Apple Edge

I found this image everywhere, but never with a source. So if you know it, please send me info on who to credit!

This one is a little more recent than most of the things I've covered here. I don't want to date myself here, but when I was a kid Halloween was kind of the Biggest Day of the Year. Mostly because it was a holiday we could celebrate at school, and was thus exempt from the "no celebrating holidays" tradition at home. 

I never got to go trick or treating though, because there wasn't really much point in trying to do that through a school, and my parents were convinced that the candy being handed out to children were laced with things like razors and hypodermic needles. Every parent "knew" that it happened to a ton kinds just last year somewhere out there. 

Except it totally didn't. 

Ages of Old

Georg von Rosen - Oden som vandringsman, 1886 (Odin, the Wanderer)

It seems to be a common belief that the current generation of people below the age of 20(ish) will be the first generation to live a shorter lifespan than their parents. It's often paired with the belief that every generation BEFORE this generation has lived a slightly longer time than the one before them (with a few exceptions due to massive wars).

So much so that I've heard people say that people died of old age in Ancient Egypt while in their mid-20s. And that you were "ancient" if you made it to 30. Now, obviously this can't be true for all of human history, or else people would have been dying of "old age" while they were still infants. [*]

But how much younger was "old age" back in "the day"?

Medieval Food

When asked to list what foods people ate in the middle ages, most people think of huge feats of meat, bread, and copious amounts of alcohol. 

Something like this, really:

But when pressed for details, those details can get a little... odd. 

The most common "fact" to crop up was that people ate a lot of meat, but the meat was usually spoiled, but seasoned with a lot of spices so you couldn't taste it.

Wooden Washington

Wooden teeth image courtesy of Japan Times.

One of the more common things I hear when people start talking about myths and George Washington is that they know that Washington didn't actually chop down a cherry tree, and then they  go on to inform me that Washington did have wooden teeth -- occasionally with the elaboration that the teeth were made from cherry wood, and thus the origin of the tree chopping myth. 

So did George Washington have wooden teeth, cherry or otherwise? 

The Spanish Flu

After the slog that was researching Custer myths last time, this one is going to be short and simple. 

You may be familiar with The Spanish Flu. Also known as The Great Influenza and/or La Grippe.

If you're not, I'll give you a very quick rundown:

The Spanish Flu was a highly contagious strain of Influenza (aka "the flu") that rampaged around the world starting around March 1918 and ending sometime June 1920. From Mid-1918 to late 1919, the United State's death toll was  675,000 people. [*] World wide estimates start at about 50 million fatalities world wide -- on the low end. [**] Higher estimates are closer to 100 million deaths.

But that's not the myth -- because it most certainly did happen. 

The myth is the name, the "Spanish Flu." 

You might have noticed from the dates that the flu coincided with World War I. This meant a lot of censors in the news media, and the countries involved in what was known then as The Great War didn't report anything about influenza epidemic. 

Spain was neutral in the war, and didn't censor its news. Thus, it was the only large European country reporting the outbreak. Since it was only appearing in Spanish papers, people assumed it was a Spanish disease. For the record, Spaniards  called it "The French Flu." [***]

Yep, they got the blame because they were honest. 

For the record, we still don't know for sure where the strain of influenza came from. The three most likely sources are China, Austria, and Kansas USA. [****]