9 Astounding Facts That Will Blow Your Bibliophilic Mind
The Huffington Post | By Liat Kornowski
Posted: 11/26/2013 9:18 am EST
Still not sure what to buy your great aunt this Thanksgiving, your colleagues for Christmas or your graduating son next spring? We've got you covered. The splendidly all-encompassing book "1,227 Quite Interesting Facts To Blow Your Socks Off" has enough "NO WAY!" in it for everyone. For instance:
1...The word “time” is the most commonly used noun in English.
2...An “earworm” is a song that gets stuck in your head.
3...A language dies every 14 days.
4...25 million Bibles were printed in 2011, compared to 208 million IKEA catalogs.
5...There are about 6,900 languages in existence but more than half the world’s population uses only 20 of them.
6...Charles Darwin’s editor thought “The Origin of Species” was too obscure. He suggested a book about pigeons, as “everybody is interested in pigeons.”
7...A full Kindle weighs a billionth of a billionth of a gram more than a brand-new one.
8...Leo Tolstoy’s wife wrote out the drafts of “War and Peace” for him, in longhand, six times.
9...99 percent of all the words in the “Oxford English Dictionary” do not derive from Old English.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/11/26/book-facts-english_n_4343080.html
