logicandtrick:

i-am-miku:

stripitdown:

• you can’t view the great wall of china from the moon.
• marie antoinette didn’t say ‘let them eat cake’. it was a saying that jean jacques rousseau attributed to a ‘great princess’ (not antoinette, who was only ten when he made this claim) who said ‘have them eat brioche’. 
• nero didn’t start the fire in rome, it was probably started by his political enemies who knew it would be blamed on him. he didn’t fiddle with a lyre or a harp either, he was 30 miles away when it happened and then he immediately set out with firefighters to extinguish it. 
• slaves didn’t build the pyramids, they were mainly built by farmers who doubled as craftsmen to earn money.
• not many people actually thought the world was flat in christopher columbus’ time. aristotle advanced in 330 BC that the earth was probably spherical. 
• thumbs up in gladiator battles didn’t mean ‘let them live’, it actually meant to let them die. a closed fist with no thumb signalled the sign to live.
• roman ships weren’t really manned by slaves as hollywood depicts. most of them were paid workers.
• paul revere did not say ‘the british are coming!’. that statement wouldn’t even have made sense when most americans still regarded themselves as britons. he said ‘the regulars are out’.
• louis XIV did not say ‘i am the state’, he said ‘i am leaving, but the state will remain always’ (something that will probably horrify anarchists and the like nonetheless)
• napoleon was taller than the average frenchman of the time. his nickname ‘le petit corporal’ was meant to be a sign of affection, not a reference to his stature.
• julius caesar’s last words were not ‘and you, brutus?’. they were probably ‘kai su, teknon’ (gk. ‘you too, child?’). the roman aristocracy in fact preferred to speak greek between each other at this point.
• JFK’s statement ‘ich bin ein berliner’ did make sense in german. ‘berliner’ pastries aren’t even called that in berlin. 
• the words ‘faggot’ and ‘fag’ do not refer to burning sodomites. in england where the word developed sodomites were never burnt at the stake with faggots (although they were in germany). the actual etymology is that a faggot referred to a nattering old woman (compare ‘strumpet’, ‘shrew’, ‘hag’) who was as useless and cumbersome as a pile of sticks (‘a faggot’). this word then was applied to women in general (some early 20th century novels have young girls being referred to with this word). sometime during the interwar period the word shifted to meaning ‘effeminate, sissyish or cowardly man’ and then to homosexual.

Uh, what?

I would love to see proof for this. While some of it seems perfectly plausible to me, there’s some statements here that I don’t really believe unless there’s proof.

I can tell you for sure that the gladiator thing is completely unknown. I prefer to go with the version stated above, but according to my Latin teacher(who is kind of a genius on these things), nobody actually knows for certain.

I’m pretty sure the pyramid one is correct too