Natalie Colgate

In 2005 the Royal Mint incorrectly spelled the word ‘Remember’ on a batch of £2 coins made to mark the anniversary of the Gunpowder plot.

The error remained officially unnoticed until 2010 when a man in Suffolk (Mr Albi Pinnion) noticed the mistake while at a pub.  More have since been found and they now fetch around £10 on eBay among coin collectors.

Mr Pinnion has also found several other coins with different spelling mistakes on them, for a more detailed article on this, see Small World’s post.

There’s a reason why the medical world are serious about putting you under general anesthetic before a surgery.

In a Reuters article, according to Dr Nicholas Schiff of Weill Cornell Medical College in New York, it is more like a coma than a deep sleep. Despite this, doctors still refer to it as ‘putting you to sleep’.

Apparently, when you’re in a coma your brain operates on a specific phase dampening your neurons, whereas during sleep your brain goes through several phases.  During general anesthesia, your brain operates on the same specific phase as it it would in a coma.

An unknown phenomena has resulted in more than 3000 blackbirds falling from the sky in Arkansas in January 2011.  Whether they died on impacting the ground, or fell to the ground because they died, is still a mystery.

To get you started, see National Geographic’s article and The Blaze’s article for photos and a bit more on this topic.

Lake Chargoggagoggmanchauggagoggchaubunagungamaugg has reportedly been incorrectly spelled on road signs in Webster, Massachusetts.

‘Chargoggagoggmanchaoggagoggchaubunaguhgamaugg’ has been deemed an incorrect spelling and ‘Chargoggagoggmanchauggauggagoggchaubunagungamaugg’ has been noted as the second most commonly misspelt variation of the word.  It has now been agreed that ‘Chargoggagoggmanchauggagoggchaubunagungamaugg’ is the new accepted correct spelling.

Confused yet? The locals take the easy route and call it Lake Webster instead.

For a photo of the Lake in a Metro article on this topic, click here.

David Hewson has shared an excellent editing feature for the famously irritating, yet brilliant program, Microsoft Word.  The feature allows two documents to scroll simultaneously while editing (and physically scrolling) only one.

He cautions that if you have a several revisions in one of the documents it will cause the pages to become different lengths the windows could go out of sync.  His solution is to deselect the Synchronous Scrolling option, align the documents again, select Reset Window Position, then sync again.

See his full post on davidhewson.com

Some people can’t stop themselves correcting another person’s grammar and some people don’t mind such feedback.  Most people however hate being corrected by anyone but especially by their partner on the first date.  Reese Witherspoon famously admitted that she was not impressed when her date corrected her.  Write Well’s blog post on this topic elaborates a bit more.

Debretts, the modern authority on Etiquette, says “there is a fine line between interest and intrusion” and “a good conversationalist strikes a perfect balance between talking and listening. By picking up threads as they go along they create a multi-layered conversation and a sense of intimacy – the other person feels sure that they are listening, and interested.”

The rule of thumb could be to only correct someone else’s grammar for three reasons:

1. you’re the speaker’s parent
2. you’re an English teacher
3. you’ve been paid to correct the speaker’s grammar, such as assisting a toastmaster with his/her speech

The English language has doubled in size over the last century.  Since 1950, English has reportedly expanded by 70 percent.

In the new millennium Google found that English was expanding by 8500 words a year and our language apparently now stands at a count of 1022000 words.  However, nearly half of the newer words are not in dictionaries due to their slang or jargon origins.

See the full article from The Telegraph.

Guardian.co.uk has published a page quoting a health.com (US health website) that lists artists and writers as being in the top ten professions where people are depressed.

Ad hoc paychecks, irregular hours and isolation are a key feature in these professions and many famous authors have suffered from the side effects.  Ernest Hemmingway and Virginia Woolfe committed suicide and many creative people are well known to have mood swings.

For further reading, see the full articles at guardian.co.uk and/or health.com.