Guacamole

Today is a random fact day.

Yesterday my friends, sister, mom and I were eating chips and guacamole. I remembered that when I was little I had called guacamole something else, but wasn’t sure what, so I asked my mom what I used to call it.

She replied, “Brocamole.” We smiled at that, and my sister said, “That would be made of broccoli, Emma.”

We had said this before, that brocamole would be made of broccoli, but yesterday I had the brilliant realization that it wouldn’t, necessarily, because guacamole isn’t made of guacals or guacali. I also realized that this would be the perfect thing to write about for a Random Facts post (it’s harder than you think coming up with interesting questions each day).

Filthy Rich

The other day, while we were driving to a football tournament, my dad asked my sister and I why Macklemore refers to our city as “filthy”. (In The Town he says “My city’s filthy”). I told him that it was used as a way of saying “awesome”, and my sister said that it was sort of like calling something “sick”, where it sounds gross but it is meant as “cool”. (Just as I was writing that I realized how much that doesn’t make sense).

That’s not really what I’m writing about though. Talking about the word filthy, we of course made the connection to the phrase “filthy rich”, which made us wonder, why do we sometimes call extremely wealthy people filthy? How did that start? So here’s the random fact for today:

It turns out, it started with the word lucre, which has been used since the fourteenth century and means money. However, lucre is usually regarded as money made in a dishonest way. In 1526 William Tindale used the phrase “filthy lucre” in his printed works. Then money was referred to as “the filthy” and soon after the jump was made to call people who became wealthy by dishonorable means the “filthy rich”. The phrase was first used in the US in the 1920s. Today, however, most of the negative association with the phrase is gone.

SPF

It’s summer where I am, and I spend most of my day outside. So I put on a fair amount of sunscreen. But as my sister said something about only wearing SPF 70 and not SPF 30, I wondered what exactly SPF is, and more importantly what it means.

Amonds

Here’s something interesting I learned yesterday.  I was in a sweets store with my grandma, and she was getting a box of turtles as a present for someone.  (Turtles meaning those chocolate-caramel-nuts combinations NOT the animal, just to clarify). So she was looking at the three types they had: peanut, pecan and almond. She was bent over looking at the displays, and she said, “I think we should get an assortment of peanut and almond.”

The way she said it sounded funny to me, but I didn’t say anything because she had been facing away from me and I figured it was just my hearing. But then she said “Almond” again and it still sounded funny. So I told her to say that again. And she said “amond”!