Nonsense

Nonsense. We all encounter some of it every day. And the most nonsensical thing of all is that some apparent nonsense turns out to be logical after all.

Here are some random thoughts on nonsense, and the perfect place to start is with the month of November.

• November, the eleventh month, comes from the Roman word for “ninth”. It was the ninth month on the Roman calendar. But we use the Gregorian calendar resulting in our eleventh month being named nine.

• Cold-blooded animals don’t always have cold blood, in fact, their blood and bodies are often much warmer than ours, the warm-blooded creatures. Cold-blooded animals have body temperatures that are the same as the air and surfaces around them. The term cold-blooded has confused countless children when I do science programs, and I do give them the correct term which is “ectothermic”. I agree with the scientists who want “cold-blooded” to be tossed in the garbage bin of words.

• Upper Egypt is at the bottom or southern part of Egypt, and Lower Egypt is at the top of Egypt. These names appear to make no sense at all, however, a logical explanation exists. The correct term for the place where a river empties into a larger body of water is the lower part of the river. Since the Nile River flows north, the lower part is at the top of the map and the upper part is at the bottom. Again, it’s a true challenge to explain this to a group of children.

• To raze a house, you tear it down. But you can also raise the roof, raise children, raise a garden or raise your spirits, none of which have anything to do with tearing something down.

• Ever since my childhood, I have never understood how “robin red breast” got that name. The breast is clearly orange. Look at a cardinal or red-headed woodpecker if you want to see red.

• I frequently find myself driving down a highway behind a truck from the Yellow Trucking Company. The word “Yellow” is painted in bright orange paint as is the entire truck. I finally looked up this nonsense and found out why Yellow is orange. In 1924, A. J. Harrell founded a bus and taxi company called Yellow Cab Transit. In 1929, he branched into trucking and became the Yellow Transit Company. Concerned with road safety for his fleet of trucks, he commissioned the chemists at DuPont to determine the color that would be most visible from the greatest distance on the nation’s highways. They came up with the color “Swamp Holly Orange”. It is still used on all their trucks.

• And, finally, as you drive down the highway, buckle up your seat belt. But don’t drive on a bridge that is about to buckle.

3