Mertcan Bulak
@MBulak
1183 okur puanı
Ağustos 2020 tarihinde katıldı
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In Victorian England seashells were popular. Really popular. Popular to an extent that just looks weird to us. Victorians collected seashells, painted seashells and made things out of seashells.
These seashells had to be supplied by somebody. One man who cashed in on this importing business was Marcus Samuel, who set up shop in Houndsditch in east London and became a shell merchant. It was therefore perfectly natural that he should call his company Shell.
Marcus Samuel brought his son (also called Marcus) into the family business and sent him off to Japan to buy gaudy trifles. It was while on this trip that Marcus Samuel Junior realised that there might just possibly be a little bit of potential profit in, of all things, oil.
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Why do guns have girls’ names? It’s a silly question because gun itself is a girl’s name. So far as anybody can tell (and theories vary), the very first gun in history was a cannon in Windsor Castle. A document from the early fourteenth century mentions Una magna balista de cornu quae vocatur Domina Gunilda , which means ‘a large cannon from Cornwall which is called Queen Gunhilda’. Gunhilda is a girl’s name and the usual shortening of Gunhilda is Gunna . So far as etymology can tell, every gun in the English - speaking world is named after that one gunna in Windsor Castle: the Queen Gunhilda.
By the outbreak of war in 1914, Russia was fighting on the Allied side, so Swinton decided that a good cover story for the new weapons would be to say on all documents that they were Water Carriers for Russia , but when Swinton told Churchill about his ruse Churchill burst out laughing. Churchill pointed out that Water Carriers would be abbreviated to WCs and that people would think that they were manufacturing lavatories. So Swinton had a quick think and suggested changing the name to Water Tanks for Russia . Churchill could find no objection to this codename, and it stuck. Well, it didn’t all stick. Water Tanks for Russia was a bit cumbersome, so water got dropped. Then it turned out that the tanks weren’t going to Russia at all. They were going to the trenches on the Western Front, so Russia got dropped too. And that’s why tanks are called tanks .
It wasn’t until the 1890s that James Murray discovered that his star contributor, the man on whom his dictionary was based, was an insane murderer. When Murray did find out, he immediately set off to visit Minor, and the two became firm friends. Murray tried to give Minor emotional support but it didn’t really work, as Minor, in 1902, deliberately sliced off his own penis.
The word dictionary was invented by an Englishman called John of Garland in 1220. But it wasn’t what we would call a dictionary; he had merely written a book to help you with your Latin diction .