There is still quite a lot of life out there, but it is mostly very small. According to a wildlife census by an ecologist at the University of Illinois named V. E. Shelford, a typical ten-square-mile block of eastern American forest holds almost 300,000 mammals – 220,000 mice and other small rodents, 63,500 squirrels and chipmunks, 470 deer, 30 foxes, and 5 black bears.
Some of these words deserve to be better known. Take velleity, which describes a mild desire, a wish or urge too slight to lead to action. Doesn’t that seem a useful term? Or how about sluibbergegullion, a seventeenth-century word signifying a worthless or slovenly fellow? Or ugsome, a late medieval word meaning loathsome or disgusting.
Or ugsome, a late medieval word meaning loathsome or disgusting? It has lasted half a millennium in English, was a common synonym for horrid until well into the last century, and can still be found tucked away forgotten at the back of most unabridged dictionaries. Isn’t it a shame to let it slip away?
Before this dumping was halted in the 1990s, the United States had dumped many hundreds of thousands of drums into about fifty ocean sites – almost fifty thousand of them in the Fallarones alone.
In shame, I sipped my tea and nibbled at my biscuit. I had never had tea with milk in it before or a biscuit of such rocklike cheerlessness. It tasted like something you would give a budgie to strengthen its beak.
Cressbrook Mill was operated mostly by orphans who were treated worse than abysmally.
Among the other enthusiastic dumpers were Russia, China, Japan and nearly all the nations of Europe.
Steller’s sea cow, named after the German naturalist Georg Steller, who discovered a small community of them living on Bering Island, off the coat of Siberia, in 1741. Hunted mercilessly by humans, within thirty years of its discovery by Steller this remarkable species was extinct.
We are each so atomically numerous and so vigorously recycled at death that a significant number of our atoms – up to a billion for each of us, it has been suggested – probably once belonged to Shakespeare.
What we do have for Shakespeare are his plays – all of them but one or two – thanks in very large part to the efforts of his colleagues Henry Condell and John Heminges, who put together a more or less complete volume of his work after his death – the justly revered First Folio.
Although nothing is known about the origin of the painting or where it was for much of the time before it came into the Chandos family in 1747, it has been said for a long time to be of William Shakespeare.
One of the more striking features of Sweden and Norway is how much public drunkenness there is. I mean here you have two countries where you cannot buy a beer without taking out a bank loan, where successive governments have done everything in their power to make drinking not worth the cost and effort, and yet everywhere you go you see grossly intoxicated people – in stations, on park benches, in shopping centres. I don’t begin to understand it.
Peale was a lover of birds, and yet did not hesitate to kill them in large numbers for no better reason than that it interested him to do so.
In 1856, shortly before his death, Lord Ellesmere gave the painting to the new National Portrait Gallery in London as its founding work. As the gallery’s first acquisition, it has a certain sentimental prestige, but almost at once its authenticity was doubted.
Albert Snyder’s mortal fall was outlined. The story had begun ten years earlier when Snyder, the lonely, balding art editor of Motor Boating magazine, had developed an infatuation with an office secretary of high spirits and light intellect named Ruth Brown.
The best ones go in for a kind of gloriously silly redundancy toward the end, as with Sir Humphrey Dodington Benedict Sherston Sherston-Baker and the truly unbeatable Leone Sextus Denys Oswolf Fraduati Tollemache-Tollemache-de Orellana-Plantagenet-Tollemache-Tollemache, a British army major who died in World War I. The.
Within the animal kingdom only humans and guinea pigs are unable to synthesize vitamin C in their own bodies.
Dr. Tarnya Cooper, curator of sixteenth-century portraits at the gallery, told me one day when I set off to find out what we could know and reasonably assume about the most venerated figure of the English language.
Curiously, the one service room not named for the products it contains is dairy. The name derives from an Old French word, dey, meaning maiden. A dairy, in other words, was the room where the milkmaids were to be found, from which we might reasonably deduce that an Old Frenchman was more interested in finding the maid than the milk.
It had never once occurred to me in thirty-six years of living that anyone listened to Mexican music for pleasure. Yet here there were a dozen stations blaring it out. After each song, a disc jockey would come on and jabber for a minute or two in Spanish in the tone of a man who has just had his nuts slammed in a drawer.