I am a naturally inquisitive person, and if I come across a word I don’t know I look it up, and I can’t stop myself googling any new or amazing facts I come across. For instance - and many people may already know this, the letter ‘E’ is the most common letter in the alphabet, used in over 11 percent of words in the English language!

And the least used? Yes, it’s ‘Z’, with an estimated frequency of use at 0.07 percent. And how about this fact, The letter “A” doesn’t appear in a written number until you reach one thousand, (well that’s if you don’t count the “AND” in numbers like “four hundred AND twenty” for example,) and the letter “M” doesn’t make an appearance until the word “million”.

Another amazing random fact, the first oranges ever were from southeast Asia, and weren’t orange at all - they were in fact green, even when fully ripe. The name ‘orange’ comes from the Arabic name ‘naranj’ and is close to the Spanish word for orange, naranja’, and then the Portuguese word ‘laranja’.

Here is another totally random fact, in England, pigeon poop is property of the Crown. This was because pigeon poop could be used to make gunpowder. Because of this, King George I declared all pigeon poop to be property of the Crown in the 18th century (I assume it has since been rescinded).

How about this fact, In Russia, beer was classified as a soft drink until as recently as 2011, when anything with less than 10 percent alcohol was classified legally as a soft drink.
Another random fact, Italy has 34 native languages in use today. Surprisingly, most of these different languages are not, in fact, dialects of Italian as you might have thought, but apparently they have evolved independently from common Latin.

I read recently that Soviet Cosmonauts had taken shotguns to space with them. This wasn’t to fight off any capitalist aliens they might encounter in space…It was in case they returned to Earth and had the misfortune to land in Siberia, so they could fend off hungry bears.

And this is the most bizarre, and I assume true fact. Two stealth nuclear submarines once bumped into each other by accident. Well, I don’t think they actually made serious contact - that could have been a total disaster - but in 2009 in the Atlantic Ocean, two stealth-cloaked nuclear submarines (one from France and one from Britain) ‘bumped’ into each other out of sheer coincidence. They were both cloaked so well from each other that neither submarine could detect the other, even when they were only a couple feet apart!


Author

Marilyn writes regularly for The Portugal News, and has lived in the Algarve for some years. A dog-lover, she has lived in Ireland, UK, Bermuda and the Isle of Man. 

Marilyn Sheridan