Have you ever seen the show “Connections”? It is a s interesting as what you have stated here. I remember much of this list is listed in the show.
Hmmmm...thought that was from boxing.
It could be true. Keep your ear to the ground.., thats how they knew if horses or buffalo or a train was coming in the old days.
I think the history channel could do a series on where sayings and words come from
And after 4 years of Hussein, we’ll look at those as the “good old, old days!!”
Most of this is fantasy, esp. the parts about bathing and cooking. People bathed frequently. Most towns had public bathhouses for that purpose. The avoidance of bathing because it was thought unhealthy is an early modern development—1600s and early 1700s; Louis the XIV’s era. Towns became filthier in the early modern period (late 1500s, 1600s onward). Absolute monarchy grew in that period, warfare became nearly nonstop. Witch persecutions are also early modern more than medieval. “Around 1500” is right between these two epochs.
Almost all the filthy, tyrannical stuff that most people associate with the “Middle Ages” is actually more characteristic of the early modern era than medieval period.
Well, anyone who’d believe all that is probably gullible enough to have voted for....
Look on the bright side. There’s an ample supply of village idiots in D.C. to choose from.
Hey—those folks lived pretty well compared to what Obama has in store for middle- class white folks!
this part I know is untrue. The form of "dead" used in terms like dead ringer and dead reckoning is not the same as dead as in "not alive". Saved by the bell, I believe, is from boxing.
Some of the other things in this may be true, I don't know.
The part about tomatoes certainly is incorrect.
It’s an email. It must be true.
Oh, and the burying alive stuff is pure crap. Look, people knew the difference between dead and alive people. We are the ones who are in such a hurry to harvest organs that we declare people dead based on fancy machines measuring brain waves and starve them to death if it suits our convenience.
They had to go with simple old vital signs. They waited until the heart and lungs stopped. Yes, it can happen that someone’s breathing and pulse slow down to be almost undetectable and then later the person thought dead revives, but it’s very rare, not common as this stupid piece asserts. And if the pulse and breathing really stop, then it doesn’t take too long before the person is irretrievably dead. They didn’t have electric paddles etc. to revive them.
So the idea that half the coffins had nail scratches is pure, simple outrageous BS, that only the credulously naive would believe. This hoary tale has been told around flickering camp fires for millennia, I’m sure, but even those who tell it know it’s crap.
As for digging up bodies, yes, they did that routinely. We think it’s macabre but that’s our problem. We are the ones so screwed and antsy about death that we ship our dead off to professionals to process. In 1500 the family washed and prepared the body for the wake and burial. They could tell whether the person was really dead or not. And they weren’t squeamish about exhuming the bodies after a number of years to reuse the burial space. That’s why they had charnel houses, to house the bones.
We are the ones so messed up about life and death that we can’t tell the difference and thus kill the innocent and excuse the guilty.
They knew death first hand, stared it in the face, and faced it with faith. We are so messed up because we’ve abandoned faith that we are scared to death of death.
We’re the fools.
Tomatoes are a New World food. They wouldn’t have been around in the 1500’s.
Nothing like getting history from E-mails. Virtually all of this is incorrect.
1. Ancient Egypt was inhabited by mummies and they all wrote in hydraulics. They lived in the Sarah Dessert and travelled by Camelot. The climate of the Sarah is such that the inhabitants have to live elsewhere.
2. The Bible is full of interesting caricatures. In the first book of the bible, Guinessis, Adam and Eve were created from an apple tree. One of their children, Cain, asked "am I my brother's son?"
3. Moses led the Hebrew slaves to the Red Sea, where they made unleavened bread which is bread made without any ingredients. Moses went up on Mount Cyanide to get the Ten Commandments. He died before he ever reached Canada.
4. Solomon had three hundred wives and seven hundred porcupines.
5. The Greeks were a highly sculptured people, and without them we wouldn't have history. The Greeks also had myths. A myth is a female moth.
6. Actually, Homer was not written by Homer, but by another man of that name.
7. Socrates was a famous Greek teacher who went around giving people advice. They killed him. Socrates died from an overdose of wedlock. After his death, his career suffered a dramatic decline.
8. In the Olympic games, Greeks ran races, jumped, hurled the biscuits, and threw the java.
9. Eventually, the Romans conquered the Greeks. History calls people Romans because they never stayed in one place for very long.
10. Julius Caesar extinguished himself on the battlefields of Gaul. The Ides of March murdered him because they thought he was going to be made king. Dying, he gasped out: "Tee hee, Brutus."
11. Nero was a cruel tyranny who would torture his subjects by playing the fiddle to them.
12. Joan of Arc was burn to a steak and was canonised by Bernard Shaw. Finally, Magna Carta provided that no man should be hanged twice for the same offence.
13. In midevil times most people were alliterate. The greatest writer of the futile ages was Chaucer, who wrote many poems and verses and also wrote literature.
14. Another story was William Tell, who shot an arrow through an apple while standing on his son's head.
15. It was an age of great inventions and discoveries. Gutenberg invented removable type and the Bible. Another important invention was the circulation of the blood. Sir Walter Raleigh is a historical figure because he invented cigarettes and started smoking.
16. During the Renaissance, history began. Christopher Columbus was a great navigator who discovered America whilst cursing about the Atlantic. His ships were called the Nina, the Pinta, and the Santa Fe.
17. Later, the pilgrims crossed the ocean, and this was called Pilgrim's Progress. The winter of 1620 was a hard one for the settlers. Many people died and many babies were born. Captain John Smith was responsible for all this.
18. One of the causes of the Revolutionary War was the English put tacks in their tea. Also, the colonists would send their parcels through the post without stamps. Finally, the colonists won the war and no longer had to pay for taxis. Delegates from the original 13 states formed the Contented Congress. Franklin discovered electricity by rubbing two cats backwards and declared "A horse divided against itself cannot stand." Franklin died in 1790 and is still dead.
19. Soon the Constitution of the United States was adopted to secure domestic hostility. Under the constitution the people enjoyed the right to keep bare arms.
20. Abraham Lincoln became America's greatest precedent. Lincoln's mother died in infancy, and he was born in a log cabin, which he built with his own hands. Abraham Lincoln freed the slaves by signing the Emasculation Proclamation. On the night of April 14, 1865, Lincoln went to the theatre and got shot in his seat by one of the actors in a moving picture show. The believed assassinator was John Wilkes Booth, a supposedly insane actor. This ruined Booth's career.
21. Meanwhile, in Europe, the enlightenment was a reasonable time. Voltaire invented electricity, and also wrote a book called Candy.
22. Gravity was invented by Isaac Walton. It is chiefly noticeable in the autumn when the apples are falling off the trees.
23. Beethoven wrote music even though he was deaf. He was so deaf he wrote loud music. He took long walks in the forest even when everyone was calling for him. Beethoven expired in 1827 and later died of this.
24. The sun never set on the British Empire because the British Empire is in the East and the sun sets in the West.
25. Queen Victoria was a the longest queen. She sat on a thorn for 63 years. She was a moral woman who practised virtue. Her death was the final event which ended her reign.
26. Louis Pasteur discovered a cure for rabbis. Madman Curie discovered radio. And Karl Marx became one of the Marx Brothers.
“so they spread thresh (straw) on floor to help keep their footing.”
Thresh never referred to straw. Thresh means to stamp or mash and is the real origin of the term Threshold, which is the first place one steps when enterting a house.