Sir Walter Raleigh is commonly known as the man that put the cloak down for Elizabeth and that sparked off a long affair. However Walter Raleigh was also famous for introducing Tobaco and Potatoes to Europe. Guess the origins of the word Potato ?
Batata !
Yes – The earliest reference I have is 1565, from Sp. patata, from the Haitian batata “sweet potato.” Ordinary potatoes were known as ‘bastard potatoes’ or ‘Virginia Potatoes’ (even though they came from Peru). They were not simply referred to as potatoes until 1597. William Harrison (1534-1593) in his Description Of Elizabethan England of 1577 refers to potatoes (although he may be referring to sweet potatoes. The word is clearly in use by then anyway.
How come the Marathi word and the Haitian word are exactly the same ? From as far back as before 1560, ? What kind of contact did we have then. The Portugese may have brough the Potato to India.
shekhar
Exam Howlers
These items have been selected from lists of answers from 16 year olds.
Queen Elizabeth was the “Virgin Queen”. As a queen she was a success. When she exposed herself before her troops they all shouted “hurrah”.
It was an age of great inventions and discoveries. Gutenberg invented removable type of the Bible. Another important invention was the circulation of blood. Sir Walter Raleigh is a historical figure because he invented cigarettes and started smoking. And Sir Francis Drake circumcised the world with a 100 foot clipper.
The greatest writer of the Renaissance was William Shakespeare. He was born in the year 1564, supposedly on his birthday. He never made much money and is famous only because of his plays. He wrote tragedies, comedies, and hysterectomies, all in Islamic pentameter. Romeo and Juliet are an example of a heroic couplet. Romeo’s last wish was to be laid by Juliet.
Writing at the same time as Shakespeare was Miguel Cervantes. He wrote Donkey Hote. The next great author was John Milton. Milton wrote Paradise Lost. Then his wife died and he wrote Paradise Regained.
I have some more like these for different historical periods. They are hillarious. I sent you the ones connected to the Renaissance, but if you wish, I can send you all of them.
Best wishes,
Simona
P.S. Please, pay attention to my previous letter, posted yesterday.
The potato originated in the Andes…and looking at the mountain ranges from a birdseye, they appear to have the appearance of potatoes…sometimes things do look like where they come from.
The cross over of Marathi and Haitian might be a point where the weave in the cloth intersect threads?
I don’t know about potatoes, but I’m sure glad someone took Mangos to Trinidad:)
Cinda
Dear Shekhar
On Intent in January, Geeta Jayaram posted a comment at http://www.intentblog.com/archives/2006/01/did_ancient_ind.html – the second Geeta comment down, where she mentions a book by Gopalacharya. She says there’s evidence of modern human culture having spread around the world from southern India. I read something about some human DNA research that supports this theory, though I can’t find what I read right now. To know if the potato — word and plant — moved from Peru to India, or, thousands of years earlier, from India to Peru, one would also need to research the DNA history of the potato.
These cross connections on earth are endlessly fascinating. We are all bound by threads, yet we are all untied – and yet still bound.
Love, Heather
please! write something about mary stewart, as you know i love her so much! what is your opinion about her behavior?
The Golden Age
The sleeping place of the Age of Gold is in the depths of every human heart.
~ John Cowper Powys, Morwyn
Within the Celtic belief, the Golden Age is a paradigm of the living other-world, where there is no winter, no death, no disease, no want, no work. In every age, we look back to times that we judge to be less imperfect than our own. Grandparents remember better times than they see ahead for their grandchildren.
Our longing for a Golden Age is not a fantasy or a historical reality; rather it is a real rememberance of something profoundly, mythically, true. Its images shimmer upon our inner sight like a mirage- a recognition of the eternal, living otherworld whose lands we travel to when we dream, meditate, or make soul flight to its regions, a realm to which we instinctively belong.
The Celtic Spirit, Caitlin Matthews
The Elizabethan era just about marks the beginnings of British expansion in the world – is this why you see it as particularly interesting?, eg with respect to India…
Books like Hobson Jobson show that words borrowed from other cultures entered common usage in the English language freely, as if underlining colonial ambitions…
Man, a marathi word similar to a haitian word…
You know, if u really delve deep into our History, there are so many intrigueging things in there…to start with, our religions world over teaching the same things…
You know..the image that media reflect of yours is of an intelligent but a little prude film maker…but the trueth is that you still inhibit the youthfull urge to know the answers for everything…
Good on you mate…
CHeers
Dear Simona,
LOL. That was funny.
Cheers!
Navin
Thank you, Navin. I have some more, not connected with Elizabeth. I can post them, if you want. Would you please tell me what does LOL mean?
Dear Simona,
LOL is the short for Laughing Out Loud. Sure, you can post more such funny pieces…..always good to laugh.
Cheers!
Navin
AGL…always good to laugh (inspired by Navin)
Cinda:)
cinda you´r great!!!!
Hehe! 🙂 It’s a little bit late here, I’ll post some more tomorrow.
Cheers
su is sweet…(SIS)
Cinda 🙂
Hi again! Excuse me for disappearing, I was ill.
Here are some more exam howlers:
Ancient Egypt was inhabited by mummies and they all wrote in hydraulics. They lived in the Sahara Dessert and travelled by Camelot. The climate of the Sahara is such that the inhabitants have to live elsewhere.
The Bible is full of interesting caricatures. In the first book of the Bible, Guinessis, Adam and Eve were created from an apple tree.
Moses led the Hebrew slaves to the Red Sea, where they made Unleavened bread which is bread made without any ingredients.
The Greeks were a highly sculptured people, and without them we wouldn’t have history. The Greeks also had myths. A myth is a female moth.
Socrates was a famous Greek teacher who went around giving people advice. They killed him. Socrates died from an overdose of wedlock. After his death, his career suffered a dramatic decline.
Julius Caesar extinguished himself on the battlefields of Gaul. The Ides of March murdered him because they thought he was going to be made king. Dying, he gasped out:”Tee hee, Brutus.”
Nero was a cruel tyranny who would torture his subjects by playing the fiddle on them.
Joan of Arc was burnt to a steak and was cannonized by Bernard Shaw.
Finally Magna Carta provided that no man should be hanged twice for the same offence.
In midevil times most people were alliterate. Yhe greatest writer of the futile ages was Chaucer, who wrote many poems and verses and also wrote literature.
Another story was William Tell, who shot an arrow through an apple while standing on his son’s head.
During the Renaissance America began. Christopher Columbus was a great navigator who discovered America while cursing about the Atlantic.
The winter of 1620 was a hard one for the settlers. Many people died and many babies were born. Captain John Smith wa responsible for all this.
One of the causes of the Revolutionary War was the English put tacks in their tea. Also, the colonists would send their parcels through the post without stamps. Finally the colonists won the War and no longer had to pay for taxis.
Delegates from the original states formed the Contented Congress. Thomas Jefferon, a Virgin, and Benjamin Franklin were two singers of the Declaration of Independence. Franklin dicovered electricity by rubbing two cats backwards and declared,”A horse divided against itself cannot stand”. Franklin died in 1790 and is still dead.
Abraham Lincoln became America’s greatest Precedent. Lincoln’s mother died in infancy, and he was born in a log cabin which he built with his own hands. Abraham Lincoln freed the slaves by signing the Emasculation Proclamation. On the night of April 14, Lincoln went to the theatre and got shot in his seat by one of the actors in a moving picture show. They believed the assinator was John Wilkes Booth, a supposedly insane actor. This ruined Booth’s career.
Gravity was invented by Issac Walton. It is chiefly noticeable in autumn when the apples are falling off the trees.
Johann Bach wrote a great many musical compositions and had a large number of children. In between he practiced on an old spinster which he kept in his attic. Bach died from 1750 to the present. Bach was the most famous composer in the world and so was Hendel. Hendel was half German half Italian and half English. He was very large.
Beethoven wrote music even though he was deaf. He was so deaf he wrote loud music. He took long walks in the forest even when everyone was calling for him. Beethoven expired in 1827 and later died for this.
The sun never set on the British Empire because the British Empire is in the East and the sun sets in the West.
Queen Victoria was the longest queen. She sat on a thorn for 63 years. She was a moral woman who practiced virtue. Her death was the final event which ended her reign.
The ninetheened century was a time of great many inventions. People stopped reproducing by hand and started reproducing by machine. The invention of the steamboat caused a network of rivers to spring up.
Louis Pasteur discovered a cure for rabbis. Charles Darwin was a naturalist who wrote the Organ of the Species. Madman Curie discovered radio. And Karl Marx became one of the Marx brothers.
The First World War, caused by the assignation of the Arch-Duck by an anahist, ushered in a new error in the anals of human history.
The ties between anything considered indian(once called east ethiopia), mauritanian, african and haitian is not coincidental, we had already exchanged/traveled lands and cultures long before the idea of organized slavery, i.e. atlantic slave trade and the papal sponsored blood voyages. Hair, phenotypes, etc, eyc, have never been monolithic amongst non white people.
mr. Kapur,
I study history in Leuven (Belgium). We have a class called ‘history for a big public’ (freely translated), and it is about history in museums, films, books etc. I analysed Elizabeth The Golden Age for this occasion, and I have some questions on your research: did you get help from historians or not? Did you use authentic locations and props, or where they reproductions? If so, how accurate where they reprodced? => In the paper I am still writing on the subject of ‘making a film look and feel authentic to the viewer’. If you don’t have time to answer these questions, I understand. But it would be a great help.
Sincerely,
Eveline Leclercq