Mental Floss

BIG QUESTIONS

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For some time now, we have known the basic outline of the story of “dude.” The word was first used in the late 1800s as a term of mockery for young men who were overly concerned with keeping up with the latest fashions.

Arika Okrent
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If you’ve ever seen a cat wiggling around in its sleep, or come across three different-sized beds after eating porridge in a bear family’s inexplicably furnished home, you’ve probably wondered if animals are capable of dreaming.

Alex Watt
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Dried prunes can be juiced by steaming or simmering them to rehydrate them, running them through a strainer to remove the pits, seeds and skin, and then adding more water to the resulting paste.

Matt Soniak




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Some argue that standing to pee helps spread disease and ruins men's sex lives. Is that actually true?

Meghan Holohan


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“Stand beside her, and guide her,” we sing in “God Bless America.” Come to think of it, most nations of the world are referred to in the female gender. Why is that?

Kara Kovalchik


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The Dilemma: You're at a football game and there's a large, cigar-shaped object hovering suspiciously close to you. Question: Is it a blimp or a zeppelin? And more important, why didn't you get better seats?

Floss books
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According the Oxford English Dictionary, if you “turn the tables” on someone, it is generally understood that you have reversed the fortunes in your favor to some capacity, so as to “reverse one’s position relative to someone else, especially by turning a

Will McGough








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If you’ve ever been enrolled in the Fruit-of-the-Month Club or gotten a Tower of Treats as a gift, you’re probably familiar with the names Harry and David, but don’t know much about them. Are they real people? Do they have last names?

Matt Soniak
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Wouldn’t it do just the opposite? Doesn’t it prove that the rule does not hold for all cases and is therefore not a rule at all?

Arika Okrent


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When this refracted light reaches you, your brain and eye don’t account for all the bending it did along the way. What you see is an inferior mirage where the mirage is under the real object.

Matt Soniak


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When you speak, vibrations from your vocal cords resonate in your throat and mouth, and some get transmitted and conducted by the bones in your neck and head. The inner ear responds to these just like any other vibrations, turning them into electrical sig

Matt Soniak




Christopher Columbus did a lot of naming in his day. As it turns out, he had a hand in naming four of the five island-nations with two names. Is that an obscure enough fact for you? Still, this is definitely the kind of fact that shows up on pub trivia ni

Haley Sweetland Edwards