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: Interesting History... Did you Know...  ( 27150 )
Soniaslut
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« #75 : February 06, 2021, 05:03:34 AM »

In Ancient Greece the word "Idiot" had a very different meaning than it does today. And the word has undergone several variations in meaning over time.
A little potted history of "idiot"...

The word "idiot" comes from the Greek noun idiōtēs, 'a private person, individual', 'a private citizen' (as opposed to an official), 'a common man', 'a person lacking professional skill or layman'.
It was adopted into Latin by the Romans and "idiota" then took on the meaning of  'uneducated', 'ignorant', 'common', and in Late Latin came to mean 'crude, illiterate, ignorant'.
In French, it kept the meaning of 'illiterate', 'ignorant', but  'stupid' was added as a defenition in the 13th century.
In English, the inference to 'mentally deficient' was attached in the 14th century.

Many political commentators, starting as early as 1856, have interpreted the word "idiot" as reflecting the Ancient Athenians' attitudes to civic participation and private life, combining the ancient meaning of 'private citizen' with the modern meaning 'fool' to conclude that the Greeks used the word to say that it is selfish and foolish not to participate in public life. But this is not how the Greeks used the word though it is certainly true that the Greeks valued civic participation and criticized non-participation.

Thucydides quotes Pericles' Funeral Oration as saying :
"We regard him who takes no part in these public duties not as unambitious but as useless".

But neither he nor any other ancient author uses the word "idiot" to describe anyone that failed to participate in public life.
In fact not in any derogatory sense at all. Its most common use was simply a private citizen or amateur as opposed to a government official, professional, or expert.
The derogatory meaning  came centuries later, and was completely unrelated to it's original political meaning.

Several authors have used "idiot" characters in novels, plays and poetry.
Very often these characters are used as an allegory to highlight something else.
A few examples of this can be found in William Faulkner's  'The Sound and the Fury', Daphne du Maurier's  'Rebecca' and William Wordsworth's 'The Idiot Boy'.

In Fyodor Dostoevsky's novel  'The Idiot'.  the title refers to the central character Prince Myshkin, a man whose innocence, kindness and humility, combined with his occasional epileptic symptoms, cause many in the corrupt, egoistic culture around him to mistakenly assume that he lacks intelligence.
In 'The Antichrist',  Friedrich Nietzsche applies the word 'idiot' to Jesus in a comparable fashion, almost certainly in an allusion to Dostoevsky's use of the word : "One has to regret that no Dostoevsky lived in the neighbourhood of this most interesting décadent; I mean someone who could feel the thrilling fascination of such a combination of the sublime, the sick and the childish".

According to 19th and early 20th century medicine and psychology, an "idiot" was a person with a very profound intellectual disability.
In the early 1900s, Dr. Henry H. Goddard proposed a classification system for intellectual disability based on the Binet-Simon concept of mental age. Whereby individuals with the lowest mental age level (less than three years) were identified as idiots; imbeciles had a mental age of three to seven years, and morons had a mental age of seven to ten years.
The term "idiot" was used to refer to people having an IQ below 30.
IQ, or intelligence quotient, was originally determined by dividing a person's mental age, as determined by standardized tests, by their actual age.
This concept of mental age has fallen into disfavor  in modern times and IQ is now determined on the basis of statistical distributions.

Currently, when defining the word idiot, The Oxford English Dictionary lists that an idiot is:
-most commonly “a person without learning; an ignorant, uneducated; a simple or ordinary person”
-less commonly “a person without professional training or skill”
-in psychiatry “A person so profoundly disabled in mental function or intellect as to be incapable of ordinary acts of reasoning or rational conduct”.
The dictionary also notes that sometimes idiots are people that maintain low intelligence to amuse others by speaking in a stupid way like jesters or fools.

So, as you can see, the word "idiot" has undergone an almost complete reversal in meaning over time.

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« #76 : February 06, 2021, 08:15:52 AM »

A best-seller was written by a nine-year-old

In 1890, nine-year-old Daisy Ashford wrote a novel and forgot all about it. She gave up writing fiction for good at the age of 13. Some 28 years later, upon going through her mother’s house after she had died, Daisy and her sisters found the pencilled manuscript in a drawer.
They showed it to a friend, who passed it on to an acquaintance who worked in publishing, and so the book – The Young Visiters – came out in 1919 with a preface by Peter Pan author JM Barrie, who many people wrongly believed was the book’s author.

The novel was praised for its clever plotting and keen observation of Victorian manners, and went into several editions.
The author, by now Mrs James Devlin, bought a farm with her earnings, commenting, “I like fresh air and royalty cheques”.



The Young Visiters is a comic masterpiece that has delighted generations of readers since it was first published in 1919. A classic story of life and love in later Victorian England as seen from the nursery window.

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« #77 : February 06, 2021, 08:21:07 AM »

A Parisian was given a small fine for ‘getting medieval’ on his wife

In the 1930s, Paris baker Henri Littière had a major marital problem: his wife was desperate to be faithful, but just couldn’t help herself. She had three affairs in as many months before he decided that something must be done.
He visited a museum and came out with sketches of medieval chastity belts.



These he gave to a man who made false arms and legs for veterans of the First World War, asking him to knock him up a secure means of keeping Mme Littière from consummating her infidelities.

He brought his wife to the final fitting, and she pronounced herself satisfied with the comfort of the velvet-covered steel contraption and joked with her husband that he mustn’t lose the key.

Some time later, however, one of her former lovers came to visit. One thing led to another and he saw the apparatus she was wearing.
He went straight to the police, and Mr Littière appeared in court on 21 January 1934 on charges of cruelty.
Although Mrs Littière testified that she found it impossible to be faithful, the judge gave the hapless baker a three-month suspended sentence and a 50-franc fine.

Soniaslut
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« #78 : February 06, 2021, 09:00:28 AM »


Vaughan
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« #79 : February 07, 2021, 04:25:54 PM »

Polish Catholic midwife Stanisława Leszczyńska delivered 3,000 babies at the Auschwitz concentration camp during the Holocaust in occupied Poland.



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Vaughan
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« #80 : February 07, 2021, 04:26:59 PM »

In World War II, British soldiers got a ration of three sheets of toilet paper a day. Americans got 22.



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« #81 : February 13, 2021, 08:55:35 AM »




Vaughan
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« #82 : February 15, 2021, 03:21:03 PM »



Her kisses left something to be desired ... mmm ... the rest of her.
JessiCapri
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« #83 : February 16, 2021, 09:27:15 PM »



He was both a freedom fighting abolitionist AND a best selling writer, speaker, and journalist. ⁣

Three years ago when we decided to relaunch his newspaper, The North Star, with the blessing of his family, his great great great grandson @kbmorrisjr told me something that I’ve held with me. It’s painful. ⁣

He told me that some of the most consistent and fierce opposition of Douglass didn’t come from evil white people, but of Black folk, who hated and opposed him and his work at damn near every step of his life. ⁣

That stung. But it also helped me understand the patterns of history. ⁣

Fighting oppression - I mean really fighting it - will always be complex - but at least we have models like Frederick Douglass to follow.


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« #84 : February 17, 2021, 10:35:09 AM »

The shortest war in history was the Anglo-Zanzibar War. It lasted just 38 minutes.



The Anglo-Zanzibar War was a military conflict fought between the United Kingdom and the Zanzibar Sultanate on 27 August 1896. The conflict lasted between 38 and 45 minutes, marking it as the shortest recorded war in history.
End date: 27 August 1896
Combatants: United Kingdom

The immediate cause of the war was the death of the pro-British Sultan Hamad bin Thuwaini on 25 August 1896 and the subsequent succession of Sultan Khalid bin Barghash. The British authorities preferred Hamud bin Muhammed, who was more favourable to British interests, as sultan. In accordance with a treaty signed in 1886, a condition for accession to the sultanate was that the candidate obtain the permission of the British consul, and Khalid had not fulfilled this requirement. The British considered this a casus belli and sent an ultimatum to Khalid demanding that he order his forces to stand down and leave the palace. In response, Khalid called up his palace guard and barricaded himself inside the palace.
A bombardment, opened at 09:02, set the palace on fire and disabled the defending artillery. A small naval action took place, with the British sinking the Zanzibari royal yacht HHS Glasgow and two smaller vessels. Some shots were also fired ineffectually at the pro-British Zanzibari troops as they approached the palace. The flag at the palace was shot down and fire ceased at 09:46.

The sultan's forces sustained roughly 500 casualties, while only one British sailor was injured. Sultan Khalid received asylum in the German consulate before escaping to German East Africa (in the mainland part of present Tanzania). The British quickly placed Sultan Hamud in power at the head of a puppet government. The war marked the end of the Zanzibar Sultanate as a sovereign state and the start of a period of heavy British influence.

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« #85 : February 17, 2021, 10:40:25 AM »

Before there were alarm clocks, there were "knockers-up", who were hired to shoot dried peas from a blow gun at people's windows in order to wake them up in the morning.


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« #86 : February 20, 2021, 03:35:17 PM »


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« #87 : February 21, 2021, 07:27:43 AM »

In 1820 an entire town held a trial against tomatoes.

 

The tangy red fruit was once considered ~evil~ (and poisonous) by much of the world! To dispel the rumours that tomatoes were lethal, Robert Gibbon Johnson ate a basket full of them in front of a crowd in Salem, New Jersey, who were astonished to see that he hadn’t keeled over from one bite.

And while we're on the subject of tomatoes, ketchup was once actually sold as medicine.



In the 1830s, a physician called Dr. John Cooke Bennett claimed that tomatoes could be used to treat diarrhoea and indigestion – his tomato ketchup recipe was even concentrated into pill form and sold as medicine!

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« #88 : February 26, 2021, 03:03:01 PM »


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« #89 : March 12, 2021, 08:24:15 PM »


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