Happy HumpDay!
Happy HumpDay! Do you love learning something new each week? Maybe your friends and family would like to learn some cool stuff too?! If you know someone who has a thirst for useless but entertaining knowledge, feel free to forward this email to them and have them subscribe!!!! As always, check out the HumpDay website at HumpDayNewsletter.com and follow the official HumpDay Instagram!
Around The House
Stuck inside all day? Staring out the window just to pass the time? Well, looking out the window may be a little different once you learn the true meaning of the word “Window”. The word window is derived from the Old English word “eyethril” made up of two parts “eye” meaning the same as it means today, and “thril” meaning “hole” or “opening”. The original meaning of the word was “eye hole”. Interestingly, the modern word “nostril” is based a combination of “nose” and “thril” and means “nose hole”. Later, the word for window transformed into the Middle English word “vindagua” from the words “vindr” meaning wind, and “auga” meaning eye. Windows were called “wind eyes” because they allowed wind to blow through homes and allowed people in the house to see outside. Finally, in the 13th century, the word window replaced its predecessors and became the word for glass covered holes in houses. Next time you find yourself staring out the window, realize that you are seeing the world through your houses’ eyes, and maybe let the wind blow in for a little while, for old times’ sake. Amityville Horror True Story Dear Evan Hansen- Waving Through A Window
Astronomy
With all that is going on in the world, there is a lot of talk on the news about a vaccine that will fix everything and let people watch sports again, but what really is a vaccine? How do they even work? A vaccine is a tool that is used to teach our bodies the simple rule, “Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me”. Although vaccines come in may shapes and forms, they all serve the same basic purpose, to provide our bodies’ immune system with a practice run for fighting viruses. When a virus enters the body, our immune system kicks into action and sends special cells called T cells and B cells to trap the virus and destroy it. This process can take a long time and when the virus isn’t contained quickly, it can spread throughout the body and cause an incredible amount of damage. Fortunately, after the body destroys a virus once, the immune system remembers how to destroy it and can respond quickly the next time it sees the virus. Vaccines contain samples of viruses that have been weakened or killed. When they are injected into our bodies, our immune system gets to work destroying the virus and remembering how to address it for next time. Since the virus is dead or weakened, it can’t spread through the rest of the body and do damage like the full-strength virus would. Vaccines teach our bodies how to destroy viruses without putting us in harms way. Thanks to vaccines, our bodies are ready to destroy viruses as soon as they up. Since the first one was invented in 1760, vaccines have saved millions of lives. Without them, the world would be a much scarier place full of Whooping Cough, Polio, and the scariest of all, Diphtheria (whatever that is). Osmosis Jones Trailer How Vaccines Are Made
History
What do bears, and the evil Lord Voldemort have in common? Well... not very much. One is a ferocious and dangerous creature, and the other is a bear. The Harry Potter villain and bears do have one very unique thing in common… you should never say their name. In the Harry Potter books, Lord Voldemort is most commonly referred to as “He who shall not be named” because it is considered dangerous to say his name out loud. In the later books, it is revealed that saying the name “Voldemort” acts like a GPS signal and lets the bad guys know a person’s location. For this reason, people avoided saying Lord Voldemort’s name in order to avoid having him and his goons show up and attack them. Pagan people in ancient Europe had a similar fear of being located and hunted but rather than fearing a dark wizard, they were afraid of bears. According to pagan tradition, saying a bear’s name out loud would cause a wild bear to learn your location, find you, and attack you. To avoid a sudden attack from a 500lb bear, ancient pagans never used their word for bear, instead they created a replacement word. In fact, the word “bear” isn’t even the real name for the giant furry animals that we know as bears. A euphemism is a phrase used to replace a word that goes unsaid. For instance, “pushing up daisies” is a euphemism for dying. To avoid being attacked, the ancient pagans created different words to refer to bears. Germans called them “braune”, the Swedish called them “bruna”, and the Dutch call them “Bruine”. All of these variations translate to “the brown one” in their respective languages. By referring to bears as “the brown ones” rather than their real names, ancient Europeans could avoid having bears sneak up on them. Today, we do not know what the real name for bears was in ancient Europe. The true name has been lost to history. To this day, we refer to bears as the “the brown one” because of superstitions from thousands of years ago. That’s all fine and well, but when you realize that polar bears are also called “the brown ones” the logic starts to fall apart.
This Week in History
On this week in 1839, the abbreviated word “Ok” was first used in The Boston Morning Post. “Ok” was used as an abbreviation for the phrase “oll korrect”, which was early 19th century slang for “all correct”. The abbreviation of a slang word eventually became the preferred way of saying that everything was alright. After the explosion of the word “Ok”, other two letter abbreviations came into fashion including “KY” (“know yuse”), “OW” (“oll wright”), and “KG” (“know go”).
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