According to the book Texas Folk Medicine, by John Q. Anderson, an old folk remedy in Tarrant County for curing stuttering was to hit the patient in the mouth with the shank bone from a newly killed calf. In Navarro County, it was advised to never let babies see their image in a mirror before learning to talk, or you ran the risk of them growing up to stutter.
A Mexico City restaurant can’t serve $27 tarantula tacos because the Mexican red rump tarantula is a protected species.
Some sculptures depict the person looking up and to the left. This is sometimes called a Lysippean gaze, named for the sculptor Lysippos, who did a sculpture of Alexander the Great with a similar look, supposedly looking off into the distance at the lands he was going to conquer.
Michelangelo depicted the forbidden fruit eaten by Adam and Eve as a fig, not an apple.
“Tear gas” is two words as a noun, one word as a verb, as in “He teargassed the crowd with tear gas.”
This article appears in November 16 • 2018.