It probably isn’t 10:10 as you’re reading this, but you’d be forgiven for thinking it is if you just watched an ad for a clock or watch. Timepieces are almost always set to that exact time in advertisements, and as with most aspects of advertising, this choice isn’t arbitrary. 

The time 10:10 is considered aesthetically pleasing because it looks symmetrical on the face of analog watches and clocks, something anyone who prefers things to be neat and tidy will appreciate. It also helps that this position allows the company’s logo to not only be visible but perfectly framed by the hands pointing to 10 and 2. And this isn’t done just some of the time: In 2008, for example, The New York Times found that 97 of the 100 bestselling watches on Amazon were set to 10:10 in their pictures.

Atomic clocks are the most accurate kind.

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They’re so accurate, in fact, that some will gain or lose only a second of time over the course of tens of millions of years.

This ubiquitous hand placement has another, more subtle advantage: It looks like a smiley face. A 2017 study on the subject published in Frontiers in Psychology found watches set to 10:10 “showed a significant positive effect on the emotion of the observer and the intention to buy.” Those set to 8:20, which looks more like a frown and was the standard setting in the 1920s and ’30s, had no such effect. Like a lot of advertising tricks, it’s not evident to most consumers  — but that doesn’t mean it isn’t working.

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You’d be forgiven for failing to notice some of The Shining’s more intricate details, since there’s a good chance you were covering your eyes with your hands the first time you watched it. Those details really do add to the experience of Stanley Kubrick’s 1980 horror classic, however, including the fact that the color red appears in nearly every shot. Some of these appearances are obvious — that famous scene of blood pouring out of the elevator, the red-walled men’s room where Jack Torrance (Jack Nicholson) freshens up — but many are quite subtle. Did you ever notice, for example, that the darts young Danny (Danny Lloyd) plays with are red, or that a book placed on a table in the opening scene and the dress Wendy (Shelley Duvall) wears are red as well?

Stephen King loved Kubrick’s adaptation.

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King was actually “deeply disappointed” with the take on his 1977 novel, despite admiring Kubrick. He told “Playboy” in a 1983 interview that “parts of the film are chilling, charged with a relentlessly claustrophobic terror, but others fell flat.”

According to one analysis, the inclusion of the scarlet hue is meant to be a visual nod to Jack’s deteriorating mental condition as the Overlook Hotel takes hold of him. It’s just one reason The Shining has been the target of so much theorizing on the part of academics and fans alike; there’s even a documentary devoted to unpacking ideas about the film, called Room 237. Some of the theories are more outlandish than others — the idea that Kubrick used The Shining to confess to helping NASA fake the moon landing is pretty out-there — while others are just strange enough to feel at home in the Overlook.

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The cultural impact of the Brothers Grimm fairy tales, originally published in 1812 as Kinder- und Hausmärchen, or Nursery and Household Tales, is hard to overstate. Two centuries after its publication, the tales have been the creative backbone for hundreds (or even thousands) of films, TV shows, plays, and works of art — whether as direct adaptations or loose inspirations. But while you’re probably familiar with stories such as “Little Red Riding Hood,” “Rumplestiltskin,” and “Sleeping Beauty,” you may not know that German linguists Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm didn’t actually create the narratives themselves. Instead, they compiled tales that had been passed down through the oral tradition, some for perhaps millennia. The two brothers began interviewing family and friends to collect the tales while they were still teenagers studying at the University of Marburg. After publishing their first collection of 86 tales, the brothers delivered a second edition three years later with an additional 70 tales. The seventh and final edition in 1857 featured 211 tales.

In the Brothers Grimm’s “Cinderella,” the fairy godmother character is a tree.

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While almost everyone is familiar with the fairy godmother in Disney’s “Cinderella,” she never appears in the Grimms’ version. Instead, she is replaced by a tree that’s been planted on Cinderella’s mother’s grave. Many cultures around the world have some version of the Cinderella story.

Originally, the stories weren’t meant for children — many were violent, sexual, or otherwise R-rated. Instead, the Grimms intended for the tales to be an excavation of cultural heritage, and they first introduced them as scholarly work. But as literacy rates climbed in the 19th century, subsequent editions edited out a lot of the original tales’ brutality in order to appeal to wider audiences, especially children. Today, many kids become acquainted with the Grimms’ fairy tales through Walt Disney, who used the stories as far back as 1922 for some of his earliest animations. But Disney is far from the only one inspired by the Grimms — more recently, their work has provided the narrative fuel for Stephen Sondheim’s musical Into the Woods, Shelley Duvall’s Faerie Tale Theatre TV series, 2020’s fantasy-horror film Gretel & Hansel, and NBC’s aptly named television show Grimm, to name just a few folklore-filled examples.

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English words today come from a variety of languages, originating from Greek, French, Latin, and many others. But perhaps the most important of them all is German, whose words form the backbone of English. That’s why English is considered a Germanic language, as opposed to a Romance language like French (although English also shares a considerable number of similarities with French, thanks to the Normans). Taking a look at the most commonly written words in English around the world, as compiled by the Oxford English Dictionary, illustrates German’s indelible influence.

The U.N. has three official languages.

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The U.N. has six official languages: Arabic, Chinese, English, French, Russian, and Spanish. Document are typically issued in all six languages, and each has its own “Language Day” at the United Nations to promote multilingualism.

At the top of the list of the most common written words is, unsurprisingly, “the,” related to German’s gendered der, die, and das. Germanic function words, such as “and,” “but,” and “that,” pepper the rest of the list. English’s most-written noun (“time”), verb (“be”), and adjective (“good”) are also Germanic in origin. Today, English borrows liberally for its vocabulary — scholars estimate that words from more than 350 languages have entered English — but the roots of its linguistic tree are considered Western Germanic. English speakers are far from alone: Dutch, Afrikaans, Frisian (spoken in parts of the Netherlands and Germany), Yiddish, and of course German also developed from the same West Germanic roots. In total, these tongues are spoken as primary languages by about 450 million people throughout the world.

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