know, is about as wide as two horses' behinds.

So, a major Space Shuttle design feature of what is arguably the world's most advanced transportation system was determined over two thousand years ago by the width of a horse's arse ... and you thought being a HORSE'S ARSE wasn't important!

So we were amazed, and hugely intrigued, by a revelatory piece that appeared recently on the ever-fascinating website Mental Floss. The article, entitled "World War II Weapon: Monopoly With Real Money", recounts the following amazing story:

Starting in 1941, increasing numbers of British airmen found themselves as the involuntary guests of the Third Reich, and the Crown was casting about for ways and means to facilitate their escape. Now obviously, one of the most helpful aids to that end is a useful, accurate map, one showing not only where-stuff-was, but also showing the locations of "safe houses" a POW on-the-lam could go to for food and shelter.

Paper maps had real drawbacks: they make a lot of noise when you open and fold them, they wear-out rapidly, and if they get wet, they turn into mush. Someone i n the MI-5 branch (one hopes it was the youthful incarnation of "Q"!), got the idea of printing escape maps on silk. It's durable, can be scrunched-up into tiny wads and unfolded as many times as needed, and makes no noise whatever.

At that time, there was only one manufacturer in Great Britain that had perfected the technology of printing on silk, and that was John Waddington, Ltd. When approached by HM Government, the firm was only too happy to do its bit for the war effort.

By pure coincidence, Waddington's was also the U.K. licensee for the popular American board game, Monopoly. As it happened, " games and pastimes" was a category of item qualified for insertion into "CARE packages" dispatched by the International Red Cross to prisoners of war of all belligerents.

Under strictest secrecy, in a securely guarded and inaccessible old workshop on the grounds of Waddington's, a group of sworn-to-secrecy employees began mass-producing escape maps, keyed to each region of Germany or Italy where Allied POW camps were located (Red Cross packages were delivered to prisoners in accordance with that same regional system). When processed, these maps could be folded into such tiny dots that they would actually fit inside a Monopoly playing piece

As long as they were at it, the clever workmen at Waddington's also managed to add:

A playing token containing a small magnetic compass A two-part metal file that could easily be screwed together Useful amounts of genuine high-denomination German, Italian and French currency hidden within the piles of Monopoly money! British and American air crews were advised, before taking off on their first missions, on how to identify a "rigged" Monopoly set - by means of a tiny red dot, one cleverly rigged to look like an ordinary printing glitch, located in the corner of the Free Parking square! Of the estimated 35,000 Allied POWS who successfully escaped, perhaps one-third were aided in their flight by the rigged Monopoly sets. Everyone who did so was sworn to secrecy indefinitely - HM Government might wan t to use this highly successful ruse in another, future war.

The story wasn't declassified until 2007, when the surviving craftsmen from Waddington's, as well as the firm itself, were finally honored in a public ceremony.

At any rate, it's always nice when you can play that "Get Out of Jail Free" card!