Back about 2000 years ago, the Greek scientists were becoming fascinated with magnetism when they stumbled upon lodestones, a naturally occurring magnet.

Lodestone is a piece of magnetite, an iron oxide, which produces a strong magnetic field. Now, to be clear, not all magnetite is magnetic (it won’t stick to your fridge by itself) but being a type of iron, all magnetite is attracted to a magnet (technical word: it’s ferrimagnetic).

The creation of a lodestone (magnetized magnetite) is still a bit of a mystery, but the leading hypothesis is that the magnetic properties were picked up after being struck by lightning. It’s sort of a geological superhero origin story. This theory is supported by the fact that a lodestone has never been found very far from earth’s surface.

The word magnet originates from Magnesia, which was a region of Greece where these original lodestones were popping up.

Magnetite lodestones are one of only two minerals that have been found to be naturally magnetized on earth. Which begs the question; how do the real estate agents and plumbers manage to get their hands on so many lodestones?

Most of the magnets we encounter on a daily basis have been artificially magnetized. You can start with any ferromagnetic material. (most commonly ferrite, a ceramic compound containing iron oxides) The simplest way to turn that into a magnet would be to rub it against something that is already magnetized in the same direction many times. (it’s sort of like you are “combing” the electrons)

To manufacture the strongest magnets, the material must be heated above the Curie temperature, which varies depending on the material, putting it into a receptive state. It’s then subjected to a strong electromagnetic field. As it cools, the magnetism remains in the material. If it’s ever re-heated past that Curie temperature again, it could lose it’s magnetic strength. I learned this the hard way when trying to use a hot glue gun on rare-earth magnets.

Now, this is just the tip of the iceberg for the fascinating science behind magnets. There is a lot to think about next time you go to clip up your grocery list.

• Source: Magnet – Wikipedia
• Good Book: Magnetic Magic – from Klutz Press, I had this book as a kid and loved it. Comes with magnets and a steel book cover to keep them on.

If you’ve been looking for love in all the wrong places, try your local tennis game. Event the most inexperienced player will have no trouble finding love on the court.

In tennis scoring, love means zero. This is believed to come from the French word l’oeuf, for egg. The egg shape signifies a round zero, just as they say “goose-egg” in American baseball.

In the English game of cricket, a batsman can be said to be “out for a duck”, which came from the idea of a duck’s egg referring to a zero score.

• Source: Lock, Stock & Barrel! Familiar Sayings and Their Meanings – Book available on Amazon

Be mindful, world travelers, when you order a tall glass of cool lemonade. It can mean different things in different parts of the world.

It all started with limonade in France. It was simply water with some pure lemon juice added for a spritz of flavour. In french the addition of -ade adds action or process to a noun. When you’re using something that blocks, it is a blockade. So using lemons in your drink naturally made it lemonade.

However, as the word got nabbed by the English, it was solely meant as the drink, such that the -ade suffix now refers to any carbonated soda beverage in the UK. They have lemonade, limeade, orangeade, or other-ades depending on the flavour. In England, Australia, and a few more countries lemonade could refer to any sort of lemon-lime soda similar to Sprite or 7-Up brands.

The American style lemonade, which is a mix of water, lemon juice, and a whole lot of sugar may be called cloudy lemonade in Europe, but it would be very difficult to find in a store. In India and Pakistan (where fruit punch originated) lemonade would be called nimbu paani, but it might also add some salt or ginger to the ingredients.

Originally, pink lemonade was a drink of Native Americans made from red sumac berries and sweetened with maple sugar. However, due to the cost-cutting of manufacturing, pink lemonade has devolved to be regular lemonade with the addition of red food colouring… which as we learned recently, is likely ground-up beetles.

But you know what they say; When life gives you lemonade… you’re pretty much done for the day.

• Source: Lemonade – Wikipedia

I’m always interested in how words evolve over time. Nowadays we have the dictionary to settle all disputes about what’s proper or not, but the whole idea of the printed word is relatively new.

As languages were created and shared through speaking, much like the telephone game, when the word was finally written down at the end of the line it may have changed considerably.

Take, for example, the lowly green pea. Originally, it was not a pea, but a pease. Somewhere along the line somebody heard that, and decided that pease was meant as the plural of pea. In fact, the proper plural of pease would have been peasen.

Much like an ox and a group of oxen. Just think, we could have been plowing our fields with an ock, or a group of ocks.

The cherry had a similar amputation of the s, but in French, it’s still known as “une cerise”.

It can also go the other way, when the plural of a word becomes more popular than the original. Primates (as in gorillas) was originally a group of primas, but we decided to reverse engineer the word, dropping the s, to create primate. The same thing happened with syringe (originally a syrinx), termite (termes), and phase (phasis).

Other times, new words are born out of mumbling. Your uncle was one time your nuncle, but “a nuncle” turned into “an uncle”. A newt began as an ewte.

The lesson to be gained here is to not talk with a mouthful of peasen.

• Source: “The Dord, The Diglot, and an Avacado Or Two” – a book about word origins available at Amazon.com

For the first fact of Christmas, I bring you a partridge in a pear tree. That’s how the song goes, but it seems that the pear tree shouldn’t actually be there. Partridges are a bird rarely seen in trees, and a pear tree wouldn’t be a great gift in the middle of winter, being completely barren of leaves or fruit.

The whole thing is most likely a language misunderstanding. The song of the Twelve Days of Christmas seems to be of French origin. A partridge, in french, is une perdrix. Une perdrix – a pear tree. An easy mistake for an anglophone.

So let’s talk partridges. Actually, the french perdrix has its origins in Greek mythology. A man named Perdix was a young innovative inventor. For example, he was walking along the beach and saw a spine of a fish. Making similar notches in a piece of iron led to the invention of the saw. (or so the myth goes) Daedalus, Perdix’s teacher, was so jealous one day he took the opportunity to shove Perdix off a tall tower. As he fell, the gods took mercy on the ingenious Perdix and turned him into a bird. But, after such a traumatic experience, a bird that was afraid of heights and lived its life on the ground. Such is the story of the first partridge. One genus of partridges is indeed named Perdix, which contains the common Grey Partridge of North America.

Partridges are smaller than pheasants, and larger than quails. Varieties are found in most all parts of the world, as they have been introduced to new regions as a tasty treat. They themselves, being ground dwellers, dine on seeds, vegetation, and insects. They have strong beaks for digging up those tasty morsels.

In prehistoric times, partridges were a popular dish for Neanderthals and Cro-Magnum humans going back at least 35,000 years.

Happy Christmas to you all, and watch for tomorrow’s article in the Twelve Facts of Christmas.

• Source: Perdix on Wikipedia

Unfortunately wisdom teeth are on my mind these days, as I’ve got one being a pain in the… jaw. I’m all for the wisdom part though.

These molars, usually four, at the very back of the mouth come in at the age of 17 to 25. The origin of the wisdom moniker may come from the Dutch, where they are called verstandskies, which would literally translate to wisdomtooth. However, verstand may have been intended to mean “standing far away”, as in, in the far back of the mouth.

Turkish people call them the 20th Year Tooth, while Spanish refers to them as the Molars of Judgement (as 18 is the age at which the law applies).

In Japan they are Oyashirazu, literally meaning “unknown to the parents”. Apparently, children have moved away from home by the time these teeth come in.

In Thailand they call it the huddling tooth, for it’s pesky reputation for crowding your other teeth. It’s for that reason that many people have had their wisdom teeth removed. Many dentists believe in preemptively extracting wisdom teeth whether or not problems occur while others prefer a wait-and-see approach as surgery can have side effects.

The most unique term comes from Korea, where they are called Sa-rang-nee, which means love teeth. It refers to the pain of a first love, commonly experienced around that age.

Turns out that your wisdom teeth may in fact lead to wisdom in the truest sense. In 2008 Japanese researchers found that stem cells can be extracted from extracted wisdom teeth. That’s pretty good news, as it’s a source for these scientifically important cells that’s not bogged down in controversy.

• Source: Wikipedia: Wisdom Tooth

Imagine you were a visiting anthropologist from a different planet, on assignment to “live among the apes”. From the fresh outside perspective, many things about us would be fascinating. Our language, the multitude of sounds that emanate from our little naked-monkey heads, is rather amazing if you stop to think about it. From the corner of Hong Kong to the Scottish highlands, it seems an endless variety.

The meat of our speech is delivered via vowels. Vowels, by definition, are the sounds spoken without any build-up of air pressure. (if you think about a K, we start working on the sound slightly before it is released) As was pointed out to me at a singing workshop I attended, the vowels carry all the emotion in our speech. Comparing the expression of vowel sounds pinpoints the difference between the dramatic Italian tongue and the stuffy British.

As such, there are a lot of ways to bend the vowels to make each dialect unique. For example, Canadians are often characterized as pronouncing “about” like “a-boot”. The difference between the two is the position of the tongue. If you make an “ooo” sound, you can feel your tongue more curved, whereas the lazier “aaa” results in a flat tongue. (Which is likely why it’s the preferred sound by doctors during a check-up) So, if a Canadian actor wants to speak more American, they must learn to keep their tongue forward.

A pure vowel, one that sounds the same at the beginning as it does at the end, is called a monophthong. (mono = one, phthong = sound, pronounced mono-f-thong) Italian features a lot of solid monophthongs, which is what makes it such a great language for opera. A nice fat un-changing monophthong can be belted out with a lot of power and emotion.

Next up is the diphthongs, which start with one vowel sound then bend into a second sound. Not all languages have these. Going further along you get triphthongs (three sounds) which are rarer still, but do show up in English a fair bit. Let’s wrap our tongues around some examples.

“Ten”. When I say that, it’s a monophthong. T-eeeeee-n. My tongue stays perfectly still until I cut into the N. However, if my tongue was born in the state of Georgia in the southern USA, things would be different. T-eee-aaaa-n.  At least a diphthong, or more depending on the part of the south. Same language, same word, same letters, but the way the vowel is handled is a world of difference.

Now the word “fire”, which tends to be a triphthong no matter who’s saying it. Faaa-iiii-eeeerrr. Of course the three sounds are blended together smoothly, but the tongue is never at rest.

Getting back to the singing, it’s tough to sing the word “fire” with much emotion. Go on, give it a try. The shifting vowel sound seems to drain away the energy. To make it work, you’d probably want to hang on to a monophthong as long as possible. Faaaaaaaaaaa-i-er!

There you go. Linguistics plus a singing lesson. That would be two things you’ve learned today.

• Source: Vowels on Wikipedia
• And thanks to the workshop with Alan Marriot