The OK on health, music and mind games
‘Motels booked up as quake evacuees head south’ reads one headline about Christchurch after the quake. How alien if accurate a word is evacuee when it applies to our own people fleeing from their own patch…. It’s something you read in media about other places, but never here. ********** When did we first say OK? The BBC has the answer in a great backgrounder to this now universal word (see http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-12503686 ) It says in part…. ‘On 23 March 1839, OK was introduced to the world on the second page of the Boston Morning Post, in the midst of a long paragraph, as "o.k. " (all correct). OK may have originated from a comical misspelling. How this weak joke survived at all, instead of vanishing like its counterparts, is a matter of lucky coincidence involving the American presidential election of 1840. One candidate was nicknamed Old Kinderhook, and there was a false tale that a previous American president couldn't spell properly and thus would approve documents with an "OK", thinking it was the abbreviation for “all correct”. But okay soon became part of the language and the story explains how it was so easy for this to happen’. ********** Music is listened to in all known cultures. Similarities between human and animal song have been detected: both contain a message, an intention that reflects innate emotional state that is interpreted correctly even among different species. In fact, several behavioural features in listening to music are closely related to attachment: lullabies are sung to infants to increase their attachment to a parent, and singing or playing music together is based on teamwork and may add group cohesion. Read on… http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2011/02/110225090844.htm ********** Researchers at the University of California, San Diego School of Medicine and Creighton University School of Medicine in Omaha have reported that markedly higher intake of vitamin D is needed to reach blood levels that can prevent or markedly cut the incidence of breast cancer and several other major diseases than had been originally thought... http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2011/02/110222140546.htm ********** And to finish… a test for your brain. Look at the words below and work out what they have in common. 1 Banana
2 Dresser
3 Grammar
4 Potato
5 Revive
6 Uneven
7 Assess
Answer: No, it is not that they all have at least two double letters. Try again.
… … … Keep looking… … … Give up? …
Answer:
In all of the words listed, if you take the first letter, place it at the end of the word, and then spell the word backwards, it will be the same word. |
