Uncle John’s Briefs (22 page)

•
Romania:
chica

•
Australia:
Freddie Firedrill
(as if the haircut was interrupted by a fire alarm)

•
Chile:
chocopanda
(referring to the typical haircuts of ice cream sellers)

•
Colombia:
greña paisa

•
Turkey:
aslan yelesi
(“lion’s mane”)

•
Brazil:
Chitãozinho e Xororó

•
Denmark:
bundesliga-hår

•
Croatia:
fudbalerka
(referring to the soccer-player haircuts of the 1980s)

•
Finland:
takatukka
(“rear hair”)

•
Germany:
vokuhila
(short for
vorne kurz, hinten lang
“short in the front, long in the back”)

•
Greece:
laspotiras
(“mudflap”)

•
Hebrew:
vilon
(“curtain”)

•
Argentina:
Cubano

•
Japan:
urufu hea
(“wolf hair”)

•
Puerto Rico:
playero
(“beachcomber”)

•
Serbia:
Tarzanka
(“Tarzan”)

•
Italy:
capelli alla tedesca
(“German-style hair”), or
alla MacGyver
(hair that resembles Richard Dean Anderson’s from the TV show)

•
American terms:
B&T (bridge and tunnel), ape drape, Tennessee top hat, Kentucky waterfall, Missouri compromise

Your remote control works by shooting an invisible beam of infrared light at the TV.

WHAT THE #!&%?

Here are the origins of several symbols we use in everyday life
.

?
QUESTION MARK
Origin:
When early scholars wrote in Latin, they would place the word
questio
—meaning “question”—at the end of a sentence to indicate a query. To conserve valuable space, writing it was soon shortened to
qo
, which caused another problem—readers might mistake it for the ending of a word. So, they squashed the letters into a symbol: a lowercase
q
on top of an
o
. Over time the
o
shrank to a dot and the
q
to a squiggle, giving us our current question mark.

! EXCLAMATION POINT

Origin:
Like the question mark, the exclamation point was invented by stacking letters. The mark comes from the Latin word
io
, meaning “exclamation of joy.” Written vertically, with the
i
above the
o
, it forms the exclamation point we use today.

= EQUAL SIGN

Origin:
Invented by English mathematician Robert Recorde in 1557, with this rationale: “I will sette as I doe often in woorke use, a paire of paralleles, or Gemowe [i.e., twin] lines of one length, thus: =====, bicause noe 2 thynges, can be more equalle.” His equal signs were about five times as long as the current ones, and it took more than a century for his sign to be accepted over its rival: a strange curly symbol invented by Descartes.

& AMPERSAND

Origin:
This symbol is a stylized et, Latin for “and.” Although it was invented by the Roman scribe Marcus Tullius Tiro in the first century B.C., it didn’t get its strange name until centuries later. In the early 1800s, schoolchildren learned this symbol as the 27th letter of the alphabet: X, Y, Z, &. But the symbol had no name. So, they ended their ABCs with “and, per se, and”, meaning “&, which means ‘and.’” This phrase was slurred into one garbled word that eventually caught on with everyone:
ampersand
.

According to DC Comics, the ancestors of Superman’s adoptive family, the Kents were noted abolitionists in the 19th century.

# OCTOTHORP

Origin:
The odd name for this ancient sign for numbering derives from
thorpe
, the Old Norse word for a village or farm that is often seen in British placenames. According to typographers, the symbol was originally used in mapmaking, representing a village surrounded by eight fields, so it was named the
octothorp
.

$ DOLLAR SIGN

Origin:
One theory on the origin of this symbol says that when the U.S. government began issuing its own money in 1794, it used the common world currency: the
peso
—also called the Spanish dollar. The first American silver dollars were identical to Spanish pesos in weight and value, so they took the same written abbreviation: Ps. That evolved into a P with an s written right on top of it, and when people began to omit the circular part of the p, the sign simply became an S with a vertical line through it.

OLYMPIC RINGS

Origin:
Designed in 1913 by Baron Pierre de Coubertin, the five rings represent the five regions of the world that participated in the Olympics: Africa, the Americas, Asia, Europe, and Oceania. While the individual rings do not symbolize any single continent, the five colors—red, blue, green, yellow, and black—were chosen because at least one of them is found on the flag of every nation. The plain white background is symbolic of peace.

“THE SYMBOL”

Origin:
Okay, so we’re running out of symbols, but this is a great pop culture story: In 1993, Prince’s dissatisfaction with his record label, Warner Bros., finally reached its peak. Despite his superstar status and his $100 million contract, the Purple One didn’t feel he had enough creative control over his music. So “in protest,” Prince announced that Prince would never perform for Warner Bros. again—this unpronounceable symbol would instead. The symbol for the Artist Formerly Known as Prince combined three ancient symbols: the male symbol, the female symbol, and the alchemy symbol for soapstone, which was supposed to reflect his artistic genius. Prince retired the symbol when his contract with Warner Bros. ran out in 2000. Today, he is again Prince.

GROUNDS FOR DIVORCE

Think you’re in a bad relationship? Take a look at these folks
.

In Loving, New Mexico, a woman divorced her husband because he made her salute him and address him as “Major” whenever he walked by.

One Tarittville, Connecticut, man filed for divorce after his wife left him a note on the refrigerator. It read, “I won’t be home when you return from work. Have gone to the bridge club. There’ll be a recipe for your dinner at 7 o’clock on Channel 2.”

In Lynch Heights, Delaware, a woman filed for divorce because her husband “regularly put itching powder in her underwear when she wasn’t looking.”

In Honolulu, Hawaii, a man filed for divorce from his wife, because she “served pea soup for breakfast and dinner…and packed his lunch with pea sandwiches.”

In Hazard, Kentucky, a man divorced his wife because she “beat him whenever he removed onions from his hamburger without first asking for permission.”

In Frackville, Pennsylvania, a woman filed for divorce because her husband insisted on “shooting tin cans off of her head with a slingshot.”

One Winthrop, Maine, man divorced his wife because she “wore earplugs whenever his mother came to visit.”

A Smelterville, Idaho, man won divorce from his wife on similar grounds. “His wife dressed up as a ghost and tried to scare his elderly mother out of the house.”

In Canon City, Colorado, a woman divorced her husband because he made her “duck under the dashboard whenever they drove past his girlfriend’s house.”

No escape: In Bennettsville, South Carolina, a deaf man filed for divorce from his wife because “she was always nagging him in sign language.”

The Last Straw: In Hardwick, Georgia, a woman divorced her husband because he “stayed home too much and was much too affectionate.”

America’s first DJ: Dr. Elman Myers, in 1911.

THE LEAGUE OF
COMIC BOOK CREATORS

By day, they were mild-mannered writers and artists. But at night…well, they stayed mild-mannered writers and artists, but they also thought up some of the most popular comic book characters the world has ever known. Come meet the men behind the Man of Steel, the Dark Knight, and the mutants
.

S
UPERMAN: Joe Schuster & Jerry Siegel
Schuster & Siegel created
Superman
in 1936, when the Cleveland duo (Siegel born there, and Schuster having moved there at age nine from Toronto) tried selling the Man of Steel as a comic strip to the newspapers. No one bought it until 1938, when DC Comics gave
Superman
a tryout in its Action Comics book. The rest is history, and Schuster & Siegel would go on to fame and fortune, right? Not exactly. By contract, DC Comics retained all rights in the Superman character, and so while the publishing company was making millions from
Superman
, Schuster & Siegel were not. They weren’t doing poorly—in 1940
The Saturday Evening Post
noted that the two of them were making $75,000 a year between them—but they knew they could be doing much better.

They sued DC Comics in 1946, and in 1948 received a relatively small settlement (a reported $120,000). But the flip side of the settlement was that the duo’s byline, previously on every
Superman
story, was removed from all future products. Schuster soon left the comic book field, and Siegel’s work slowed to a trickle. In the 1970s, while Hollywood geared up for the
Superman
movie starring Christopher Reeve, Schuster & Siegel again got the word out about how badly they had been treated by DC and sued the company once more. Although the courts decided the writers didn’t have a case, DC was pressured by the comic book community into providing both men with a $35,000-per-year stipend for as long as they lived. Schuster died in 1992; Siegel passed away in 1996.

BATMAN: Bob Kane

Like Schuster & Siegel, Kane handed over his comic book creation,
Batman
, to DC Comics, where the Caped Crusader made his first appearance in
1939. However, unlike Superman’s creators, Kane maintained a small percentage of the take every time the cash register rang up a Batman sale. How did he do it? He had a lawyer in the family, who advised him to retain his copyright interests.

Look next time you yawn: 55% of people yawn within 5 minutes of seeing someone else yawn.

Keeping a stake in the Dark Knight did good things for Kane’s income and his leisure time. Although his name was kept on all the Batman stories, he handed off most of the work to underlings in what was one of the biggest open secrets in comics. Kane himself headed to Hollywood to create animated TV shows (such as
Courageous Cat
) and to advise in the development of the campy 1960s
Batman
TV series. He even had a cameo in 1997’s
Batman and Robin
, as did his wife. Kane died in 1998.

THE X-MEN & THE INCREDIBLE HULK: Jack Kirby

Kirby, who started working in comics in 1938, was arguably the most prolific comic book character creator around. Characters he created or co-created include the X-Men, the Incredible Hulk, and the Fantastic Four, as well as Captain America, Iron Man, the Silver Surfer, and Thor (the last one with a little help from Norse mythology). Some comic fans also give him a shared credit (along with DC’s Stan Lee) for Spider-Man. Most of Kirby’s greatest creations are associated with Marvel Comics, but he worked off and on for a number of comic book publishers, including DC; he bounced between the two majors for much of his career.

Kirby was also not above doing grunt work. In the mid-1950s, when worries about the morality of comic books caused the industry to collapse and the superhero genre was gutted (350 comic book titles stopped publication), Kirby stayed in business by drawing romance comics. His artistic output throughout his career was staggering—more than 24,000 pages of comic book art. In 1994, at the age of 76, Kirby died at his home in California.