Did Romans Design the Space Shuttle?

The Well I Never Knew That! series of books takes you on a fun and fascinating journey through the origins of fascinating facts and everyday phrases like no other book.

For a start, the specially commissioned artwork is both historically accurate and actually shows you the origins of words and phrases. Like the original “square meal”, made from a sawn-off (square) plank of wood, and “beyond the pale”, where a pale was a wooden stake (cf. palisade) marking the boundary of land protected by knights from the dangerous land of the barbarians. It would be dangerous to go “beyond the pale”!

The book is also written so you can use it as a quiz over dinner or relaxing on the sofa. One person reads out the story and the others guess the phrase that has derived from the situation.

You can also discover the true meaning behind nursery rhymes. Sometimes it’s political satire (e.g. Ride a Cock Horse to Banbury Cross), sometimes it’s about sex (e.g. Jack and Jill) and sometimes it’s social commentary (e.g. Half a Pound of Tuppenny Rice).

All these intriguing origins are then interconnected in ways that no one has spotted before. For example, “pop” means to pawn something for money. So when a cloth worker died, their clogs (worn to avoid sparks and fires in the factories) would be pawned. Hence the phrase “to pop your clogs”. This is the same term appearing in the nursery rhyme “Pop Goes the Weasel”, where a weasel is a craftsman’s tools. After poor people did all their drinking in the boozer (“Up and down the City Road, in and out of the Eagle, that’s the way the money goes, pop goes the weasel!”), the craftsmen had to pawn their tools for food and so lose their livelihood. Oh, what jolly things we teach our kids!