Strange BUT TRUE

* As Shakespeare said, what’s in a name? A duck is called a duck because it ducks its head under the water to feed. The animal was named after the verb, not the other way around.

* In the era of TV dinners, it wasn’t enough that you ATE your veggies. No, etiquette experts still found time to make some interesting rules about HOW you consumed them as well. According to one guide, asparagus should be cut in half in order to avoid “the ungraceful appearance of a bent stalk … falling limply into someone’s

mouth.”

* What’s in a name? Part 2: The French name for cotton candy is “Barbe a papa,” or “dad’s beard.”

* Mary Babnik Brown generously donated 34 inches of her natural golden locks to the United States military during World War II after they determined that blond hair that had never been treated or exposed to heat was the most resilient material to use as the crosshairs in bombsights.

* A 7-year-old boy had long complained about his swollen and aching jaw, and small wonder: Surgeons at the Saveetha Dental College and Hospital in Chennai, India, found 526 teeth crammed inside his mouth! After removing a seven-ounce, “well-defined bag-like mass”

from his jaw containing hundreds of miniature teeth, it took the team five hours to carefully search for and count all of them. The hospital asserted that it was “the first ever case to be documented worldwide, where so many minute teeth were found in a single individual.”

* Led Zeppelin let Ben Affleck use their song “When the Levee Breaks” in the movie “Argo” on one condition — that they digitally alter the record player’s needle drop to the correct spot on the vinyl.

••• Thought for the Day: “The greatest weapon against stress is our ability to choose one thought over another.” — William James

(c) 2020 King Features Synd., Inc.