DYK: Did you know To close ranks means to join with someone in a cause, or agreement. In the old-time European armies, the soldiers were aligned side by side, in neat rows, or ranks, on the battlefield. When the enemy attacked, officers would order the troops to close ranks; that is, to move the rows close together, so that the enemy faced a […]
March 31, 1916 On March 31, 1916, Julia Strudwick Tutwiler’s death was reported in the Florence Times. Julia Strudwick Tutwiler died in Birmingham, Alabama. She was a woman with progressive ideas who contributed much to the education and penal system in Alabama. Julia Tutwiler was born in Havana, Alabama to Henry and Julia Ashe Tutwiler […]
I Hate Privet Hedges by Dorothy Graham Gast I hate privet hedges. In the mid 1900’s privet hedges were used in southern landscapes as cheap fences. A row of bushes 3 feet apart would soon grow into a dense barrier. If untamed they might grow 15 feet high and serve as a windbreak or feeding […]
DYK: Did you know? In olden days, your dinner plate was a square piece of wood with a “bowl” carved out to hold your serving of the perpetual stew that was always cooking over the fire. The kettle was never actually emptied and cleaned out. New ingredients were simply added to the muck. You always […]
Did You Know? THE STRAIGHT AND NARROW- Comes from Matthew 7:14. In the King James version of the Bible, published in 1611, he says: ‘Strait is the gate and narrow is the way which leadeth to life’. The old English word strait meant tight or narrow but when it went out of use the phrase […]
Have you ever heard the word mimeograph? In the 1940s and 1950s, it was a household word. Advertisement in Life Magazine December 11, 1939 Making a copy of a document is easy today, but it was once a major task. Thomas Edison was only one of many inventors who looked for ways to make duplicates […]
DYK: Did you know? Translated from the old Spanish phrase “sangre azul”, blue blood derives from the Medieval belief in Europe (among other places) that the blood of the royalty and nobility was blue. Since the royal family and aristocrats were wealthy and powerful enough to pay commoners to labor in the fields for […]
The bitter end’ means the very end and comes from a nautical term. Anchor cable was wrapped around posts called bitts. The bitt end (or bitter end) refers to the final part of the anchor rope near to where the rope is fixed to the ship’s deck. Usually marked with coloured rags, the bitter end […]
BEARS by Dorothy Graham Gast I love bears. Not the seven foot grizzlies that chase careless tourists for their picnic baskets, but the manmade fluffy varieties carried by firefighters to calm frightened children after trauma. The kind teenagers leave on their pillows each day and the kind grandmothers rest their arthritic elbows on as they […]
DYK: Did you know? The fashion for wigs began with the Bourbon kings of France. Louis XIII (1601 – 1643) went prematurely bald and took to wearing a wig. By the middle of the century, and especially during the reign of Louis XIV. The Sun King, wigs were virtually obligatory for all European nobility and […]
