Mercy

Preserves are like jam but made with more whole fruit. Marmalade is preserves made from citrus fruit.

The difference between jam and jelly is that jam is made with mashed-up fruit while jelly is made with fruit juice.

Pound cake got its name because the original recipe required a pound each of butter, flour, sugar and eggs. That’s a lot of cake—but it was meant to last for a long time.

What’s inside a Kit Kat? Broken Kit Kats that are damaged during production—they get ground up and go between the wafers inside, along with cocoa and sugar. That’s a way to not let anything go to waste!

Almost all commercially grown artichokes (99.9 percent) come from California. One town in particular, Castroville, is nicknamed “the Artichoke Capital of the World.”

The different colors of Froot Loops cereal all taste the same—they’re not individual flavors.

Hawaiian pizza was created in Ontario, Canada, by Greek immigrant Sam Panopoulos in 1962

German chocolate cake doesn’t come from Germany. It was named for a person, Sam German, who created a type of baking chocolate for Baker’s in 1852.

Mary Shelley wrote Frankenstein when she 18, during a ghost story competition while staying in Switzerland with writers Percy Shelley (her lover) and Lord Byron.

The original title of Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice was First Impressions.

Among lost works, this story might be even worse: Ernest Hemingway’s first wife, Hadley, left a suitcase full of the author’s writing on a train. When she went back to get it, it was gone. “I had never seen anyone hurt by a thing other than death or unbearable suffering except Hadley when she told me about the things being gone,” Hemingway wrote i…[Read more]

The dog ate John Steinbeck’s homework—literally. The author’s pup chewed up an early version of Of Mice and Men. “I was pretty mad, but the poor fellow may have been acting critically,” he wrote.

A mash-up of two words to make a new word (such as breakfast and lunch into brunch, or motel from motor and hotel) is called a portmanteau. In case you’re wondering, the word “portmanteau” itself is not a portmanteau; it’s a compound word that refers to a duel-sided suitcase.

Cartoonist Mort Walker, creator of Beetle Bailey, came up with names for the things we often see in comics and cartoons: “briffit” is the dust cloud a character makes when he runs away quickly; “plewds” are the beads of sweat when a character is under duress; and “grawlix” are symbols such as “#@*%” that stand in for curse words.

The word “strengths” is the longest word in the English language with only one vowel.

There is not one letter “q” in any US state name, the only letter in the alphabet to be missing. “J” and “Z” are only represented once each—in New Jersey and Arizona.

The origin of the word “sinister” reflects a historical bias against left-handed people. It comes from the Latin word for “left,” which was also seen to be unlucky or evil.

The longest fingernails ever were over 42 feet in total and belonged to American Diana Armstrong, recognized as the new record holder in March 2022. The previous record was held by American Lee Redmond, with fingernails over 28 feet in total.

According to recent research, the human nose can distinguish at least a trillion different odors.

All of an adult human’s blood vessels, if laid out end to end, would be about 100,000 miles, so they could encircle the earth four times