Among skilled craftsmen – a category that included John Shakespeare – some 60 percent could read, a clearly respectable proportion.
It isn’t easy being an organism. In the whole universe, as far as we yet know, there is only one place, an inconspicuous outpost of the Milky Way called Earth, that will sustain you, and even it can be pretty grudging.
It was always Christmas at my grandparents’ house, or Thanksgiving, or the Fourth of July, or somebody’s birthday. There was always happiness there.
It’s a strange thing because nobody can say exactly where the Scottish Highlands begin and end, but there comes a moment when the world fills with clean, sparkling air and the mountains take on a kind of purply glory and you know you are there. That’s what I was looking.
A single kilogram of CFCs can capture and annihilate 70,000 kilograms of atmospheric ozone.
More recently, during a debate in the House of Lords in 1978 one of the members said: “If there is a more hideous language on the face of the earth than the American form of English, I should like to know what it is.
By 1927, the average state was spending eight times more on enforcing fish and game laws than it spent on Prohibition.
I had no idea that the Scottish so loathed the English that their favorite team in the world is whichever one is presently playing England.
If you count proper nouns, the word in English with the most varied spellings is air with a remarkable thirty-eight: Aire, ayr, heir, e’er, ere, and so on.
Jefferson, incidentally, was also a great adventurer with foods. Among his many other accomplishments, he was the first person in America to slice potatoes lengthwise and fry them. So as well as being the author of the Declaration of Independence, he was also the father of the American French fry.
To avoid arousal more generally, women were instructed to get plenty of fresh air, avoid stimulating pastimes like reading and card games, and above all never to use their brains more than was strictly necessary.
It is an extraordinary fact but a true one that there are thousands of men in Britain who will never need Viagra as long as steam trains are in operation.
We have now reached a level in which many people are not merely unacquainted with the fundamentals of punctuation, but don’t evidently realize that there are fundamentals.
Did all that really just happen or have I wandered into some kind of Dada exhibition?
As Siddhartha Mukherjee observed in The Gene: An Intimate History, humans don’t actually reproduce at all.8 Geckos reproduce; we recombine.
Each time you fly from North America to Australia, and without anyone asking how you feel about it, a day is taken away from you when you cross the international dateline.
All Australians are required by law to vote in federal elections, including residents of the Northern Territory.
Dressing impractically is a way of showing that one doesn’t have to do physical work.
At a minimum the name should puzzle foreigners – this is a basic requirement of most British institutions – and ideally it should excite long and inconclusive debate, defy all logical explanation, and evoke images that border on the surreal. Among.
We have been gulled by the ease of air travel and other forms of communication into thinking that the world is not all that big, but at ground level, where researchers must work, it is actually enormous.