Tuesday Trivia

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Calvin Klein’s perfume range Eternity has a connection to King Edward VIII and his squeeze Wallis Simpson. Before Edward gave up the British throne in 1937 to marry Simpson he gave her a diamond ring with the word “Eternity” engraved inside it. Fifty years later, in 1987, Calvin Klein bought the ring at auction for his wife Kelly Proctor. One year later he launched a new range of perfumes and named it Eternity after the engraving in the ring.

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Bulls are colour blind and do not become enraged at the colour of red capes. Instead they’re provoked by the movement. The capes, known as muletas, are coloured red to hide the blood splatter when the bull meets its end.

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Harrison Ford was under the impression that he had a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame when he saw a star with his name on it outside the Musso and Frank Grill. In fact that star was for stage actor and silent screen star Harrison Ford (1884-1957) whose career ended with the advent of talking films.

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Origins:

Question Mark

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 lowercased q on top of an o. Over time the o shrank to a dot and theq to a squiggle, giving us our current question mark.

Exclamation Point

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.

Ampersand

This symbol is stylised 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.