To be called a dunce means you are slow-witted, stupid, and unable to learn. Yet the word is derived from the name of one of the great scholars of the middle ages. John Duns Scotus was a philosopher and theologian whose thinking was so profound he was given the nickname Doctor Subtillis, the Subtle Doctor. His teaching attracted a group of students and admirers who became known as Dunsmen, or Dunsers. Duns Scotus’ teaching remained influential from the 14th century until the Renaissance when more modern theories gained prominence. Those who clung desperately to Duns’ teaching were mocked for their seeming inability to modernize, or learn at all. The Dunsers became Dunces and a new word was born.

Gerrymandering is the rigging of elections by changing the boundary lines to give one party an advantage through the distribution of voters. The rigging of elections is as old as democracy but the act only gained its name in the 19th century. The governor of Massachusetts in 1812 was Elbridge Gerry, representing the Democratic-Republican party, in opposition to the Federalist party. Seeking to gain the upper hand in the Senate race of that year a bill was passed changing the districts by which voters were grouped. This explains the Gerry portion of the word, but the -mander? The shape of the districts after the passage of the bill was said to resemble a salamander or, as someone suggested, a Gerrymander.

Words and things named for a person are called Eponyms. Like Gerrymander, Boycott is a new word for an ancient thing. Boycotts, the willful refusal to do or use something, can be seen in the Aristophanes’ play Lysistrata where the Greek women boycott sex with their husbands. In 1880 Captain Charles Boycott was managing land in Ireland when poor harvests struck. The lord whose lands he was managing offered to reduce the rents of his tenants, but the offer was unsatisfactory. The tenants then refused to have anything to do with Captain Boycott. The lands were left untended, shops would not sell to his family, and post was not delivered to his house. Supplies were shipped to the estate from England since no one would deal with him in Ireland. In the end the protest was successful and Boycott’s name became synonymous with targeted ostracism.

Jumbo, meaning huge, is another eponym but this time derived from the name of perhaps the most famous elephant in the world. Jumbo was an African elephant born in the 1860s and displayed in France, England and North America. Standing 4m tall people flocked to see the giant animal. With an eye for spectacle the circus owner P.T. Barnum bought Jumbo for the equivalent of a quarter of a million dollars and shipped him to the US. While being displayed in Canada Jumbo was hit by a train and killed. This gave the canny Barnum a chance to earn more money by offering people the chance to see a dead elephant. Jumbo’s huge hide was stuffed and put on display further spreading the elephant’s fame.

The Quakers, or Society of Friends, are a Christian denomination with a long history of social reformation. Quakers played a strong role in the abolition of slavery and many philanthropic businessmen of the Victorian era were Quakers. Founded by George Fox as an alternative to Church of England worship in the 17th century the Society of Friends was soon named Quakers. How did they get this name? Two stories exist. The first is that early followers of Fox were so taken with religious mania that they shook, or quaked, while they preached. The other supposed origin of the term comes from Fox’s autobiography. Charged with blasphemy for his new theology Fox was taken before the magistrates. Fox was defiant and “bade them tremble at the word of the Lord.” One of the magistrates retorted that the only person to quake in the court was Fox himself.

Silhouettes were once a highly fashionable form of art which displayed their subjects in outline with no other features. Portraits of this type have the benefit of being cheap and quick to make compared to painted portraits. During the Seven Years War the state of French finances became parlous. The finance minister of the time was Etienne de Silhouette who, to save the French economy was forced to put in place harsh measures to raise funds. The nobility and clergy who were normally not called on to pay taxes but Silhouette levied taxes on various luxuries which hit the wealthy. Because of this he was ridiculed and forced from his position. His name became attached to anything seen as cheap. When profile portraits became popular they were sneered at as cheap (or to use the French “à la Silhouette”) and the name stuck.

To talk Bunkum is to talk nonsense, and perhaps fittingly is derived from the US House of Representatives. In 1820 an important debate was held on whether the state of Missouri would be admitted to the union a slave-holding or free entity. Slavery had long been a contentious issue and fierce arguments were expected on both sides. When Felix Walker, representative of Buncombe County, began to speak his colleagues were bemused to find his speech did not seem to address the matter at hand, but some local affair. When asked what he was doing he replied “I was not speaking to the House but to Buncombe.” From then speaking to Buncombe meant to speak irrelevantly.

The clue to the origin of the word Clue is in its derivation from the medieval word Clew, meaning ball of thread. This may not be of much help unless you are clued up on Classical mythology. The hero Theseus was given a ball of thread to help him find his way out of the labyrinth of Minos. By following the trail of thread he left behind him he was able to navigate his way to the exit. The word clue then became associated with anything which might hint at the solution.

It is well known that the Ancient Greeks, with a proud history of xenophobia, looked down on anyone who could not speak Greek. They termed such foreigners Barbaroi, or Barbarians, because they seemed to bleat like sheep (Bah-Bah-Bah). Today we frown on such a nationalistic outlook but we have a similar term for those who seek to bamboozle us with technical terms when simpler ones would do. Scientists, lawyers, government ministers, and bureaucrats often hide behind unintelligible gobbledegook. We say they speak Jargon—derived from a French word meaning to twitter like birds.

Before the invention of guttering roofs were made with wide eaves, overhangs, so that rain water would fall away from the house to stop the walls and foundations being damaged. This area was known as the eavesdrop. The large overhang gave good cover for those who wished to lurk in shadows and listen to others’ conversations. Since the area under the eaves was considered part of the householder’s property you could be fined under Anglo-Saxon law for being under the eaves with the intention of spying.

LordZB enjoys wearing pajamas.

The post Ten Unusual Etymologies appeared first on Listverse.

Vowels have certain qualities than make them distinct, including length (short vs. long), position of the mouth and tongue, proximity to other vowels, roundedness of the lips, and nasalization. So let’s plunge headfirst into the deep waters of voweldom by answering these and more: Is it possible for a language to have no vowel sounds? What is a triphthong? Which language has as many as 55 vowel sounds? Are there any English words with no vowel sounds at all? What was The Great Vowel Shift?

Ubykh—sometimes spelled Ubyx—is a language whose last native speaker died in 1992. The language is part of the Northwest Caucasian Language group. The Ubykh people once lived in a place called Sochi, along the eastern shores of the Black Sea, until the Russians drove them out in the middle of the 19th century.

Tevfik Esenç—the last speaker of Ubykh—spent a great deal of time with linguists, in effect acting as the cultural and linguistic ambassador of a language soon on the cusp of extinction. Of the many fascinating properties of the language that were studied, perhaps this stands out the most: Ubykh has as few as two distinct vowels sounds. This is made all the more amazing when you consider that in contrast, Ubykh has one of the largest consonant inventories of any language ever observed, with between 81 and 84 consonant sounds—likely the most outside of the southern African Khoisan languages (which feature clicks). The disproportionate consonant-to-vowel ratio is the highest known in the history of the world’s languages.

It’s worth nothing that for a time, the Karbadian language of the Middle East (a language related to Ubykh) was thought to have only one distinct vowel sound. Some went even further, claiming it had no vowel sounds at all. It is now believed to have three vowels, and most linguists agree that no language will ever be found that does not contain any vowel sounds. The video above is of Tevfik Esenç reading a story in Ubykh.

Ah, the semivowel. Not quite vowelly enough to be a vowel, but not consonanty enough to be a full-fledged consonant, the semivowel lives in limbo. Phonetically, semivowels are known as “approximates,” a distinction they share with a few other types of sounds. English has two of these creatures: w and y. Make these sounds and it becomes clear why they fall someplace between vowel and consonant; there is some small obstruction, but the sounds emerge from the mouth in a manner quite similar to vowels. They are also known as “glides.”

In English spelling, y and w are semivowels when they begin words or are the first letter following a prefix, or (in the case of w only) when they follow a consonant. When they end words, however, they become part of the preceding vowel’s sound. Take the word “paw”—w does not act as a semivowel here, but rather serves to turn the “a” into a diphthong; similarly, the “y” to end “pay” does the same thing (See item 7).

If we approach these sounds from a phonological perspective—phonology being the study of how sounds construct meaning in language—some semivowels get more complex in an attempt to classify them. Vowels, by definition, are “syllabic:” on their own, they are considered a complete syllable. Y and w, however, are not —they must become attached to a vowel to attain true syllable status.

Syllables are a method of organizing and sequencing speech sounds; they’re the way we break down language into spoken parts. Syllables are generally divided into three parts: onset, nucleus, and coda. The nucleus and coda are frequently grouped together and called the rime. In the word “ten,” the “t” is the onset, the “e” is the nucleus, and the “n” is the coda—together, the “e” and “t” comprise the rime. In English, syllables are generally defined as needing a vowel as their nucleus (see #3), though some languages make use of a “syllabic consonant” at the nucleus of some syllables. English syllables may have an onset and rime (“cat”), an onset and coda (“me”), a rime only (“it”), or only a nucleus, without any onset or coda (this called a null-onset syllable), including the entire word “owe.” The word has three letters but only one sound, a diphthong that serves as a nucleus, whole syllable, and whole word. Certain languages require an onset, meaning that every syllable must begin with a vowel.

The word “rime” is used to describe the nucleus (with an optional coda) because of its direct ties to poetry. When rhyming words, it is the rime of the syllable that is used to produce the rhyming effect.

A diphthong is when two adjacent vowels come together to form a single vowel with two distinct elements. The vowel sound in the word “fight” is a diphthong, because you start with the vowel sound from “fa” and end up higher up in the mouth making the vowel sound from “feet.” English is full of diphthongs—the sentence “no highway cowboys” contains five distinct diphthongs. Note, however, the distinction between a diphthong and a situation where two vowels each retain their own full effect; the word “neon,” for instance, contains two separate syllables because the “e” and the “o” do not form a diphthong.

Similarly, a triphthong contains three vowel sounds all coming together to form one, as in the British pronunciation of the word “hour.” In this case, the first vowel is serving as the syllable’s nucleus, though there are languages where the second vowel does so and others where the third vowel does. There is some disagreement about whether the middle sound of a word like “layer” should be considered a triphthong, or two distinct vowel sounds (one being a diphthong). One of the reasons that English is tough for foreign learners is the relatively small extent of vowel movement—essentially, we slur our vowels together.

Apophony, sometimes used synonymously with the term “ablaut,” is a type of vowel gradation, which describes any pair of related words with differing vowel sounds. The first “o” in photograph is long, for example, whereas its counterpart in photography is short. In this pair, however, the grammatical information is intact; both words are nouns, and no inflection has taken place. Apophony, on the other hand, is a form of vowel gradation resulting in a grammatical change. In English, this occurs when the vowel in the middle of a word is altered either to pluralize the word or to change its tense.

A few examples:

- Sing/sang/sung/song. Here, we have 4 different vowels producing 4 distinctly different words, each conveying its own grammatical information (three verb tenses and a noun).
- Mouse/Mice. Phonetically speaking, the only difference here is a shift in the vowel between the “m” and “s” sounds—the result is a pluralization.

Sedang is a language with about 100,000 native speakers; it’s spoken in Laos and Vietnam and is in the Austro-Asiatic language family. More specifically, it belongs to the Bahnaric Language group, a collection of closely related languages known for their wide range of vowels.

What makes Sedang unique amongst the world’s languages is its sheer number of vowel sounds—some linguistic studies place this number as high as 55. The study of distinct vowel sounds is not an exact science, given how subtle the distinctions are between similar sounds—factors such as vowel length and quality contribute to the minor controversy of the “most vowels” crown.

Let’s break that vowel number down. Sedang has 24 pure vowels (meaning single vowels, not attached to another as a diphthong) which can be broken down into 7 vowels that can each be plain, nasalized, or “creaky“—a vowel quality produced by vibrating one’s vocal folds in such a way that the resulting sound is two octaves above its plain counterpart. Three of these vowels can be both nasal and creaky. Throw in a variable amount of diphthongs, and you’re left with a staggering array of vowel sounds.

As a noteworthy side note, the “creaky” quality of these vowels—also known as “vocal fry”—is possibly showing up in the speech patterns of American women, as well as certain dialects of the American Northwest. Listen to the Sedang language in the above clip.

If you think of the human mouth and its production of vowels as a 3-dimensional grid, what falls right smack in the center? It’s everyone’s favorite upside-down letter: the schwa, represented in the International Phonetic Alphabet as “?.” It’s the “uh” sound you hear at the beginning of the word “about,” and phonetically it’s described as a “mid-central” vowel. In English, it’s the most common vowel sound, showing up most commonly in unstressed syllables of words. The schwa can masquerade as any vowel in English:

The “a” in “sofa”
The “e” in photosynthesis
The “i” in “terrible”
The second “o” in “commonly”
The “u” in “medium”
The “y” in “syringe.”

Its use varies significantly based on which dialect of English is being spoken, though it almost always appears in unstressed syllables. In New Zealand English and South African English, however, the high front vowel in the word “sit” has shifted to a position in the mouth very close to the schwa—so close, in fact, that linguists generally denote its sound with a “?.”

In a phenomenon known as “schwa syncope” or simply “schwa deletion,” there is a situation in which schwas tend to be omitted from speech. When a schwa would normally be spoken in a syllable situated mid-word following the stressed syllable, it’s generally left out, as in the cases of cam(e)ra and choc(o)late. Note that schwa syncope does not exist in all English dialects.

Schwas are found in other languages as well, including Albanian, Romanian, French, Korean, and Hindi.

When we talk about words that have no vowels, there are two significantly different avenues for discussion: (1) Words without any vowel letters, and (2) words without any actual vowel sounds. In English, there are only a handful of vowel-less words from a spelling standpoint, and there is (surprise!) disagreement over whether any true English words have no vowel sounds.

Scrabble players, and people with a Welsh background, may recognize the Welsh loanword “crwth”—pronounced “cruth”—as a violin-like instrument. You’ll notice the use of “w” as a vowel here—evident in another Welsh example, cwm (“coom”), a sort of deep valley or gully within a mountain. Interjections like “shhh” and “hmm” have no vowel sounds, but are not always regarded as true words with distinct meanings. Other words like “nth” can stake a claim to be a vowel-less word, whereas words like “myth” don’t count because the “y” stands in for a short “i” sound.

English is usually classified as a language that requires a vowel for every word; by definition, an English syllable must contain a vowel. There are, however, possible exceptions—in certain dialects, for instance, one-syllable words like “bird” and “church” can be heard as having no vowel sound. Say the word “bird”—the “b” goes directly to the “r” potentially without a vowel as a go-between. Where this gets muddy is the concept of a “rhotic vowel” (represented here by the symbol [?]) which describes a vowel immediately before an “r;” the “r” sound affects the preceding vowel in a significant way. The word “bird” may thus, depending on analysis, be understood as containing an extremely short rhotic vowel.

As with #3 above, there is a difference between a written consonant and a spoken one. The word “eye,” for example, contains a written consonant—y—but is pronounced as one single diphthong. While we have a few such one-syllable words, English is a consonant-heavy language that requires them for nearly all words. Given that syllables do not require a consonant, certain languages have longer no-consonant words as well—unsurprisingly, English only contains a few (including “aa”) and they are all loanwords or scientific terms.

Many Polynesian languages, including Hawaiian, have dozens of such longer words, where the vowel syllables are separated by “glottal stops” (the brief disruption of airflow in the middle of “uh-oh”). One of these words is a small green fish called the “ae?ea,” which is also the name of the mythical land of Circe. Swahili, Finnish, Rapa Nui, and Portuguese are other languages with longer consonant-less words.

Giving The Great Vowel Shift such cursory treatment is to redefine “short shrift,” and it deserves its own list at the very least. But we’ll summarize it the best we can: The Great Vowel Shift is the name of a massive change in English pronunciation that took place over a period of several hundred years spanning the 15th through 18th centuries. In essence, long vowels began to shift “upwards” in their positioning in the mouth; long vowels already at the top had noplace higher to go, and became diphthongs. This dramatically affected the way English is pronounced today, and is partially responsible for English’s confusing spelling system.

The modern English word “ripe” was once pronounced “reep;” say the two in succession and you can feel your tongue shifting to produce a vowel sound in different parts of the mouth. The word “house,” which features a diphthong, was once pronounced something like “hoose”—a long vowel already toward the top part of the mouth. In all, five long vowels shifted upwards, and two others became diphthongs. Notable exceptions to the Great Vowel Shift help explain some of the many English spelling inconsistencies; take the word “broad,” which one might expect to rhyme with “road” and “toad.” Somehow, “broad” and other words (particularly ones with the “ea” spelling) escaped the Shift.

As with all language events that cannot be directly studied (we have plenty of text from the time period, but no audio), linguists and historians disagree on the causes of the Shift. Theories include accent shifts following the great post-Black-Death migrations; others look to differences in social classes.

The post 10 Tantalizing Tidbits About Vowels appeared first on Listverse.

Ah, the zeugma. For a word that sounds like it should be the name of a science-fiction villain, it sure has a wonderfully dorky definition. Pronounced “ZOYG-ma,” and dating back to the 1580s, the word is defined as “a figure of speech in which a single word, usually a verb or adjective, is syntactically related to two or more words, though having a different sense in relation to each.”

Phew! There’s a lot going on in that definition, and it’s at this point that you’re either going to realize you’re exactly the target demographic for this list, or go running for the nearest 10 Grossest & Most Stomach-Churning Medical Images list. Or perhaps you’re like me, and you’ll read language lists and crazy-weird-nasty lists all in one sitting.

Anyway, zeugma is clearly a word best defined by examples. Here are a few:

“I opened my door and my heart to the filthy urchin.”
“The clumsy baseball-playing dragon blew fire and the game.”
“The amateur musician worked a long day, then the crowd.”
“You are free to execute your laws, and your citizens, as you see fit.” (From Star Trek TNG)

See what’s going on there? In each case, the verb refers to two different parts of the sentence using slightly different usages of the verb. These are pretty fun to make up, at least for some people.

Oh—for the record—Zeugma is also a place in Turkey with some awesome recently discovered ancient mosaics (seen above).

The pataphor, a term coined by writer and musician Pablo Lopez—aka Paul Avion—is an extension of a metaphor, wherein the imagined world where the metaphor actually begins creates its own reality, and other stuff happens in that reality. Confused? Good—that means you’re normal. Take the common metaphor of a broken heart. It’s a metaphor because it’s figurative—we know that when someone is heartbroken, their heart has not literally ruptured. Now let’s make a pataphor out of it:

“Billy’s heart was broken when he saw Sally messin’ around with his best pal. It snapped in two, the pieces sinking into either leg, causing him great pain and discomfort as he tried to run away.”

Here, the metaphor of his broken heart has now been extended so that the heart really did break, and is making it hard for him to move his legs. The world of the metaphor has begun to exist, though its metaphorical meaning—he’s very, very sad about the breakup—is still true as well.

Pataphors are confusing, awesome, a little silly, and totally worthy of further exploration if the term is new to you. They are considered part of the world of pataphysics, defined as that which lies beyond the world of metaphysics.

Of all the items on this list, I actually found synecdoches perhaps the most challenging to define. In a comprehension fight, pataphors and potentially zeugmas might have their way with a mere synecdoche—but in an explanation fight, he’d eke out a victory.

Let’s get to it: A synecdoche (pronounced Si-NEK-da-key) is, broadly speaking, a figure of speech where a word (or term) for a PART of something is used to describe the WHOLE thing. It can also mean the exact opposite.

As with many of these terms, that’s tough to wrap the ol’ noodle around. So let’s take it slowly. Sometimes, we use a small part of a thing to refer to the whole thing—as in the nautical expression “all hands on deck!” Here, we’re saying hands to refer to people, which is an example of synecdoche because a hand is merely one part of a man. Another example is using wheels to refer to car.

It can be flipped around the other way, too. We talk about Spain winning the 2010 World Cup, even though it was only a few athletic dudes on a field/pitch who actually won the game—this is a whole (Spain) referring to a part (Spain’s soccer/football team). Another example is saying “the state banned cute baby pictures online,” because it wasn’t the entire state but rather a smaller subset (in this case, a ruling body).

You know exactly what this is, you just didn’t know there was a name for it. And if you did know, congratulations—you get to write the next list like this because you’re an even bigger language nerd than I.

“Listverse, shmistverse!” There, that’s an example of schm-reduplication. “I’ve had enough of these fancy-shmancy lists”—that’s another. Generally when you do this type of thing, you’re indicating that you’re being ironic and/or sarcastic—people don’t usually shm-duplicate for the hell of it. Shm-reduplication (say it 10 times fast) is actually a subset of a broader linguistic category—the reduplication—which is the morphological process wherein part of a word is repeated either exactly or nearly exactly, like hokey pokey and razzle dazzle.

You’ll not be surprised to learn that shm-reduplication has Yiddish roots and exists in modern Hebrew as well as English.

When you say foilage instead of foliage and Chipolte instead of Chipotle, you’re engaging in linguistic metathesis. When kids say what sounds like pasketti instead of spaghetti, they’re doing the same thing. Essentially, it’s when you rearrange (often with a straight swap) two or more sounds in a word or a sentence. While we think of these as mistakes, the metathesized form of a word has been known to become standard over time in certain instances—for example, bird comes from the Old English bryd.

Perhaps the most fascinating and commonplace example in English is the word ask, which is pronounced aks (ax) in certain dialects. What folks don’t frequently know is the prevalence of the ax pronunciation in the history of English. Chaucer, for instance, used ax. Many speakers of English used ax instead of ask when this metathesis occurred sometime in the 14th century.

Oh capitonym, my capitonym! What on earth is a capitonym? Here are three pairs of them—can you guess what it means?

polish & Polish
march & March
turkey & Turkey

Do you have it yet? You do? That’s wonderful. If you don’t, here goes: a capitonym is a word that changes meaning, and potentially its pronunciation (as in the P/polish example) when it is capitalized. In these three cases above, the words are not etymologically related—their similarity is coincidence, and the distinction is clear. In other cases, the words derive from the same root, and sometimes the distinction is more subtle. Take the following examples:

alpine & Alpine
mercury & Mercury

I’m going to go ahead and say that my favorite capitonym pair is tangier & Tangier, which are unrelated, pronounced quite differently, and have no business being linguistically related. In case it isn’t obvious, Tangier is a place and tangier is when one thing is more tangy than another.

An isogram is a word in which each letter appears only once, or more accurately, where each letter appears the same number of times. The word isogram itself is an isogram. Many (most?) short words, naturally, are as well. Ambidextrously is an especially long one. The longest one is believed to be subdermatoglyphic, at 17 letters, but the longest word that’s remotely normal is the 15-letter uncopyrightable—which is also noteworthy in that it contains all the vowels, including y.

Of course, us language nerds aren’t going to stop there—there is much fun to be had in the world if isograms. These are “1st-order” isograms (each letter appearing exactly once, also called heterograms), but of course there are 2nd-order ones as well—words where each letter appears exactly twice (also called pair isograms). There are many short 2nd-order isograms—papa, mama, peep, boob, noon—but it’s harder to find longer ones (intestines and arraigning are notable ones). Deeded, the past tense of the verb form of deed, is one of the few 3rd-order isograms—can you, oh fellow nerd, come up with a 4th-order isogram?

The world of place names makes for great isogram hunting. The longest English-language isogram is believed to be an English village named Bricklehampton, clocking in at a cool 14 letters. The longest country name is likely Switzerland, at 11 letters—though it must be noted that we’re talking about the longest country isogram as spoken in English.

When you use a contraction, when you say cuz instead of because, when you say wanna or gonna instead of want to and going to, and when you say cap’n instead of captain, what you’re doing is called elision. Don’t be embarrassed—everyone does it and it’s totally normal. At least that’s what they tell me. So go ahead—elide away! (Elide is the verb).

Simply put, it’s when a sound is left out of a word. Generally, it’s done for the purposes of making something easier to say. Elisions are everywhere:

Cannot -> can’t
Iced cream -> ice cream
Temperature -> tempacher
Get him! -> get ‘im!

In English, elision is never grammatically mandatory, but there are other languages—notable French—where it occasionally is. Take c’est, meaning it is—in English, we can choose it is or it’s, whereas in French, although it’s a contraction of ça est, you would never actually say that.

Litotes are a not uncommon way of expressing emphasis. This last sentence contained an instance of litotes—can you spot it? It’s a figure of speech where you accomplish what you’re trying to say by (usually) negating a negative to form a positive. I wouldn’t be unhappy if you understood litotes at this point, for instance.

The idea here, perhaps confusingly, is that you’re adding emphasis to your statement by understating. When you say “that movie wasn’t bad,” it’s different from saying “that movie was good”—depending on your inflection and the context, you’re conveying different pieces of information.

Litotes are quite old, once figuring prominently in Old English poetry. The term itself was a Greek word meaning “plainness, simplicity.” It has all kinds of accepted pronunciations, including LIE-ta-teez and LI-ta-teez.

A portmanteau is also known as a blend, but to be honest, I don’t know why you’d call it that when you’ve got the word portmanteau at your disposal. The portmanteau is in many ways the Inception of linguistic terms, spiraling ever inward and outward in a mind-bending tableau of self-reference. The word was coined by Lewis Carroll in his 1871 book Through the Looking Glass.

So . . . what is it? Quite simply, it’s a word that’s a combination of two (or more) others, as well as their associated meanings. Common examples include smog (smoke + fog), spam (spiced + ham), and brunch (breakfast + lunch).

Portmanteau itself is a portmanteau—originally, it was a French (and later English) word for a suitcase that opens into two equal parts. The word comes from porter (to carry) and manteau (a coat). One might expect the French word for portmanteau—the blend, not the luggage—to be portmanteau, since it’s already a perfectly good French word, but one would be wrong. Instead, it’s mot-valise, which loosely means word-suitcase. How very . . . odd.

Note: portmanteaus differ from contractions and compound words—a contraction is a sequence of two words that follow each other in a sentence rather than two conceptually related words, and a compound word includes the entirety of the words it comprises.

The post 10 Supremely Nerdy Language Tidbits appeared first on Listverse.

The pilcrow, also less elegantly called the “paragraph mark,” serves a number of purposes, most of which involve denoting the presence or location of a paragraph in one way or another. Most commonly, it’s used in word processing programs to indicate a “carriage return” “control character;” that is to say, a non-permanent mark showing where a paragraph ends. There is disagreement over the origin of the name; The Oxford English Dictionary, for one, likes to think it comes from a string of corruptions of the word “paragraph.” I prefer to side with the Oxford Universal Dictionary, which suggests that the sign itself looks a lot like a featherless crow—a “pulled crow.” The symbol itself derives from the letter C—you can still see it in there—which stood for the Latin “capitulum,” or “chapter.” The two lines that ended up vertically crossing the C were a sort of editorial note from the writer.

The pilcrow was used in the Middle Ages, in an earlier form, as a way of marking a new train of thought before the paragraph became the standard way of accomplishing this. Now, among its myriad uses are in academic writing (when citing from an HTML page), legal texts (when citing a specific paragraph), and in proofreading (an indication that a paragraph should be split in two).

The ampersand is a logogram used to mean “and.” The symbol itself is based on a shorthand version of the Latin word for “and”—et—and in certain fonts, you can still clearly see an ‘e’ and a ‘t’ linked together (Adobe Caslon, for instance). The word ampersand has a somewhat unusual origin—it’s a corruption of the hard-to-parse, multilingual (English and Latin) phrase “& per se and,” which means “& by itself is ‘and.’” Confused? Don’t worry—that’s only natural. All it means is: “The symbol &, all by its little self, simply means and.” And where did this phrase come from? Well, in the early 1800s, & was considered the 27th letter of the English alphabet, and since saying “X, Y, Z, and” would be confusing, “and per se and” was said instead. It doesn’t take a major stretch of the imagination to fathom how this could quickly turn into ampersand, which it did by around 1837.

Because people like to make up urban legends based on everything, including stodgy ol’ typographical marks, there’s a vicious rumor floating around that French physicist and mathematician André-Marie Ampère used the mark so much that it eventually got called “Ampere’s and.” Don’t believe it for a second. In the end we’re left with a pretty little symbol that has more than a few variants.

What?! You’ve never heard of the interrobang!? Really? Well, now you have, so all is forgiven. An interrobang is described as a “nonstandard punctuation mark” (it’s part of the punctuation counterculture), used to end sentences where you really want both the exclamation point and the question mark. While the use of both marks side by side had been prevalent for some time, it wasn’t until 1962 when an advertising executive named Martin K. Speckter decided that enough was enough—no longer would he withstand the tyranny of two separate punctuation marks when one would suffice. He asked readers to suggest names—rejecting such fine ideas as rhet, exclarotive, and exclamaquest—and ultimately settled upon interrobang, a combination of the Latin root “interro” (think “interrogate”), and “bang,” which is printer’s slang for the exclamation mark. The word is used to describe both the two side by side (!? or ?!), or the combined symbol ?.

What we know as @ has a lot of different monikers—including “at sign,” “at symbol,” “ampersat,” and “apetail”—but is unusual in that it doesn’t have a widely-accepted name in English. In Spanish, it is known as an arroba, and in French the arobase. @ has two primary usages—its original one, used in commerce to mean “at the rate of,” and more recently, “directed at” (primarily in email and in social media like Twitter). It has been claimed (by Italian professor Giorgio Stabile) that the symbol is actually over 500 years old, to represent an “amphora”—a unit of capacity used in commerce. It first made its way onto a typewriter as early as 1885, and has since found its way into our hearts.

A couple of fun facts:

- The Spanish arroba was a unit of weight equivalent to 25 pounds.
- The names for @ in other languages often derive from the idea that it looks like an animal. To wit: apenstaartje (Dutch for “monkey’s tail); papacy (Greek for “little duck); dalphaengi (Korean for “snail”); sobachka (Russian for “little dog”).

Guillemets are what the French use instead of quotation marks. In addition to the physical differences, the usage differs as well—generally, guillemets open and close entire conversations or exchanges, rather than individual utterances. Amusingly, the guillemet is named after a French printer named Guillaume Le Bé from the 16th century; “Guillemet” is a diminutive of “Guillaume.” One can only assume that French people call our quotation marks “Willies,” “li’l Bills,” or “Mini Williams.”

The Obelus, more commonly known as “the division sign” for reasons I can’t fathom, comes from an Ancient Greek word for a sharpened stick or other similar pointy object. It shares its roots with the word “obelisk.” The obelus was once used to denote sections of writing that were considered incorrect or suspicious; in other words, it would have been perfect for Wikipedia editors. It was first used to mean “division” in 1659 by Swiss mathematician Johann Rahn. While still used frequently in the US and in Britain, it is not commonly used to mean division in most of the rest of the world.

In Spanish, when a sentence ends with a question mark or an exclamation point, it also starts with an inverted one. ¿Porque? Well, I’ll tell you porque. In 1754, the Spanish Royal Academy decided that the Spanish language had a dire problem: when you start reading a sentence, you often have no way of telling if it’s a question or not until you get to the very end.

Consider the sentence vas a ir a la tienda? (Are you going to go to the store?). Up until you get to the question mark, you are totally in the dark—is it a question, or simply a declarative sentence stating “you are going to go to the store”? In English, we have ways of indicating that a question is coming, so that proper inflection can be used, as well as to help with comprehension. In Spanish, you used to need contextual clues to help you out before the Royal Academy had its way. They also decided that the exclamation point would be lonely, so they advocated for its inverted use as well.

Though the language was slow to adopt this new convention, it is now a fully integrated part of the language. A few interesting usage notes:

- Short, unambiguous questions are often written without the inverted mark—Quien eres?
- In digital communication, the inverted mark is frequently left off (emails, instant messaging, texts).
- Some authors refuse to use inverted marks.
- Writers can get playful with the marks, including starting a sentence with a ¡ and ending it with a ?.
- ¿ can be used in the middle of a sentence if the whole sentence is not a question, but rather the final clause.
- Note that ¿ and ¡ are positioned differently than ? and !; they hang below the line.

File this under “things we use all the time but don’t know their name.” Ditto marks are those quotation-looking-guys you use to save your tired wrist from a few more seconds of writing, indicating that what’s directly above should be repeated. Though one might suspect (“one” being “me” before I researched it) that the word ditto may have been related to the Latin root “di” (meaning “two”, as in when you say “ditto” you mean “me too!”), it in fact derives from an early (c. 1620) form of the Italian word for “to say.” Originally, it was used to avoid needless repetition when writing a series of dates in the same month.

A “ditto mark” is a type of “iteration mark.” Other languages have their own, notably Chinese, Japanese, and Ancient Egyptian. It’s tough to fathom why Ancient Egyptian scribes might have needed a way to cut down on chiseling elaborate drawings into rock.

Take a look at the percent sign. Look at each of the three individual marks—a circle, a line, a circle. Remind you of anything? Does it, perhaps, remind you of a certain number, with the digits rearranged and realigned? A very important number? Maybe . . . the number 100?

The % sign, of course, means that the preceding number should be understood as being divided by one hundred—”per cent.” The slash mark used to be straight across, with zeroes above and beneath, but it gradually became slanted—leading to what D.E. Smith, in 1925, called the “solidus form” of the percent sign. The solidus, aka slash, virgule, fraction bar, and other names, is this sign: /.

Because there is disagreement about everything, there is disagreement over whether there should be a space between the number and the % sign, over whether it should be per cent or percent, and when you should use the % symbol and when you should instead write out the word.

Once I learned the origins of the terms “upper case” and “lower case,” it seemed so obvious. I mused: does everyone know this but me? What else are my friends and family keeping from me? Instead, though, I decided to convince myself that legions of Listversers were in the dark like me, too embarrassed to say anything. Take comfort, fellow readers, for you may remain anonymous in your ignorance.

Now then: in the early days of printing, when each letter was set individually, the letters were kept in cases. The capital letters were kept in—you guessed it—the “upper case,” less convenient to the printer because of how relatively few capital letters are used, while the lower case letters were kept in the more accessible—wait for it—”lower case.” It’s as simple as that, really. This usage of the terms dates back to 1588.

Fun facts about cases:
- The use of two cases in a written language is called “bicameral script.” Languages with only one case are called “unicase.”
- So what were lower-case letters called before they used cases at all? Well, we have other words to describe them—Upper-case letters are called majuscules (and, of course, capitals), and lower-case letters are called minuscule. Note the spelling difference with the word miniscule.

The post 10 Fascinating Typographical Origins appeared first on Listverse.

A stunningly beautiful young princess, whose name is Nella, is having a secret affair with a handsome prince who lives many miles away. The two lovers build a glass tunnel that runs under the ground—from the prince’s castle into the princess’s bedroom. Every night the prince runs through the tunnel butt-naked at top-speed to ‘spend time’ with his young princess.

Nella’s two sisters, who are ugly and evil, learn of the affair and smash the glass tunnel. That night, the prince is running so fast to reach his young lover that he doesn’t see the broken glass, and because he is butt naked, the skin all over his body is sliced to ribbons. Because the glass that cut him was enchanted his wounds will not heal. The prince’s father vows that the woman who can find a remedy for the enchanted wounds will be the prince’s wife.

Nella is heartbroken upon hearing of her mortally wounded prince, and goes out into the wild to find a remedy that will heal him. Luckily, she overhears two ogres telling each other that the only thing in the whole world that will heal the prince is to smear the fat from their own bodies all over the prince. Nella, pretending to be lost in the woods, begs the ogres to let her into their house. The ogre husband, fancying a bit of human flesh, lets her in eagerly but sadly he drinks so much alcohol that he passes out before he gets to eat her.

Nella quickly gets to work and slaughters him then collects all the fat from his body in a bucket. She then rubs dirt all over her face to disguise herself and makes her way to the princes palace. She smears the fat into the prince’s wounds and he is healed as if by magic, then she reveals her identity and the marriage is swiftly arranged. And her sisters? They are burned alive of course.

You can read the first volume of Il Pentamerone here.

A King feeds a flea on his own blood until it is the size of a sheep, then he slaughters it, skins it and promises his daughter to the man who can guess what animal the skin came from. Suitors come from far and wide, but none can guess the origins of the pelt. Then a hideously ugly old ogre decides to try his luck—he sniffs the pelt and identifies it immediately as that of a flea.

The king, true to his word, hands over his daughter. She begs and pleads with him, but he sends her away calling her names like ‘‘breath of my arse’’ and threatening that he will “leave her not a whole bone in her body” if she refuses to marry the ogre.

The princess is horrified to find that her new home is made from human skeletons, and more horrified still when her new hubby prepares her a feast made from human carcasses. She begins to vomit repeatedly and the ogre promises to catch her some pigs to eat until she can stomach human flesh. While the ogre is hunting, an old woman hears the maiden wailing and sends her seven sons (who are all endowed with magical powers) to rescue the princess. They eventually defeat the ogre, by shooting out his eyeball and beheading him, and the princess returns home to her father who is (surprisingly) overjoyed to see her returned home safe to him.

While searching for her stray black sheep in the woods, a woman comes across the path of a witch who turns the woman into a sheep. The witch then disguises herself as the woman and returns to the house where woman’s husband and daughter live. The witch convinces the husband to slaughter the sheep to prevent it from wandering again. Their daughter weeps, but her mother (still a sheep) tells her not to eat of her flesh once she is slaughtered and to bury her bones at the edge of the field. The father slaughters the sheep and the witch makes soup from the meat and bones. The daughter buries what’s left of her mother in the field and a birch tree grows from the bones.

The witch hates her new step-daughter, but eventually her and the husband have a daughter of their own. One day a king declares that a festival is to be held for three days. The step mother sets the girl an impossible task, threatening to devour her if she is unable to complete it before they return from the nights festivities. The girl weeps over the birch tree, and the spirit of her dead mother completes her task for her and sends her off to the feast in beautiful garments—the prince falls instantly in love with the maiden.

As they dine the witches daughter gnaws bones under the table and the prince, thinking she is a dog, boots her so hard he breaks her arm. The beautiful sister flees before her family can return home to find her missing, but her ring is stuck on the palace door handle which the prince has spread with tar. The next two nights go the same way, with the prince breaking the witches daughters leg on the second night and dislodging her eyeball the third night.

The beautiful girl loses her bracelet, then her golden shoe in the tar the prince spreads to trap her. The prince wishes to marry the woman who will fit the lost items, and the witch forces her ugly daughter into them. However, when the prince discovers who the real bride is, they throw the ugly sister across a river to act as a bridge so they can escape the clutches of the witch.

Read The Wonderful Birch story here.

A young king falls madly in love with the princess of the golden palace after laying eyes on a portrait depicting her likeness, and devises a plot to kidnap her. The young king and his faithful servant Johannes travel to the golden kingdom, trick the princess into coming onto their boat and then set sail when she is below deck. Initially she is terrified, but when her kidnapper reveals he is a king all is forgiven and she agrees to marry him.

As they are sailing, faithful Johannes overhears three ravens conversing with each other. They predict three misfortunes that will befall the king: A fox-red horse, a poisoned shirt, and the death of his wife. The only way to save the king is if someone shoots the horse in the head, burns the poisoned shirt, and takes three drops of blood from the right breast of the new queen.

However, the saviour must not utter a word of his tasks or he shall turn to stone. When they arrive ashore, the king leaps onto the back of a fox-red horse which faithful Johannes promptly shoots in the head. When they arrive at the palace, the king finds a shirt that looks to be made of gold, but faithful Johannes throws the shirt in the fire. At the wedding dance, the queen falls down as if dead on the palace floor but faithful Johannes quickly takes three drops of blood from her right breast, saving her life.

The king, angered at the sight of his servant fondling the new queen’s breast, sentence’s faithful Johannes to hang. Johannes reveals the plot, but turns to stone. The king and queen eventually have two children and one day the statue of Johannes tells the king that if he will slaughter his own children, his trusty servant will be brought back to life. The king eagerly takes his sword and lops off his own children’s heads. He smears his children’s blood onto the stone and faithful Johannes comes back to life.

As a reward for the kings willingness to execute his own children, faithful Johannes places the children’s heads back onto their corpses and brings them back to life; they continue to run around as if nothing had happened.

You can read the full story of Faithful Johannes here.

A starving dog runs away from its cruel master and meets a sparrow—the two become great friends. The sparrow steals meat and bread for the dog and when the dog has eaten his fill he goes to sleep on the road. A wagon drives by, and the sparrow flutters about the drivers head telling him to watch out for the dog, but the driver pays no heed and runs the dog over, killing it. The sparrow swears vengeance, saying ‘’thou hast killed my brother dog, it shall cost thee thy cart and horses!’’

The sparrow then pecks out the eyes of one of the horses. The driver swings his axe at the sparrow, but chops open his horse’s head instead. The sparrow pecks out the eyes of the other two horses and the unfortunate beasts also get their heads chopped open as their master swings his axe at the sparrow. The sparrow then sings ‘’It shall cost thee thy home’’ and flies to the driver’s house.

The sparrow flutters from room to room as the driver, blind with rage, smashes up his entire house in his attempts to kill the bird. Now the driver sits amongst the rubble and says ‘’’what an unfortunate man I am!’’ ‘’Not unfortunate enough’’ says the sparrow, ‘’It shall cost thee thy life!’’. The driver catches the sparrow in his hand, and wanting it to suffer a fate worse than death, he swallows it whole—but the bird begins to flutter about his body and pokes its head out of the drivers mouth. The driver tells his wife to kill the sparrow with the axe as the bird sits in his mouth, but as the wife swings the sparrow flutters away and the wife chops open the drivers head instead, killing him.

Here is the above version of The Dog and the Sparrow.

After his wife dies, a King decides that the only woman in the world who matches his dead wife’s beauty is his own daughter Preziosa – therefore, Preziosa must now marry her deranged father. He tells her that if she will not marry him that very evening then ‘’when I am finished with you there will be nothing left but your ears’’.

An old woman then gives the terrified girl an enchanted bit of wood that will turn her into a bear when she puts it in her mouth. Preziosa – now a bear—flees into the forest and resolves never again to reveal her true form lest her father learns of her whereabouts. A prince discovers the wonderfully friendly she-bear in the woods and takes her home to be his pet.

One day when she believes she is alone, Preziosa takes the bit of wood out of her mouth to brush her hair. The prince looks out his window, spies a gorgeous maiden in his garden and rushes out to find her, but she hears him coming and quickly puts the wood back into her mouth. The prince searches throughout the garden but he cannot find the maiden anywhere—in her place is only his pet she-bear.

The prince becomes sick with lust for the bear-girl and begins to waste away. On request from her son, the prince’s mother sends for the she-bear who is now to reside in the princes bedroom, cook his meals and make his bed for him. The prince becomes overcome with lust for the bear, and begs his mother to let him kiss the animal.

While the mother watches and encourages them enthusiastically, man and bear lock lips. They are kissing so passionately that the bit of wood slips from Preziosa’s mouth and the prince finds that he now holds a stunningly beautiful maiden in his arms. Rejoicing, they get married, and presumably everybody lives happily ever after.

Full version of The She-Bear.

Karen is a very poor girl who goes barefoot until an old lady adopts her and buys her a beautiful pair of red shoes. When Karen is old enough to be confirmed, she chooses to wear her beautiful red shoes to church. During the church service, Karen can think only of her red shoes. After the service the old lady scolds Karen, telling her now that she is a grown-up christian she must never wear red shoes to church again.

The next Sunday, Karen chooses to wear her red shoes to communion and again can focus only on how pretty she looks for the entire service. As they are leaving the church, her shoes start to dance on their own and when Karen climbs into the carriage, she kicks the old woman violently before the coachman removes the shoes from Karen’s feet. The old lady falls ill and it is Karen’s job to care for her, but Karen is invited to a ball and decides to wear her red shoes to the dance rather than care for the sick old woman.

When Karen begins to dance, the shoes take on a life of their own. They dance Karen away into the dark woods. Terrified, she tries to tear the shoes off but they have become one with her feet—she continues to dance through field and meadow, rain and shine for many days. While dancing through a graveyard she sees an angel who tells her she shall dance until she is cold and dead, and will continue to dance even when she is nothing but bones.

Karen dances unceasingly over hill and heath, and over thorns and branches until her skin is torn and bleeding. She eventually comes to the house of an executioner and begs him to chop off her feet, so that she can finally rest. The executioner does as Karen wishes and the shoes dance away with her little feet still in them. She kisses the hand that wielded the axe and he fashions her little wooden feet and a pair of crutches.

Karen now wishes to go to church to repent, but the red shoes, with her feet still in them, dance in front of the church doors so that Karen cannot enter. Karen weeps bitter tears in her narrow bare room and eventually the angel returns to her: He transforms her room into a church and as the organ plays, Karen becomes so full of peace and joy that her heart breaks and she dies.

A witch’s ugly daughter grows jealous of her step-sisters beautiful apron, so mother and daughter plot to kill the step-daughter. When the girls go to bed, the witch’s daughter is to lie near the wall, and the mother will chop off the step-child’s head as she sleeps. The step-daughter overhears this conversation, so when the step-sister falls asleep the beautiful sister pushes the ugly one to the edge of the bed, and lies by the wall.

In creeps the witch and chops off her own child’s head, then she goes to bed. The step-daughter then takes her sister’s dismembered head and drips the blood around the house; one drop of blood by the stove, one on the stairs and one by the bed – she then steals the witches wand and flees with her lover Roland.

In the morning the witch calls for her daughter and the first blood drop sings from the kitchen ‘’I am here warming myself’’, the second blood drop calls ‘’I am on the stairs’’ and the third calls out ‘’I am here by the bed’’. Then the witch finds her own daughters beheaded body lying in a pool of blood. In a rage, the witch puts on her many-league boots which can fathom a mile in an hour but when she catches up to the lovers, the girl turns her lover into a lake and herself into a duck.

The witch cannot entice the duck from the water, so returns home. The next day the girl turns herself into a flower in the middle of a bramble hedge and her lover turns into a fiddler. The witch comes by hunting for the lovers and spies the beautiful flower whom she recognizes as her step-daughter. As the witch reaches into the hedge to pick the flower, Roland begins playing the fiddle. The music is enchanted and the witch begins to dance around the bramble bush as the thorns tear at her clothes until she is naked. She continues to dance wildly round and round as her skin is shredded to ribbons and eventually she falls down dead.

This twisted little tale begins with a prince and princess who are brother and sister. The brother has to go away to war, and entrusts his beloved rose garden to his sister who must tend to it day and night. The princess pines away amongst her brothers roses, then quite mysteriously, she gives birth to a baby girl. The princess is deeply ashamed of the baby girl, who was born with a rose on her forehead. As the little girl grows the princess swears to her daughter every day that she will kill her if the girl should reveal her identity.

After 5 years the prince returns, and the princess swears to her daughter repeatedly that if she should reveal who she is to the prince her mother will kill her. The prince visits the little girl’s school but she refuses to eat the cherries he offers her. The other girls in her class eagerly eat the cherries, but become so excited that they begin to throw the fruit around and a cherry becomes lodged in the daughter’s hair. The next day the mother finds the cherry stuck in her daughters locks.

The mother, assuming the girl has removed her hood and revealed herself in the prince’s presence, stabs her comb violently into her little girls head, killing her. She then puts the girl into an iron chest and locks the chest in a room in the palace. The mother grows ill with guilt and eventually dies, entrusting the key to her brother and beseeching him never to open the door that the key belongs to. Once his sister is dead, the prince becomes lonely and takes a wife.

One day the prince goes away on a hunt and leaves the key with his wife, telling her not to open the locked door. His wife’s mother convinces her to open the door and they find the iron chest which they open to discover a beautiful young woman sitting inside happily sewing. Thinking the prince is keeping her in the chest for his own enjoyment, the mother and daughter pull the fair maiden out and burn the skin all over her face and body with a heated iron. When the prince comes home they tell him she is their new slave.

The prince eventually overhears the young slave telling her sorrowful story to a talisman, and realizing she is his niece (and possibly his daughter) he releases her and asks her how his wife should be punished. Mother and daughter are both burned all over with hot irons, then buried alive inside a wall to die slowly and miserably. The prince and his niece/daughter remain alone together in the castle and the prince never remarries because presumably she is all the company he needs. Now that’s one messed up family.

Go here to read The Maiden with the Rose on her Forehead in its entirety.

An Egyptian princess dons the garb of a wild swan, and flies to a distant marsh to gather a flower that will heal the king of Egypt. The princess removes her plumage and climbs naked into the marsh to gather the healing flowers, but the Marsh King pulls her down into the murky black depths beneath the water and rapes her. Many months pass and eventually a water lily opens on the surface of the water, inside the flower is a baby girl. A stork carries the baby to the wife of a Viking lord who names the little-girl Helga.

As Helga grows she becomes ever more beautiful, but she is evil and black of heart. She likes to splash about in the blood of animals and bite the heads off roosters. However, by night she turns into a hideous dwarf-sized frog that has a kind soul but can only croak mournfully.

When Helga is 16, the Viking lord captures a Christian priest. Helga begs that savage dogs be let loose upon the priest, but the Viking lord insists the priest is to be sacrificed upon the death-stone according to tradition. Helga gleefully stabs her knife into a dog, just to make sure the blade is sharp enough.

When night comes, the gentle frog Helga rescues the priest and they ride away together on Helga’s horse. In the morning however, the beautiful Helga tries to stab the priest but he enchants her with a symbol of the cross he makes out of two sticks and she becomes dumb and silent until they are confronted by a band of robbers. In the hopes of getting their hands on Helga, the robbers slice the horse’s neck with an axe and blood spurts out, then they smash the Christians head open with an iron hammer and his blood and brains are spattered around. The group of men then seize Helga but luckily for her the sun is setting and she turns back into a monstrously ugly frog. The terrified men flee.

Helga eventually makes the sign of the cross and her frog skin falls away as if by magic, never to return. She falls asleep and when she wakes she finds the ghosts of the dead priest and his dead horse standing before her. They ride away together to the marsh where Helga was conceived and the priest lifts Helga’s birth mother from the water. Then the phantoms of priest and horse vanish and Helga and her birth mother are left alone beside the marsh.

They return to Egypt where Helga is eventually married to an Arabian prince, but on the night of the wedding the spirit of the priest comes to Helga to show her what heaven looks like. After three minutes have passed in heaven she returns to Earth but finds that hundreds of years have gone by. Helga’s body turns to dust and all that is left of her is a faded water lily.

The post 10 Unusual Little-Known Fairy Tales appeared first on Listverse.

Starting in 1958, road inspector Nek Chand of Chandigarh, India, spent eighteen years keeping a surprisingly visible and beautiful secret. Using only discarded pieces of masonry and other garbage he found in a nearby dump, he developed his “rock garden” from a small pile of trash into a twelve acre array of statues, walkways, and walls.

The act was completely illegal, because it was on a public nature reserve—but it was such a winning display that following its 1976 discovery, people used themselves as human shields to prevent bulldozers and the like from demolishing it. The park still stands today, having been essentially adopted by India as a national treasure (and being visited by an average of 5,000 visitors a day.)

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Nina Paley was a New York-based animator going through an ugly divorce, when she stumbled upon the Ramayana, a Hindu epic. The unhealthy relationship of the gods Ramaya and Sita resonated with Paley, and so she spent five years writing, animating, and directing her eighty-two minute, private epic—all from her home computer.

Despite myriad copyright problems that came up with the music, and considerable anger from both left- and right-wing groups in the Hindu community, the movie managed to get worldwide distribution and a positive critical reception which included such celebrity opinion-makers as Roger Ebert.

Inspired by the copyright problems, Paley has made the movie free to view online.

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Dean Dodrill devoted three-and-a-half years to animating this gorgeous 2D RPG platformer. The game drew generally positive reviews, and sold tens of thousands of copies in its first year at $15 each.

Some took issue with the fact that the characters were all anthropomorphic animals (feeling that it made them part of a fetish group called “furries”), or with the fact that the second lead character, Fidget, was annoying—but there was little denying that the animation and fight programming was top of the line, even without bearing in mind that it was all done by one guy.

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Claiming divine inspiration from thirty years of dreams, beginning in 1959, Aba Defar has constructed four churches in Ethiopia. Well, he hasn’t so much constructed them as … carved them. Out of rock. With pick axes. They’re definitely austere in design, measuring about sixteen by thirty-two feet (5m by 10m) with four pillars—but they will easily outlast many conventionally-made, more decorative churches.

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Speaking of more decorative pieces of religious art, check out Leonard Knight’s massive painting in Niland, California. It’s three stories tall, one hundred feet (30m) wide, and came into existence in 1985. After four years, the first attempt collapsed—but 100,000 paint gallons later, it managed to remain standing, despite public protests that a religious work should not be allowed on public land. In recent years, Leonard Knight has become too feeble to maintain the installation, and a public effort to preserve the many sayings and murals of Salvation Mountain is underway.

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While Nina Paley’s feature length Sita Sings the Blues used some clever and corner-cutting flash animation for her story, former Disney animator Phil Nibbelink went with much more old-fashioned cel animation for his retelling of Shakespeare’s famous tragedy.

With 112,000 frames drawn on his home computer, the movie more or less captures the feel of a lesser Don Bluth film—right down to the fact that critics hated it, while audience reaction was lukewarm. Still, being a one-person project from an era which saw the release of the likes of Doogal and Delgo, its $463,000 gross makes it seem like a relative gold mine.

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As Scott Weaver describes in the above video, his toothpick sculpture—which he personally spent thirty-five years working on—might not be the world’s largest; but the others don’t exactly allow a ball to be rolled through them. Including an international array of 100,000 toothpicks, Scott Weaver will be putting it on display in San Francisco in April 2013.

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Stop-motion, an extremely dated and time consuming but still somewhat popular technique, was director Christine Cegavske’s method of choice for thirteen years when she made this 2005 film.  It’s a dialogue-free story about a collection of small crow-rat hybrids whose doll is stolen by villainous white mice.

It’s every bit as odd—and quietly creepy—as that implies. Nevertheless, it received very favorable reviews from such publications as the New York Times and Variety. One anecdote from behind the scenes that simply must be told is that Cegavske once walked into her studio only to find all of her dolls gone; eventually she learned that her mother had thrown them all away. Mothers never do quite understand.

This array (built by James Hampton) was—like the churches in Ethiopia—inspired by dreaming. Hampton was a janitor, who made this secret tribute to God during his off-hours over the course of fourteen years. The enormous art collection discovered after Hampton’s death was subsequently judged to be worthy of a Smithsonian Display.

The subject of a 2011 documentary, Simon Rodia’s seventeen towers—which took thirty-three years to build—might merely seem to be dangerous pieces of junk. In fact, Rodia did build them partly from junk, like Nek Chand did his rock garden.

The towers were for a time marked by the city of Los Angeles for demolition; they were considered unsafe, especially since the tallest of them reaches one hundred feet (30m). But stress tests were performed, and these revealed that the towers were more than strong enough to be allowed to remain standing—and so they were. In 2011, the New York Times reported that there had been trouble raising the support needed to maintain the towers, tourism and public support being limited both by their eccentric nature and by the fact that they’re in the L.A. equivalent of an obscure area.

Dustin Koski, by contrast, needed help from Caroline Evans to finish the book Six Dances to End the World.

The post 10 Amazing Pieces of Art Made By One Person appeared first on Listverse.

Ancient reliefs and carvings—being some of the most durable forms of art—can still be found at religious sites, tombs, and palaces. Most of the reliefs and carvings on this list are found at UNESCO World Heritage sites, and are seen as having significance to the legacy of mankind.

At the ruins of Arsameia in Turkey, you can visit the most ancient known relief carving of two figures shaking hands. The famous eleven-foot (3.5m) relief shows the father of Antiochus I of Commagene—King Mithridates—in royal apparel, shaking the hand of Hercules. Believed to have been created between 70 B.C. and 38 B.C., it is splendid to behold to this day.

The intricate carvings on the stone cliffs of Dazu are revered as the most sophisticated and exquisite of their time. Created between the ninth and thirteenth centuries AD, they are a clear testimony to the congenial and harmonious integration of religion, philosophy, and culture that China experienced during this epoch.

Their well-preserved condition make them stand out from the larger carvings found at many other national sites. Varying in size from very small to grandiose, over fifty thousand sculptures and one hundred thousand engravings and etchings can be seen in the sunlight—all of them connected via well-maintained passages and trails.

The cave temple on Gharapuri Island has been called one of the seven wonders of India. It was carved from the natural landscape in the fifth century, and hosts the embodiment of Indian art in the form of staggeringly beautiful carvings and statues. The carvings on the panels portray various Hindu deities, along with their attendants.

The most important and brilliant sculpture depicts the Trimurti. This twenty foot image was carved in relief at the back of the cave, and it presents the three-headed Shiva. To reach the temple, you have to travel from the Indian mainland to the island, traverse the mountain, and find your way through the caves.

The catacombs in Alexandria include tombs, sculptures, and other archaeological artifacts that blend Greek, Roman, and Egyptian features. Carved in the second century and in use as a cemetery until the fourth century, the catacombs were then forgotten until being rediscovered in 1900.

The most beautifully sculptured reliefs and carvings can be seen at the entrance to the temple and inside the main tomb; they feature Egyptian rituals, as well as various gods and deities. The Greek influence becomes more evident in the main tomb, where a relief carving depicts the shield of Athena with Medusa’s head pictured on it.

The temple at Angkor Wat has the distinction of being the largest religious monument in the world. Its allure brings more than a million visiting tourists every year. Built in the twelfth century, it is admired not only for its massive size, but also for the tremendous intricacy of the reliefs and the assorted devatas (minor female deities) that adorn the temple walls.

In fact, hundreds of artists carved practically the whole temple—from the pillars, to the lintels, to the roofs. The extensive reliefs mainly portray scenes from the ancient Hindu epics, and they stretch for miles.

Built by Darius the Great around 515 B.C., the palace must have been a wonder to behold. Massive columns—of which thirteen remained standing by the twentieth century—supported the roof. The staircases were embellished with rows of reliefs that displayed successions of delegates, soldiers, guards, and chariots carrying presents and offerings to honor the king. The front walls of the palace were carved with images of the Immortals of 300 fame—the Persian Kings’ noble guard.

Sanchi is a small village in India that is famous for its stupas, or Buddhist memorials. The most noteworthy of these is the “Great Stupa,” constructed in the third century B.C. The most phenomenal relief and stone carvings in Sanchi are the Toranas, which were placed strategically around the Great Stupa. These are carved with scenes depicting the life cycles of the Buddha. No spot was left bare on any of the Toranas; one even features a sculpture of Yakshini upholding a trestle architrave.

Various memorials were built in and around the town of Mahabalipuram between the seventh and ninth centuries A.D., and today four of them are recognized as World Heritage sites. “Descent of the Ganges” or “Arjuna’s Penance”—recognized worldwide as the world’s largest preserved open-air relief—measures ninety-six feet (29m) long by forty-three feet (13m) high, and was carved from monolithic rock.

Two different but equally flattering interpretations exist as to the artwork’s symbolism. Either Arjuna or Shiva appear to the left of the shrine, and on the right hand side, life-sized elephants shield their young beneath a legion of creatures, all flawlessly suspended for aeons to come.

The carvings of Taq-e Bostan lie along the historic Silk Road caravan route in the Zagros Mountains. The exquisite and wonderfully preserved artworks were created between A.D. 226 and A.D. 650, during the rule of the Sassanid Dynasty. The site’s brilliant location, next to a historic waypoint and campground, would have ensured that every traveller saw its splendor—splendor that has remained largely unchanged for the past seventeen hundred years. The artworks include two beautiful arches that depict crowning ceremonies, hunting scenes, as well as various Sassanid patterns. The majesty of the carved mountain is reflected in an adjacent pool of water, which itself is fed from a sacred spring.

The largest stone Buddha in existence was carved out of a cliff face in the Sichuan province around A.D. 713. The construction was begun by a monk, who hoped that the Buddha’s presence would pacify the tumultuous river. It is said that so much stone was deposited in the river during its construction that the currents were indeed changed, making the waters safer for passing ships. An exceptional drainage system that is still in working order today was integrated into the artwork—keeping it safe from water run-off.

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The majority of his work shows up overnight on billboards—illegally—like the now famous “Camel Kid” ads featuring a young Joe Camel offering cigarettes to kids, or the McDonald’s ads featuring an overweight Ronald McDonald and some not-quite-subtle comparisons to idol worship.

But it’s with Ron English’s oil paintings that he really brings to life a unique mash-up between the classic and the modern. Sometimes the message is obvious; sometimes it’s a little more open to interpretation. Here are ten of his best pop culture versions of famous paintings, with some boring art history drivel on the side.

The Starry Night is one of the most famous paintings by Vincent van Gogh. It shows a stylized version of the town of Saint-Remy as seen from the window of the mental hospital where van Gogh was living at the time, in 1889.

According to Ron English, what he saw out of his window was a sea of advertisements, and with that he made his own version, entitled McStarry.

The Virgin of the Lilies is a painting by William Bouguereau from 1899. It shows a peaceful Virgin Mary holding the infant Jesus, who even as a child has assumed a pose of authority with his outstretched arms. The halos around their heads were typical of Catholic art from that time period.

As another statement on pop culture gods, English’s version puts the well-known KISS face paint over the two subjects, effectively turning Mary into Gene Simmons and Jesus into Paul Stanley.

In 1863, a daguerreotype, a form of print made on a copper plate, was created of Abraham Lincoln. This single image is where most of our modern perception of Abraham Lincoln comes from.

In 2008, Ron English created Abraham Obama, a surprisingly subtle amalgamation of the faces of both presidents. This has since become one of his most famous political images, unless of course you want to count Incredible Barack.

After the village of Guernica was bombed in 1937, Pablo Picasso created this massive oil painting, entitled Guernica, in an attempt to capture the suffering of the villagers. It has since become one of his most popular pieces and is often held up as a symbol for anti-war efforts.

Ron English’s version features grade-school children in the same horrific poses as the original, surrounded by carousel animals while a young boy in the center drops bombs from a toy airplane. It’s entitled Guernica Go-Round. He also created this one, which features Mickey Mouse dropping bombs from the plane.

The Luncheon On The Grass, or Le dejeuner sur l’herbe in French, was painted by Edouard Manet. The original itself was shocking at the time for featuring a woman who is not only nude, but nude despite the two men she’s with, who are fully clothed. Even more unusual is the way the two men seem to be holding a conversation and ignoring the woman completely.

The Ron English version sort of speaks for itself. It’s the same painting, but the figures are replaced with Peanuts characters Charlie Brown, Lucy, and Sally. The roles are also reversed—Charlie Brown is the nude, while Lucy and Sally are clothed.

Andy Warhol almost single-handedly created the American pop art movement, and the most enduring image from the time is his silkscreen print series of Marilyn Monroe, which he created after her death in 1962.

Ron English took the sex symbol in a new direction in his own version, which is actually more of an homage than a “version.” His oil painting features Marilyn Monroe topless with the face of Mickey Mouse in place of each breast. The background of the painting has a repeating series of Mickeys with Marilyn’s hair in a shifting color pattern.

In 1964, Rene Magritte painted the surrealist The Son of Man, which has a man in a suit and a bowler hat, with an apple in front of his face. The artist described the painting as an example of how everything that can be seen is actually hiding something else.

In Stereo Magritte, Ron English recreated the man and the apple, but placed them beside another subject—a skeleton wearing the same clothes as the man, with a spoiled apple core in front of his face, probably signifying life and death.

Edvard Munch’s The Scream is probably the most recognizable painting in the world. There are actually four versions of The Scream, which were done at the end of the 19th century.

Ron English’s version, Harmonic Scream, is quite a bit different. In keeping with his usual style, the figures in the painting are most likely members of a band.

From 1893 to 1900, Claude Monet created a series of paintings that focused on a bridge over a small pond on his property. This series contains some of the most famous pieces of the Impressionist period.

The version by Ron English uses noticeably darker colors and features the “Bunny Rabbit,” a creepy figure that shows up in a lot of other Ron English paintings as well. While the background and foreground are painted in the style of Monet, the Rabbit is a lot crisper and more modern looking.

The Last Supper is one of the most iconic paintings in the world, depicting Jesus Christ sitting down for his final meal with his twelve disciples. It was painted in the late 1400′s by Leonardo da Vinci.

According to Ron English, with different times come different gods, and so we get his take, Super Supper. The parallels are obvious, and it makes an incredible visual. There’s another version here.

The post 10 Pop Culture Versions Of Famous Paintings appeared first on Listverse.

Misconception: He wouldn’t treat an innocent person badly just to solve a case.

Many people see Sherlock Holmes as a white knight of the detective world: he solves cases using only the power of his mind and innocent people never get hurt in the process. He is universally beloved as the greatest fictional detective in the world, but he had more of a dark side than just his drug use and other eccentric habits. Sherlock Holmes was not at all averse to doing whatever it took to win a case, and he often played the game for the games own sake. In one story The Adventure of Charles Augustus Milverton, he becomes engaged to a housemaid to get closer to a villain he is trying to expose. After he solves the case, he simply leaves the woman, presumably upsetting her greatly. He never makes any effort to explain the situation to her and we never hear about it again. He also employed a small group of street urchins to do his dirty work, which he affectionately called “The Baker Street Irregulars.” We see them in The Sign of the Four, A Study in Scarlet, and The Adventure of the Crooked Man.

Misconception: Sherlock Holmes was a socially-forward thinker

In The Adventure of the Three Gables Sherlock Holmes engages in some very cruel and racist conversations with black people. He basically calls a black boxer stupid based on his skin color and then goes so far as to make fun of the size of his lips. An excerpt from Holmes encounter with Steve Dixie, a black boxer: “‘That’s my name, Masser Holmes, and you’ll get put through it for sure if you give me any lip.’ ‘It is certainly the last thing you need,’ said Holmes, staring at our visitor’s hideous mouth.” After The boxer left Sherlock Holmes comments: “I am glad you were not forced to break his woolly head, Watson. I observed your maneuvers with the poker. But he is really rather a harmless fellow, a great muscular, foolish, blustering baby, and easily cowed, as you have seen.” There are other times where more commonplace comments are made about people from Africa in general, that are somewhat disparaging. There are a couple of important things to note, however. When the stories were written, these attitudes were fairly commonplace, it doesn’t excuse them, but it doesn’t make the character much different from anyone else in England at the time. It is also interesting to note that many scholars believe The Adventure of the Three Gables, which had the most obvious racism, was actually a forgery and not written by Arthur Conan Doyle at all. This would not be particularly surprising as Sherlock Holmes fan fiction has been popular for a long time.

Misconception: Sherlock Holmes withholds information from the police.

In the recent Sherlock Holmes movies, he is pictured taking evidence from crime scenes and hiding it from the police on multiple occasions. This allows him to stay several steps ahead at all times and ensures he solves the case before they do. The only problem here is that this is totally the opposite of how he behaved in the books. Sherlock Holmes would always leave enough evidence for the police to figure out the same things he did if they were so inclined as we see in The Adventure of the Devils Foot. And he would often share information with them if he thought they were pursuing a useless line of inquiry, which we can see in The Adventure of Wisteria Lodge. Sherlock Holmes stayed ahead of the police because he was simply better at deduction than they were; it does a disservice to his character to suggest that he would ever misappropriate evidence.

Misconception: Holmes trusts his best friend Dr. Watson.

Sherlock Holmes’s best friend is Dr. John Watson, and he relies on him as his biographer and companion, especially on very dangerous missions. The pair are incredibly close and remain good friends throughout most of their lives. Holmes even comments that he would be “lost without his Boswell,” in reference to the famous 18th century biographer of Samuel Johnson. However, while Holmes may have trusted his best friend to defend him in a scrape, and trusted his medical knowledge, he does not truly trust Dr. Watson. In The Hound of the Baskervilles, Holmes sends Dr. Watson to keep an eye on the situation at Baskerville hall, and then sneaks out to the moor to keep an eye on the situation himself rather than trusting his friends account. And to make matters worse he does not even tell Dr. Watson of his arrival. Also, in The Adventure of the Dying Detective, he tricks his best friend into thinking he is dying of a deadly disease because he does not believe that Dr. Watson would be able to keep the secret that he was faking it if he told him. While he claims respect for Dr. Watson’s medical skills, it’s a poor show that he doesn’t think his friend could go along with his game.

Misconception: Holmes dresses in an eccentric manner and is often dirty or unkempt.

Not all movies are guilty of this particular offense, but the horrible monstrosity that was the recent two part movie series with Robert Downey Jr is a huge offender. Robert Downey Jr portrays Holmes as dressing in an extremely eccentric manner, including ill fitting clothes, strange ensembles that don’t make sense and as having a general air of bad hygiene. However, Sherlock Holmes is actually described in The Hound of the Baskervilles as having a cat like approach to cleanliness. He dressed in very traditional, conservative clothes for his time and was always impeccably neat. In fact, in The Hound of the Baskervilles, Sherlock Holmes is out on the moor investigating a case in secret, living in an old shack, and still arranges to have fresh linen and other luxuries brought to him so that he can remain neat and clean.

Misconception: Holmes is always seen with a deerstalker cap and calabash pipe.

The popular conception of Holmes with his deerstalker cap and calabash pipe has become so common that it is considered an iconic part of Sherlock’s Holmes persona. However, it is also a complete fabrication. The deerstalker cap and calabash pipe combo was made up for theater and has never been a part of Sherlock’s normal outfit. The calabash pipe was originally used by the actor in one of the original Sherlock Holmes plays because it was easy to rest on his chest while he was talking. But in fictional reality, Holmes used a much different pipe. This might sound like nitpicking, but the calabash pipe and deerstalker cap combo have become synonymous with Sherlock Holmes, or detectives in general though it is entirely inaccurate.

Misconception: Dr. Watson and Sherlock Holmes are middle-aged gentlemen.

In popular culture many people view Sherlock Holmes and his friend Dr. Watson as somewhere around middle age, getting older and quite experienced. It’s fairly easy to make this mistake, because Dr. Watson had already served in the war and was a skilled doctor, and Holmes had created quite a reputation for himself. However, Holmes and Watson were actually both quite young, in their early twenties for most of their adventures. Holmes and Dr. Watson were close in age, and Holmes was said to be born in 1854 and Dr. Watson met him in 1881. Most of their adventures spanned the first few years they became friends, which would place them in their late twenties and still quite young. The explanation for how they could accomplish so much at a young age is very simple; they were both brilliant young men. While Dr. Watson is easily overshadowed by his friend, he was quite an intelligent man, very skilled at practicing medicine and conducted himself very well during the war.

Misconception: He never spent more than a couple months on a case and retired relatively young.

There is some truth to this; Holmes solved most cases with extraordinary speed. And he had intended to retire young. Holmes had retired to a quiet life of studying bees and even published what he called “the magnum opus of his latter years,” which was a book about his observations learned from beekeeping. However, the government had a problem; they were losing information to the other side and losing agents and could not figure out who was behind it. After several high up government officials intervened, Holmes finally agreed to take the case in the story His Last Bow. In the end Holmes catches up with the German secret agent who was causing all the trouble, and teams up with Dr. Watson for the final act. He reveals to Dr. Watson that his plan to defeat the German agent was so convoluted it involved him joining an Irish secret society in America for two full years, just to get at one agent. We can safely say that Holmes was nothing if not thorough.

Misconception: Irene Adler was Sherlock’s love interest.

Many movies and TV specials felt that to increase viewer eyeballs, they needed to give Sherlock Holmes a love interest. We can see a dramatized example of this in the recent films where Robert Downey Jr plays a bisexual, eccentric playboy who is in love with both Irene Adler and his friend Dr. Watson. Holmes had an ongoing love affair with Irene Adler, so it was perfect, right? Except that is completely untrue. Irene Adler is only mentioned in one story, A Scandal in Bohemia, and the only thing she says to him is “Good-night, Mister Sherlock Holmes,” while disguised as a passerby. Sherlock later describes her as “the woman,” but only because she was the only woman to ever best him at anything. He respected her intellect, but had no romantic inclinations toward her and we never hear of her again. If you need any more evidence, Arthur Conan Doyle described Sherlock Holmes as “inhuman as a Babbage’s calculating machine,” and felt his famous detective was not at all interested in romance.

Misconception: Professor James Moriarty was his arch-enemy.

Contrary to the popular notion that has been ingrained in us by so many television series and movies on the subject, Professor Moriarty was hardly Sherlock Holmes arch-nemesis. Moriarty actually only appears in one story, The Final Problem, he is also mentioned briefly in The Valley of Fear but only in the vein of giving paid consultation to other criminals. As far as him facing off against Holmes there is really no such evidence of it ever happening, apart from their famous battle at the Reichenbach falls. In fact, Arthur Conan Doyle had tired of the character of Holmes and wanted to move on to other projects, so he mainly just made up the conflict between Moriarty and Holmes so he could kill his most famous character, but the fans raised such an outcry that he reluctantly brought the detective back from the dead. Hardly has there ever been a character with so much popularity that people wore black armbands in the streets to mourn his death.

Everyone loves Sherlock Holmes so we have a competition to win the complete collection. This collection includes all four novels and fifty-six short stories. To enter the competition you simply have to comment on this list. Your comment should be related to this list and should not be an obvious attempt to win—in other words, don’t comment just for the sake of commenting. When tomorrow’s lists are published, the five comments with the highest upvotes will be chosen from this list to win the prize—so you get to pick the winners with your votes! We will notify the winners by email (if registered) or via a reply here. We will also name the winners on the Listverse Facebook Page. There is no limit to the number of comments per person. Remember—the more upvotes your comment gets, the better your chances of winning so email your friends and tell them to vote!

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The Moral: Evil always wins

The Shadow is a bleak Hans Christian Andersen tale about a goodhearted writer who loses his shadow. Years later it turns up on his doorstep, having seen the world and decided being goodhearted is for sissies. In the months that follow the two live together—the writer being good and becoming poorer and unhealthier; and the shadow being a dick and becoming richer and fatter. Finally, the shadow offers the writer a trip to a health resort—all-expenses paid—so long as the writer agrees to switch places and become his shadow. At the resort they meet a princess; the shadow woos her and hatches a plot to take the writer’s place permanently. Wow, how will the writer get out of this one?

Spoiler: by being executed. When he realizes the shadow’s plan the writer tries to stop him; only to be arrested while the shadow marries the princess. He disappears and—as an afterthought, we’re later told he was executed. The good man dies and the evil doppelgänger gets to marry royalty and continue being a dick. Nice.

The Moral: Jews deserve punishment

The Grimms’ The Good Bargain starts as an entertaining yarn about a stupid peasant, before metamorphosing into a drunken Mel Gibson rant. Encountering a money-lender so caricatured he might as well be called Shylock; the peasant decides to screw with him. After tricking him into taking a beating in his place, he takes the money-lender’s coat. Naturally perturbed by his recent ass-whuppin’, the money-lender reports him to the palace and the peasant is arrested. Asked to explain himself, the peasant replies: “What a Jew says is always a lie. No true word ever comes out his mouth. That rascal is even capable of claiming I have his coat on.”

When the money-lender tries to reclaim his coat, he “proves” the peasant’s point and gets another beating. As ridiculous as this is, it’s got nothing on The Jew Among Thorns. In this Nazi-favorite a servant is given a magic fiddle that can make anyone dance; she uses it to force a passing Jew into dancing among thorns until his skin is flayed off . As justification for mutilating a complete stranger, the servant simply says: “[Jews] have fleeced people often enough, and now the thorns shall do the same to you.” No wonder Hitler loved these tales.  

The Moral: Humiliation lasts forever

Do you spend your life terrified you’ll screw up in front of someone with a smartphone and become an internet sensation? Turns out the ancient Arabs did. In this tale from the 1,001 Nights, Abu Hasan gets drunk and accidentally let’s rip in a monumental way. Mortified he runs away, only to be pursued across the world by his humiliation; like an early-Islamic Star Wars Kid.

A decade later he emerges from hiding and makes his way back home to find his earth-shaking fart has gone down in history and he’s a national laughing stock. Because that’s the sort of message you want to send your kids: mess up now and people will laugh at you forever.

The Moral: If someone teases you, kill a baby

When not letting the bad guy win, Hans Christian Andersen liked to indulge in arbitrary infanticide. The Storks starts out as a worthy successor to his Ugly Duckling—a bunch of baby storks are learning to fly while the neighborhood children mock and jeer them. So what happens? The storks stick it out, learn to fly and rise both literally and figuratively above the bullying, right? . . . Wrong.

It turns out these are the same storks that bring babies. When they’ve learnt to fly and it comes time to deliver some squealing infants, they make note of the kid who bullied them the worst and deliver him a dead sibling. Bear in mind they do it specifically to take revenge, and the story clearly states the kid they’re about to traumatize is six years old. What the hell, Denmark?

The Moral: Do what your man tells you

You know the story of Bluebeard. A girl marries a guy with an all-over blue rinse, who tells her she can go anywhere in the house, except for the locked room. Because telling someone they can’t do a specific thing is the easiest way to ensure they do it. She unlocks the door and finds the remains of his previous wives. Bluebeard then tries to add her to his Leatherface collection and only fails when her brothers arrive in the nick of time.

What’s sinister about Bluebeard is that the message is identical to the mantra of abusive husbands everywhere: “do as you’re told and you won’t get hurt.” The one point in the story where the girl shows initiative, she nearly pays for it with her life. Thankfully Angela Carter got her hands on the tale centuries later; rewriting it as a kickass feminist parable.

The Moral: Repay kindness with genocide

Molly Whuppie is an old Scottish folktale that teaches you to repay your hosts with mass murder. Abandoned by their parents, Molly and her sisters seek refuge in a house. The woman who lives there agrees to feed them, as long as they eat up and get out before the giant she’s married to returns. Because it takes more than a flesh-eating monster to scare a Scot, Molly mucks around and is still there when the hungry giant comes knocking.

Guess what Molly does while the wife begs her husband to spare their guests? Robs the place, tricks the giant into murdering his children, and finally into murdering his wife. That’s the same wife who was just pleading for Molly’s life. How’s that for gratitude?

The Moral: Necrophilia will save your life

In this tale of warring farmers Hans Christian Andersen really outdid himself. Amidst all the carnage, one scene is conjured that almost makes the extortion, murder and suicide of the rest of the story pale into insignificance; thanks to its disturbing overtones of necrophilia.

For reasons too complicated to explain, Big Claus wants to murder Little Claus. To this end he waits until midnight, climbs through the window and buries an axe in the human form resting in the bed. Looks like he’s succeeded; until we discover Little Claus isn’t in the bed, because that’s where he keeps his dead Grandmother.

Honestly; the amount of explanation we get is so sparse we can only conclude the worst. When Andersen mentions Little Claus sleeping in a chair beside the body “as he had done many times before,” the insinuation that Little Claus is the Norman Bates of fairy tales becomes pretty much overt. To top it all off, Little Claus is meant to be the hero.

The Moral: You can prevent rape by stripping

The version of Red Riding Hood we all know involves a big bad wolf eating a pensioner, eating her granddaughter and finally getting cut open by a woodsman. Older versions skip out the ‘cut open by a woodsman’ part, ending the tale with Red Riding Hood dead; but even older versions end with Red Riding Hood eating her grandmother then doing a striptease. Dear God, what?

It sounds like the synopsis for Rob Zombie’s next film, but early folktales were often sexual, and Red Riding Hood can be traced back to the tenth century. In some versions she takes off her clothes and is eaten by the wolf (a metaphor for being raped); in others he starts some, shall we say, DIY and she escapes. And yet others involve defecation. What they all have in common though, is their utterly shitty moral: if someone murders your grandmother and tricks you into eating her remains: take off your clothes. You’ll make a serial killer very happy.

The Moral: You can get away with murder

The original edition of Grimm’s Tales carried two versions of How the Children Played Butcher . . . . Both start with some children watching a pig being slaughtered and deciding to play at being butcher. Both then involve a scene where a child slits another child’s throat as part of the game. One version subsequently takes the Death Wish route by having the mother of the slaughtered child murder his killer, accidentally kill another child and then commit suicide. All the while the other has the killer-child arrested, only to be let off without punishment. Both versions are super-violent, and both were banned in Germany after the war for creating Hitler.

It’s true; occupying forces were so sure of the tale’s contribution to atrocities that they made it illegal, along with nearly all the Grimm’s works. In his respected study on German Nationalism, Louis Snyder argued that the tales morals were often nationalistic, authoritarian and violently racist. The Nazis themselves used them as propaganda. German author, Gunter Birkenfeld, even claimed the seeds of Auschwitz lay in their pages. Now, most of us are probably dubious about the effect of violent fiction on people’s actions, but still. In any count down like this, the most sinister moral of all should always be the one that ends in Hitler.

Because we all love fairy tales, we are giving away five copies of the Grimm Brothers annotated fairy tales. The copy we are giving away is the 200th anniversary edition. It contains all the fairy tales you should ever need to satisfy your lust for gruesome and creepy tales—uncensored. To enter the competition you simply have to comment on this list. Your comment should be related to this list and should not be an obvious attempt to win—in other words, don’t comment just for the sake of commenting. When tomorrow’s lists are published, the five comments with the highest upvotes will be chosen from this list to win the prize—so you get to pick the winners with your votes! We will notify the winners by email (if registered) or via a reply here. We will also name the winners on the Listverse Facebook Page. There is no limit to the number of comments per person. You can click the “Facebook” button directly below this to share it with your friends – remind them to vote for your comment.

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