Today's Daily Dispatch

OUR TYPING TEST

Posted August 11, 2008

IN RESPONSE TO OUR CHALLENGE FOR TYPISTS EVERYWHERE:

Kevin Bryan writes:  I’ve found “dismantlement” (or for a tie, but maybe not in some dictionaries “antiendowment”, “antisudorific”, “autotoxicosis”, and “neurotoxicity")- the longest words you can type with alternating hands on a QWERTY keyboard.

Kevin Bryan of Exter, RI

---

HALF BAKED…

Posted October 22, 2008

As I heard it, the correct translation of Marie Antoinette’s statement, “Let them eat cake” should correctly be, “Let them eat poorcake.”

French ovens were heated with wood or other materials that generated soot that coated the walls of the oven.  To keep the bread dough from becoming covered with this soot, the walls of the oven were coated with a mixture of flour and water.  When this mixture had dried to the walls of the oven, the bread dough was placed in the oven and baked.

After the oven had cooled down, the sooty, flour mixture--like sooty matzo--was chipped off the walls, placed in a basket, and put on the outside steps for the poor to take and eat.  Thus, the lady in question was simply giving practical, if somewhat flippant, advice to her poor subjects: If one cannot afford the bourgeois bread, he can avail himself of the poor man’s “cake.”

Carl F. Weggel of Boston, MA

---

RICE BALONEY?

Posted September 14, 2008

Last week’s show had a question:  Who was Dan Rice?  The “correct” answer was that he was the inspiration for Uncle Sam.  Wrong, wrong, wrong!  Uncle Sam was originally based on the visage of Sam Wilson, a meatpacker who stamped U.S. on packages of meat that were produced during the War of 1812.  Dan Rice wasn’t born until 1823.  Sam Wilson was a relative of mine and this story has always been passed down through the generations.  Although it is not 100% certain, there is more evidence that Sam Wilson was Uncle Sam than that Dan Rice was.

Gwendolyn Wilson of Sandy, UT

---

View Daily Dispatch Archives