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| General Reference | Social and Cultural | Language | Literature | History | Science | Museums/Exhibits | Organizations/Government | Local School's Websites |

Reference Links

  • Question #1 Is there any reason for calling one hand "left" and the other, "right"?
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    Social & Cultural

  • Question #2 Why do we do something "by hook or by crook"?

    Language

  • Question #3 Why is a person who crosses a street recklessly called a "jaywalker"?
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    Literature

  • Question #4 Why does the barber's pole have red and white stripes?
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    History

  • Question #5 Why should something suspect be taken "with a grain of salt"?
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    Science

  • Question #6 Why do our fingertips become wrinkled when they're subjected to water for a prolonged amount of time.
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    Mathematics

  • Question #7 In the old western movies - why do the stagecoach wheels always look like they are turning backwards?

    Museums/Exhibits

  • Question #8 Why do golf balls have dimples?

    Organizations/Government

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    Local School's Websites

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    • Answer #1 - How we are physically oriented toward things is a pretty basic part of us. People generally favor one side or the other, and use the hand on that side to pick up and manipulate objects. Is there any significance to the way we name these two sides? No doubt about it: our language sends the message that "right" is right. The majority not only rules, it rubs it in. As many as nine out of ten people are right-handed, and the word for that side, "right," is derived from a variety of sources, all of which suggest strength. Left, on the other hand, comes from the Old English, lyft, for useless, weak. Expressions bolster this bigotry: If you're a klutz, you don't dance as if you had two right feet, do you? I guess that some of us were just left at the starting gate
    • Answer #2 - Here's an expression with a certain air of determination to it. It even sounds like you will somehow find a way of accomplishing a task, whatever you have to do to get it done. But nothing in the sound of hook and crook even hints that they refer to the gathering of firewood. In the Middle Ages, peasants dared not cut down the trees on the Lord's estate to gather fuel for their hearth. But traditionally they were allowed to take whatever wood they could cut from the branches using a hook, a pole with a curved blade at the end, or a shepherd's crook, the long staff with the curved end. Over the centuries, ironically, this expression that originated in doing something only under specified conditions came to mean doing anything in any way you could.
    • Answer #3 - As American villages evolved into cities, the indigenous blue jay retreated to the country. As a result, the bird became associated with life in the country and the people who lived there. By the mid-1800s, the word "jay" became synonymous with "hick." When country folk traveled to the cities, the locals watched in amazement as these jays ignorantly disregarded traffic laws. Not understanding the meanings of signs and crosswalks, jays routinely endangered their lives. As a result city slickers began calling anyone who walked carelessly through traffic a "jaywalker."
    • Answer #4 - Before the 1700s, in addition to cutting hair, barbers throughout Europe pulled teeth, performed minor surgery, and practiced bloodletting (ouch, and I don't even trust my barber to make my sideburns even). During bloodletting, patients squeezed a pole to allow their blood to flow more freely. The pole was often painted red to mask bloodstains. At the end of the operation the pole was wrapped in the white bandages used during the operation and put outside the shop to air. As a result, a red-and-white pole became associated with barbershops and barber guilds adopted it as their trademark.
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    • Answer #5 - Throughout history, salt has been revered for its preservation and purification properties. Jewish dietary law, for example, requires that meat be properly salted before it's eaten. Similarly, many people used to believe that salt could prevent poisoning. Our expression, "with a grain of salt" comes from a poison antidote and preventative concocted by King Mithridates VI of Pontus (now in Turkey). The king's formula was "two dry nuts, the same number of figs, and twenty leaves of rue ground together, with a grain of salt added." Mithridates's all-purpose antidote was proven ineffective, but his use of "a grain of salt" stuck.
    • Answer #6 - When the cells in our hands and feet are in contact with water the amount of water in the cells is much less than in the surrounding environment (tub) so the water will diffuse into the cells by the process of osmosis. The cells actually take on so much water that cannot hold it all and they begin to buckle or wrinkle. So our fingers are not really shriveled, but are actually filled with an excess of water. This does not happen to the rest of our body because it is covered by a wax like layer called keratin. The keratin gets worn away on our hands and feet and thus the water can diffuse into the cells.
    • Answer #7 - This happens because when you film something, you are really taking a series of still images and then replaying them so fast that the eye is fooled into thinking it is a continuous stream of images. The eye can see about 12-14 frames per second. Because of a physical law called the Nyquist Sampling Theorem you need to display frames twice as fast as the eye can see to fool it into seeing it as a continuous movie (Nyquist showed mathematically why that is true). So, imagine you have a wheel that is spinning exactly once every second. If you took a picture at the same rate, it would look like it is standing still. That's because it rotates exactly once every time you take a picture. Now take a picture just a little bit faster than 1 per second. Now every time you take a picture, the wheel has not quite made it all the way around; maybe it will have gone 350 degrees around, so it's 10 degrees behind the first frame. The next frame it will have gone another 350 degrees, making it now 20 degrees behind the first frame, and so on. When you play the film back, it will look like the wheel is moving backwards, even though you know it was going forwards. The opposite effect happens when you take pictures a bit slower than the rotation rate. It gets more complicated when the wheel does not rotate at a constant rate, like when a car accelerates. The next time you watch TV or go to the movies, watch the wheels as a car speeds up. You might see the wheel appear to go backwards, them stop, then go forwards, all while the car is moving forwards.
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    • Answer #8 - Golf balls are covered with dimples for the same reason that tennis balls are covered with fuzz -- it helps them fly farther. When a ball travels rapidly through air, the air is pushed apart by the ball. The air joins back together behind the ball, but the joining is full of eddies and turbulence. The turbulent wake reduces the pressure behind the ball, pulling it back and slowing it down. The dimples on a golf ball (and the fuzz on a tennis ball) trap a thin layer of turbulent air all around the ball, even wrapping it around the trailing half. Because the turbulent layer is very thin, the air joins together more smoothly behind the ball, creating a smaller wake. The ball feels less backward drag, and it flies farther.

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