Along with such phrases as “too much of a good thing” and “the clothes make the man,” we can also thank Shakespeare for the name Jessica. The Bard first used it in his play The Merchant of Venice (likely written around 1596), as the name of the moneylender Shylock’s defiant daughter. Some scholars think Shakespeare may have been inspired by the Hebrew name Iskah from the Bible, which was spelled “Jeska” in some English translations of the Old Testament. The name means both “to see” and “to possess foresight.”

Shakespeare likely died on his birthday.

fact

FIB

Ready to reveal?

Confirm your email to play the next question?

sign up!

Please enter valid email.

Sign up

Oops, incorrect!

It's a fact

Shakespeare was baptized on April 26, 1564, leading scholars to believe he was probably born on the 23rd (baptisms usually occurred within three days after a birth). He died exactly 52 years later, on April 23, 1616 — at which time his legacy was still only in its infancy.

Though it took several hundred years, Jessica eventually became an extremely popular first name. It consistently ranked among the 10 most popular baby names for girls born in the U.S. between 1976 and 2000, reached the top spot 1985–1990, and reclaimed it 1993–1995. Its popularity has waned over the last decade, however, and in 2020 it ranked No. 399. If you’re a Jessica fan, fret not: A successful Merchant of Venice adaptation may be all it takes for the name to reclaim its former glory.

• Share to Facebook
• Share to Twitter
• Share to Email

Can you picture an Olympic hopeful waking up at the crack of dawn to spend hours hunched over a drafting table, perfecting their blueprints? Thanks to International Olympic Committee co-founder Pierre de Coubertin, the concept became a reality when the IOC began awarding medals in the categories of sports-related architecture, music, literature, painting, and sculpture at the 1912 Stockholm Games.  

The first gold medal in architecture went to the Swiss team of Eugène-Edouard Monod and Alphonse Laverriére for their "Building Plan of a Modern Stadium." By 1928, the architecture competition had been divided into the subcategories of town planning and design, with the Netherlands' Jan Wils winning gold in the latter for his still-standing Olympic Stadium Amsterdam. However, the subjective process of selecting artistic champions ultimately produced some questionable results. Sometimes, finicky judges refused to award gold (or silver, or bronze) medals when the quality of submissions failed to meet their lofty standards. Other times, such as during the 1936 Berlin Games, the host country’s creative teams tallied a suspiciously disproportionate share of winning hardware. 

Roman Emperor Nero was an Olympic champion.

fact

FIB

Ready to reveal?

Confirm your email to play the next question?

sign up!

Please enter valid email.

Sign up

Oops, incorrect!

It's a fact

Nero reportedly bribed officials into letting him compete in the 67 CE Olympics (the Games were traditionally restricted to Greeks). He won several arts competitions, and was also named winner of the chariot race despite falling and failing to finish.

Artistic competitions remained part of the Olympics following a hiatus for World War II, with Austria's Adolf Hoch and Finland's Yrjö Lindegren claiming architecture gold in 1948. However, the writing was on the wall for these Jim Thorpes of the compass and T-square, as new IOC President Avery Brundage (who started in 1952) strongly discouraged the proliferation of professionals in the amateur realm. The creative arts were permanently relegated to the sideshow of Olympic exhibitions in 1952, and the hard-earned efforts of champion builders, singers, and writers from the first half of the 20th century were banished to obscurity when their medals were stricken from the Olympic record books.

• Share to Facebook
• Share to Twitter
• Share to Email

Few historical artifacts are as mesmerizing — or as mysterious — as the Easter Island statues. Known as moai (pronounced mo-eye), meaning “statue” in Rapa Nui (the native name for the island, its Indigenous people, and their language), the statues are believed to represent ancestral chiefs who protected the inhabitants of this 63-square-mile island in the Pacific centuries ago. Possibly built between 1400 and 1650 CE, the statues were transported to massive stone platforms known as ahu, and usually arranged so their backs faced the sea. Although their average height is only around 13 feet (bodies and heads included), many weigh more than 10 metric tons.

Easter Island is one of the most isolated inhabited places on Earth.

fact

FIB

Ready to reveal?

Confirm your email to play the next question?

sign up!

Please enter valid email.

Sign up

Oops, incorrect!

It's a fact

With the closest inhabited island, Pitcairn Island, some 1,200 miles away, Easter Island takes the phrase “middle of nowhere” to the next level. Even Chile, which annexed the island in 1888, is 2,200 miles away.

Most of the 900 or so moai aren’t buried, and when Europeans first arrived in the early 18th century, they could clearly see their bodies standing tall. But the 150 or so that are buried have become the most popular and photogenic. Resting on the slopes of the Rano Raraku volcanic crater (which is also the stone quarry for the statues), these moai were slowly entombed by continuous erosion and landslides over hundreds of years until only their heads remained. Luckily, this unintended burial preserved their tattoo-like markings, a strong tradition among the Rapa Nui people.

• Share to Facebook
• Share to Twitter
• Share to Email

If you’ve confused “Takin’ Care of Business” with “Makin’ Carrot Biscuits” or “Bennie and the Jets” with “Betty in a Dress,” you’ve been tricked by a mondegreen. As Merriam-Webster explains, this phenomenon occurs when a word or phrase “results from a mishearing of something said or sung.” You can thank American writer Sylvia Wright for the term, which she coined in a 1954 Harper’s essay. When Wright was a child, her mother read to her from the book Reliques of Ancient English Poetry. A favorite entry featured the line, “And laid him on the green,” which Wright misheard as “And Lady Mondegreen.” 

Sir Elton John names many of his pianos after famous female performers.

fact

FIB

Ready to reveal?

Confirm your email to play the next question?

sign up!

Please enter valid email.

Sign up

Oops, incorrect!

It's a fact

John has christened pianos after Nina Simone, Diana Krall, Aretha Franklin, American jazz singer Blossom Dearie, and Trinidadian pianist Winifred Atwell.

A mondegreen occurs when there’s a communication hiccup between the syllables you hear and the meaning your brain assigns to them. Mondegreens are especially common when you hear music but cannot see the singer’s face, like when listening to the radio. (For example, when you interpret “Our Lips Are Sealed” as “Alex the Seal.”) They’re also more likely to happen when the singer has an accent. But although mondegreens are perhaps most famously associated with song lyrics, they can also happen when everyday words and phrases are misheard. Occasionally, a misconstrued phrase is so common that it enters our lexicon. Such was the case with “spitting image,” which originated as “spit and image” (“spit” once meant “a perfect likeness”), and “nickname,” which began life as “an ekename” (“also-name”).   

• Share to Facebook
• Share to Twitter
• Share to Email

A sidetracked teenager changed the course of art history when she skipped an 1871 portrait-sitting. James McNeill Whistler (1834–1903) — a Massachusetts-born artist living in London — was commissioned to paint Maggie Graham, the 15-year-old daughter of a member of Parliament. Although James had prepared a canvas during his initial studio sessions with Graham, his creative process moved too slowly for her liking. When she failed to appear, James asked his mother, Anna McNeill Whistler, then living with him in London, to be his subject. 

fact

FIB

Ready to reveal?

Confirm your email to play the next question?

sign up!

Please enter valid email.

Sign up

Oops, incorrect!

It's a fact

Rather than intentionally crafting a tender maternal tribute (he was more of a proponent of “art for art’s sake”), James focused on fine-tuning the saturation of select colors with “Arrangement in Grey and Black No. 1 (Portrait of the Artist's Mother).” Artistic circles adopted the shorthand “Arrangement in Grey and Black No. 1,” while the public preferred “Whistler's Mother.” Originally, the painting was somewhat divisive, receiving lackluster placement in the Royal Academy of Arts’ annual exhibition. But in 1891, the piece earned a place in history as the first artwork by an American to be bought by the French state, via the Musée du Luxembourg. During the Great Depression, the painting gained popularity on a 13-city U.S. tour; 1 million people visited it in Chicago alone. Back in Paris, the painting continued to relocate, becoming the Louvre’s first American painting in 1922 before the Musée d’Orsay’s 1986 acquisition. “Whistler’s Mother” has been called “the most important American work residing outside the United States.”

• Share to Facebook
• Share to Twitter
• Share to Email