I love the internet. But the problem with it is the amount of unchecked, unverifiable so-called ‘facts’ that are propagated to everyone that somehow become part of the general knowledge of the nation. Here are some of the most annoying I have found – ones that people actually believe. Please please please, give it some thought before reading these in a circular and taking it as fact. They’re ludicrous and an insult to historians.

Most people got married in June because they took their yearly bath in May and still smelled pretty good by June. However, they were starting to smell so brides carried a bouquet of flowers to hide the body odour. Hence the custom today of carrying a bouquet when getting married.

Eh? This custom of course has nothing to do with the fact that flowers are pretty and look nice. People getting married in June also had nothing to do with the good weather that was expected so that, in the absence of a large hall, people could celebrate outside. The is no evidence what-so-ever to suggest that people had only one bath a year. Also, if this was the case, surely people would get married in May not June – notice the lack of explanation as to why people waited a month anyway. Utter horse shite. Ignore.

Houses had thatched roofs-thick straw-piled high, with no wood underneath. It was the only place for animals to get warm, so all the dogs, cats and other small animals (mice, bugs) lived in the roof. When it rained it became slimy & slippery and sometimes the animals would slip and fall off the roof. Hence the saying “It’s raining cats and dogs.”

What does this mean? Animals lived actually ON the roof? In what way is this warmer? If they lived IN the roof (which I am sure not many people would allow, even savage-like ‘olden dayers’) why the heck would they fall off? Thatched roofs are much steeper than modern slated ones too, so the idea of a bunch of animals hanging out there to get warm is even more ridiculous. Annoying.

Lead cups were used to drink ale or whisky. The combination would sometimes knock them out for a couple of days. Someone walking along the road would take them for dead and prepare them for burial. They were laid out on the kitchen table for a couple of days and the family would gather around and eat and drink and wait and see if they would wake up. Hence the custom of holding a “wake.”

What horse shit is this? There seems to be the idea that humans beings were actually MORE STUPID in the ‘olden days’ than they are now – to the point where they couldn’t tell whether someone was dead or not. Let’s completely ignore the derivation of the word ‘wake’ and possible Anglo-Saxon translations, and take it in its literal, modern day form. Please fuck off.

England is old and small and the local folks started running out of places to bury people. So they would dig up coffins and would take the bones to a “bone-house” and reuse the grave. When reopening these coffins, 1 out of 25 coffins were found to have scratch marks on the inside and they realized they had been burying people alive. So they thought they would tie a string on the wrist of the corpse, lead it through the coffin and up through the ground and tie it to a bell. Someone would have to sit out in the graveyard all night (the “graveyard shift”) to listen for the bell; thus, someone could be “saved by the bell” or was considered a “dead ringer.”

Once again, English people being astronomically thick that they keep accidentally burying living people. This happened so often that rather than check that the person is in fact dead (a fairly simple procedure, even for morons), they’d chain a bell to their wrist and get someone to watch over them until after some days it became apparent that they were dead or had since died. There is absolutely no explanation for the reason ‘dead ringer’ is also used as a phrase to describe someone startlingly similar to someone else. Where the fuck did “1 out of 25” come from? Were there statisticians in those days? And of course this is where the phrase ‘saved by the bell came from’. It has nothing to do with the countless occasions in the history of humanity whereby a metallic ring or bell has been used to signal the end of an activity (boxing, pubs, soldier training etc etc). Urgh.