Fast facts
Arizona Daily Wildcat
Friday, January 14, 2005
Things you always never wanted to know
Gold is so malleable that a single ounce can be beaten out into a thin film (less than 1/282,000th of an inch) that would cover a hundred square feet, and so ductile that a single ounce can be drawn into a fine wire 50 miles long.
By 1760, one-third of Britain's ship tonnage was being built in the American colonies. This was due to the abundance of timber that made shipbuilding costs only half of what they were in Europe.
The first surgeon general of the United States was appointed in July 1775 and was court-martialed less than three months later for spying for the British. Dr. Benjamin Church was convicted of having "criminal correspondence with the enemy" and was sentenced to life imprisonment.
One legal term for having sexual intercourse with someone else's spouse - i.e., adultery - is "criminal conversation."
The bloody battle of Magenta in northern Italy between a combined Franco-Sardinian army and an Austrian army in 1859 gave its name to the beautiful red-purple dye and color synthesized by French chemists shortly after the battle - magenta, the color of blood.
The word "hussy" in the 16th century was perfectly respectable; it meant simply a housewife, derived from the short form of the Old English huswif. Only one century later, the word had come to mean a bold and shameless woman.
In the 18th century, wealthy visitors so thoroughly enjoyed the mineral springs and baths in the fashionable watering town of Spa in the Ardennes in southeast Belgium, near the German border, that the name of the town soon became a lowercase English noun.