They may be small characters, but there are amazing stories behind all 26 alphabet all-stars
B GRAB PAPER and pen and start writing down every number as a word. Do you notice one missing letter? If you kept going, you wouldn’t use a single letter b until you reached one billion.
C BENJAMIN Franklin wanted to banish c from the alphabet—along with j, q, w, x, and y—and replace them with six letters he’d invented himself. He claimed that he could simplify the English language.
D CONTRARY TO popular belief, the D in D-day does not stand for “doom” or “death”—it stands for “day.” The military marks important operations and invasions with a D as a placeholder. (So June 5, 1944, was D-1.)
E MEET THE “Smith” of the English alphabet—e is used more often than any other letter. It appears in 11 percent of all words, according to an analysis of more than 240,000 entries in the Concise Oxford English Dictionary.
F ANYONE EDUCATED in today’s school system knows that the lowest grade you can get is an F. The low-water mark, however, used to be represented by the letter E. When Mount Holyoke College administrators redesigned the grading system in 1898, professors worried that students would think the grade meant “excellent.” F more obviously stands for “fail.”
Diese Geschichte stammt aus der November 2018-Ausgabe von Reader's Digest US.
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Diese Geschichte stammt aus der November 2018-Ausgabe von Reader's Digest US.
Starten Sie Ihre 7-tägige kostenlose Testversion von Magzter GOLD, um auf Tausende kuratierte Premium-Storys sowie über 8.000 Zeitschriften und Zeitungen zuzugreifen.
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Do You Kiss Your Dog? - Find out how gross your questionable habits really are, according to health experts
I admit it, when it comes to food, I have some eeew-inducing practices, like skimming mold off old cheddar and feeding the rest to my unsuspecting family. We're still alive, so how bad can it be? Because our gross human habits fall somewhere along the spectrum from mildly cringeworthy to full-on repulsive, I reached out to experts to find out where some common behaviors land on the gross-o-meter.
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Now Hear This
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The soulful stew synonymous with Louisiana is delicious anywhere you eat it
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