@FrancoJTorres

The Flyest Honeys (and Guys)

A site called misstravel.com polled 31,000 American women and 13,000 American men to determine the top 10 “sexiest” nationalities according to Gringos. Here are the results.

Brazilians place pretty high on both lists, while Americans, Spaniards, Swedes, and the French make appearances on both lists. I gotta say I agree with my brethren on Colombian women being in first place. Sofia Vergara alone is an epic super mega-babe to the third power who is still all kindsa fine even at 40 with a grown-up son. Sorry Mexicans, in my heart you are #1.

Meet Ampersand

So that’s what this thing is called. I didn’t know this guy had a name, or that it was included in the alphabet.

From Mental Floss:

Today we just use it for stylistic purposes (and when we’ve run out of space in a text message or tweet), but the ampersand has had a long and storied history in English, and was actually frequently included as a 27th letter of the alphabet as recently as the 19th century.

In fact, it’s because of its placement in the alphabet that it gets its name. Originally, the character was simply called “and” or sometimes “et” (from the Latin word for and, which the ampersand is usually stylistically meant to resemble). However, when teaching children the alphabet, the & was often placed at the end, after Z, and recited as “and per se and,” meaning “and in and of itself” or “and standing on its own.”

So you’d have “w, x, y, z, and, per se, and.” Over time, the last bit morphed into “ampersand,” and it stuck even after we quit teaching it as part of the alphabet.

GIF: 2012 Word of the Year

Oxford American Dictionaries have announced their 2012 word of the year:

GIF (v) to create a GIF file of (an image or video sequence, especially relating to an event): he GIFed the highlights of the debate

GIF beat out a short list of fierce contenders including:

• Eurogeddon: the potential financial collapse of the European Union countries that have adopted the euro, envisaged as having catastrophic implications for the region’s economic stability [from euro + (Arma)geddon]
• Higgs boson: a subatomic particle whose existence is predicted by the theory that unified the weak and electromagnetic interactions
• MOOC: massive open online course; a university course offered free of charge via the Internet
• nomophobia: anxiety caused by being without one’s mobile phone [from no + mo(bile) + phobia]
• Super PAC: a type of independent political action committee which may raise unlimited sums of money from corporations, unions, and individuals but is not permitted to contribute to or coordinate directly with parties or candidates
• superstorm: an unusually large and destructive storm
• YOLO: you only live once; typically used as rationale or endorsement for impulsive or irresponsible behavior

Previous winners include:

• 2005: podcast
• 2006: carbon-neutral
• 2007: locavore
• 2008: hypermiling
• 2009: unfriend
• 2010: refudiate
• 2011: squeezed middle

P.S. I can’t believe GIF beat YOLO. That word was all over the place. I never thought I’d say this but, YOLO got snubbed!