The bar Ladies & Gents, housed in a former public toilet in Kentish Town, London. (Photo: Ewan Munro/CC BY-SA 2.0)

William Borrell walked by the same abandoned public toilet at a junction in the north London neighborhood of Kentish Town nearly every day and wondered what was in there. A vodka distiller and local bar owner, Borrell was in the market for an office space. “So I rang the council every day for six months until they finally said, ‘Enough is enough, let the guy in, let him look at the toilet,’” he says. This particular toilet, of late Victorian or Edwardian vintage, had been left to founder for 25 or 30 years, he says, but “it was in incredible condition.” 

Incredible enough that he scrapped his plans to use the underground loo as an office and instead set his sights on opening a bar. Ladies & Gentlemen opened in January 2015 and has routinely made London top-10 lists since. 

Throughout history, most cultures have maintained a strict and necessary distinction between where you eat and where you defecate. Eating or drinking in the toilet, even one that is no longer in use as a toilet, feels like a violation of that distinction—which is probably what makes the recent trend of opening bars and cafes in disused toilets counter-intuitively appealing. A number of eateries across the globe flirt with the eat-poop taboo, with varying degrees of wit and taste: Taiwan is home to the Modern Toilet, a chain of three very cute toilet-themed restaurants that began with chocolate ice cream served in a miniature toilet bowl; in Moscow, the Crazy Toilet Café serves up drinks in miniature urinals; at Das Klo in Berlin, patrons perch on toilets and eat currywurst; and Los Angeles briefly had the Magic Restroom Café, which served noodles and curry in tiny toilets (it closed after only about six months).

But those places seem to be more about the gimmick, heavy on the “ick”. London seems to be regularly pulling off turning what were actual toilets into places you’d want to visit. And London’s success has everything to do with the city’s unique history with the public water closet.

Modern Toilet, a chain of restroom-themed restaurants in Taiwan. (Photo: riNux/CC BY-SA 2.0)

The concept of the public toilet didn’t begin with the Romans, although they were particularly invested in the idea—in 315 AD, for example, there were 144 public toilets in the city of Rome. The Romans spread their concepts of sanitation engineering to places they conquered, and though that legacy dimmed in the years after they left Britain, communal public toilets existed through medieval London. In the 15th and 16th centuries, Londoners had at least 13 houses of “easement”, including a massive 84-seater named after the legendary London mayor, Richard Whittington. “Whittington’s Longhouse” was located on what is called Walbrook Street today, but was then an actual brook feeding the Thames that carried away excrement at high tide. A wealth of evidence also suggests that the act of toileting, though not exactly public, wasn’t hidden—the Longhouse had no stalls or divisions between seats; people of both sexes used obliging corners or bushes; rulers frequently gave audiences with courtiers while having bowel movements; and, as historian Lucy Worsley points out in her book, If Walls Could Talk: An Intimate History of the Home, obsessive 17th century diarist Samuel Pepys kept his “close-stool” in his living room.

Whittington’s Longhouse was destroyed in the Great Fire in 1666 and rebuilt by the City of London on a smaller scale; by this time, despite the growing population and therefore need, there seemed to be fewer public provisions for toilets. Part of this might have owed to the cost of running a public toilet, if the City of London’s later neglect of the Longhouse is any indication. But people still needed to go: Some 18th century reports discuss a particular grate in Covent Garden flower girls would use and still other reports claim that roving entrepreneurs carrying buckets and large cloaks would charge people to pee in the bucket, hidden behind the cloak. As the city grew more crowded during the Industrial revolution, it became appallingly evident that poor sanitation was a major public health crisis.

By the mid-1800s, the terrible state of the city’s sanitation was the subject of perpetual Parliamentary debate, with the 1848 Public Health Act laying out legislation about sanitary requirements for homes and streets. Public provision for public toilets, however, wasn’t mandated.

Mid-19th century designs for public toilets in London by Joseph William Bazalgett, the engineer who created London's sewer network. (Photo: Wellcome Images, London/CC BY 4.0)

Still, progressive spirit was in the air, along with the stench of so much public waste. The first modern public toilets were the flushing toilets at the Great Exhibition of 1851, that dazzling display of the wonders of the Victorian world. Visitors (although initially, just male visitors) couldn’t be expected to relieve themselves in the corners, so sanitation engineer George Jennings’ marvelous flushing toilets were installed for public use. Visitors were charged a penny to use them (this is, of course, where the English phrase “spend a penny” as a euphemism for going to the toilet comes from); more than 800,000 of them did. “They were hugely popular and that sort of sparked an entrepreneurial interest in toilets,” says Rachel Erickson, founder of London’s Loo Tours, guided walking tours of the city’s most interesting toilets. “Entrepreneurs started to go, ‘Aha, we could make some money out of this.”

As it turns out, they couldn’t, at least not at first. Less than a year after the close of the Great Exhibition, an ambitious project backed by Prince Albert and several other forward-thinking Victorian worthies put Jennings’ flushing toilets in charmingly euphemistic “Halting Stations” on Fleet Street, this time charging two pennies. These, however, were less of a success and “the newspapers of the day determined that people didn’t need this,” says Erickson.

A dessert at Modern Toilet also keeps with the theme. (Photo: riNux/CC BY-SA 2.0)

By the 1880s, however, following the push to furnish the city with good sewers that didn’t just end in the Thames and the discovery that illnesses such as cholera were not caused by “miasmas” (insalubrious air) but poor sanitation, the public toilets’ moment had well and truly come. In the 1880s, private investors as well as council authorities began opening pay-to-pee public toilets in underground and hidden spaces across the city; the first underground public was installed near Bank Underground Station, where one, though not original, remains today.

A good deal of Victorian civic pride went into their construction: They were discreet, at a time when people wanted to hide their gross, physical bodies, but most of them were also attractive places to be – they used marble and copper, were cleanly tiled with light often provided by skylights, and some of them had touches like gold fish in the cistern. “You could get a shoe shine and have a shave and brush your teeth, it was a place to deal with your bodily needs of all sorts,” says Erickson; some toilets would offer more facilities than others, and probably charged more as well. Most of the facilities were for men only, on the wisdom that women either didn’t suffer from bodily excretions or, if they did, would never want to do them in public. 

Public Life, a bar and club in London's Spitalfields. It had its license revoked in 2012 and is now a second-hand clothing store. (Photo: Ewan Munro/C BY-SA 2.0) 

The public toilet, both fee-paying and free, flourished through the middle of the 20th century, but by the 1970s and ‘80s, they were becoming too expensive to maintain—according to a Times article from 1980, the same 73 toilets and nine urinals in Westminster that cost £516,960 (around $756,000) to run in 1971 cost £1.58 million ($2.3 million) just nine years later. The hidden nature of Victorians toilets and their internal layout made them magnets for “unintended purposes”, as the British Toilet Association delicately described the drug use, the public sex, and how shoplifters and pickpockets clogged the toilets with stolen goods and emptied wallets; this drove up the costs of keeping them in useable condition.

There is even now no legislative obligation that local authorities maintain places for people to use the toilet, so when budgets tightened—and they did a lot in these austere years—the loos were often the first to go. The same Times article noted the resulting closures, citing the London Tourism Board’s claim that between 1966 and 1977, facilities for men dropped by a quarter.

Ancient Roman public toilets. (Photo: Public Domain)

The decline left a lot of unused real estate—and as it turns out, transforming a public toilet into a bar or social space isn’t a totally new phenomenon. At least one canny developer realized there was an opportunity in cheap, but prime real estate in the late 1980s, transforming a disused Edwardian public toilet in Shepherd’s Bush, a west London neighborhood, into a snooker hall. In 2002, the place became a comedy club called Ginglik that allegedly once saw Robin Williams perform an impromptu stand-up set, but it closed in 2013. Though Ginglik didn’t exactly burst open a vein of untapped, super cheap real estate, other developers clocked the idea. A 600-square foot underground toilet in Spitalfields was reinvented in 2006 as a nightclub called Public Life, but it had its license revoked in 2012 after complaints from neighbors and a raid by police that resulted in multiple arrests on drugs charges. The toilet went on sale in January this year for an asking price of £999,000 ($1.46 million); as of June, it was still available. 

Bars in former toilets could also be seen as an indictment of the deplorable state of London real estate, which has only gotten more expensive over the last decade—disused toilets tend to be cheaper spaces. In the last four years, the number of social spaces in former public toilets has risen to the point of being an actual trend. There’s CellarDoor off The Strand in central London is a toilet converted into a cabaret with a modern Weimar Republic feel (felicitous rumor has it that Oscar Wilde frequented it when it was a toilet); WC, which stands for “wine and charcuterie”, in Clapham; the members-only Art Deco-inspired Bermondsey Arts Cocktail Club; and pizza place Joe Public, also in Clapham and which only just opened in March.

Attendant, a coffee shop in a tiny underground Victorian men’s loo in Fitzrovia that opened in 2013, embraces its past: They mounted a bar-height table top through the lovely porcelain urinals and customers can sip coffee sitting on a café stool in a place where thousands of men have urinated. 

An 1801 cartoon showing three women using a public toilet:"And pray Ma'am, what is your opinion of affairs in general?";  "I hope Ma'am you don't allude to the Minister"; "When you are finished ladies, I should be happy to be permitted to make a motion". (Photo: Wellcome Images, London/CC BY-SA 4.0)

For Borrell, owner of Ladies & Gentlemen, it was the condition of the toilet that led him to abandon the idea of an office and turn to a bar: “For me the vision was quite clear, this was a beautiful place, with high ceilings, beautiful floors,” he says, noting that too that rents underground are necessarily cheaper, though he declined to say what his was. And there were other attractions: “Bars below ground, it feels like illegal, naughty, speakeasy-ish, it’s got that rep about it. You can kind of play the music as loud as you wish, you haven’t really got many neighbors really,” says Borrell. To renovate the space, Borrell removed the toilets (although he reinstalled two) and knocked down the interior wall separating the “ladies” from the “gents”. The result is around 420-square feet of moody, Victorian-inflected bar space that only slightly references its own past—the most obvious indication of its former life is a hand-washing basin that they’ve had re-plumbed to pour punch during private parties. 

But Ladies & Gentlemen almost didn’t happen—Camden Council only narrowly approved its planning application. One of the councilors who opposed the plan declared it “ridiculous” to give people a cocktail bar when what they really needed was more public toilets. The one comment on the article in the local paper detailing the vote raged, “It’s unacceptable that Camden Council has given the go ahead to turn these disused public conveniences into an underground bar when they haven’t provided an alternative.”

Borrell is, of course, aware of the arguments against the bar. Winning over the 12 local residents associations was an uphill battle, he says, but points out that the toilet was never going to be turned back into a useable public convenience. For one thing, it could never have met the requirements of the Disability Discrimination Act of 1995. “We weren’t taking away toilets, we were actually building toilets that we were happy for people to use,” he says. “We were actually trying to be helpful.”

An 1858 satirical cartoon showing death rowing on the river Thames, during the 'Great Stink', in which the city suffered in hot weather the smells of human and industrial waste. (Photo: Public Domain)

The owners of these former toilets often find themselves in the strange position of having to bear the responsibility for what the place once was; Ladies & Gentlemen’s struggle for approval highlights a surprisingly little talked about problem in urban planning: Whose responsibility is it to provide toilets?

The answer is sort of, no one.

Outside Attendant a coffee shop in an old public toilet, in Fitzrovia. (Photo: Ewan Munro/C BY-SA 2.0) 

Again, local authorities are not required to maintain public facilities, although they are allowed to charge for them if they do provide them. Toilets are expensive—a single public convenience can cost upwards of £52,000 ($75,000) a year to maintain, and a standard toilet block with four women’s cubicles, one men’s cubicle and urinals, and a disabled access toilet would cost more than £140,000 ($240,000)—and complicated; the British Toilet Association’s “short” guide for installing toilets for public use is 56 pages long and covers everything from vandal resistant fittings to how to accommodate dogs.

Some authorities contract out toilet maintenance to private companies, but many have simply not bothered: Now, the British Toilet Association estimates there is less than one public toilet per 10,000 people in the country, although this figure is somewhat in debate (toilet campaigner Gail Knight has an excellent analysis of the reported numbers on her blog) and it’s hard to find reliable numbers. What is perhaps clear to anyone who has looked for a toilet in the city and been unable to find one is that there simply aren’t enough. (New York has faced similar public toilet woes.)

Some authentic features inside Attendant. (Photo: Sara Richards/CC BY-SA 2.0)

Rachel Erickson of Loo Tours believes that turning toilets into bars is helping draw attention to the toilet crisis, and what toilet campaigners call the “bladder leash”—the distance from home a person can go without being worried that they won’t be able to find a toilet. “[The public toilet] is something you take for granted until it goes away… I think people are starting to realize that actually, it is quite important,” she says, adding. “It is, in many ways, a sign of gentrification that we have people putting the resources into quirky projects like this, but I think it’s on the whole a good thing that the space is being used and it’s helping people talk about toilets.”

The Victorians may have had some uncomfortable ideas, but when it came to toilets, they weren’t too wrong. “The Victorians, while they were very prudish, had this wonderful civic pride … they were meant to be nice places,” says Erickson. “I think we should think of toilets as pleasant classy places…. It keeps you healthy, it can be a lovely place to sit and think!”

Or have a cocktail.

Korla Pandit sitting at an organ. (Photo: Collection of John Turner)

This article originally appeared on What It Means to Be American.

Turning on the TV in Los Angeles in 1949, you might have come face-to-face with a young man in a jeweled turban with a dreamy gaze accentuated by dark eye shadow. Dressed in a fashionable coat and tie, Korla Pandit played the piano and the organ—sometimes both at once—creating music that was both familiar and exotic.

According to press releases from the time, Pandit was born in New Delhi, India, the son of a Brahmin government worker and a French opera singer. A prodigy on the piano, he studied music in England and later moved to the United States, where he mastered the organ at the University of Chicago. Not once in 900 performances did he speak on camera, preferring instead to communicate with viewers via that hypnotic gaze.

He became one of the first TV stars, ever, with friends like Errol Flynn, Bob Hope, and Sabu, the Elephant Boy. He eventually ceded his TV performances over a contract dispute to the young pianist Liberace. And the way he came to fame is one of those only-in-America fables where the audience and the performer are both invested in the illusion.

I first got to know Korla Pandit in 1990, while I was working at KGO TV in San Francisco. I was producing a series on Bay Area eccentrics and a colleague at the station mentioned that Pandit had a live show on KGO in the ’50s.

I tracked Pandit down to a private residence in the Napa Valley, where I was greeted by a man who appeared much shorter than the pianist I’d seen on faded television clips. He was elegantly dressed in a grey Nehru jacket, a turban, and highly polished shoes. As he spoke to me in a soft but high-pitched voice, Korla regaled me with stories of India, Hollywood, and sold-out concerts, cleverly salted with “Indian pearls of wisdom.” He told me that in India a song never dies but materializes into beautiful forms and that he had played at the funeral of his famous friend Paramahansa Yogananda. I had no reason to doubt his integrity or question his philosophy. He seemed like a gentle soul.

Although his face was sunken and his gaze less alluring, he was able to take me back in time, much like the character Norma Desmond in Sunset Boulevard. After we got the necessary footage of him playing the organ and a great shot of him walking off into the sunset, we left, promising to stay in contact.

When the piece ran a few days later on the evening news, Pandit called me at work to say that he was happy to reconnect with his Channel 7 fans. He continued to call me every four months or so for the next seven years. We usually talked about the clubs he was playing at in Los Angeles. He told me he had a new audience of tiki hipsters who canonized him by calling him the “godfather of exotica music.” And he told me about his cameo appearance in Tim Burton’s film about cult film director Ed Wood.

When he called, I’d pick up the phone and hear a woman’s secretarial voice asking me if this was Mr. Turner. Then she’d say “Korla Pandit would love to talk to you.” After an acknowledgment, the line was usually quiet for 15 to 20 seconds until he came on with his familiar greeting of “Namaste, John.” It was straight out of a ’50s noir film.

Pandit with his wife and children. (Photo: Courtesy of Freek Kinkelaar)

In 1996, he invited me to attend a San Francisco concert held at Bimbos 365, an atmospheric club with ’50s-style booth seating. This was the only time I got to see him perform before an audience and boy, was he great. He played songs from his 29 albums. The crowd was on its feet for the whole performance.

In October of 1998, a viewer called the station to say that Pandit, age 77, had died that day at a hospital in Petaluma, California, of heart failure. We showed 20 seconds of him playing at his height in the ’50s, as well as something from the interview. I thought that closed the chapter on Korla Pandit. It didn’t.

In June of 2001, a friend sent me a story in Los Angeles Magazine written by R.J. Smith called “The Many Faces of Korla Pandit.” I started reading the article with excitement, which was soon followed by a clouded curiosity and later capped with a disclosure that shook what I knew about him (which apparently wasn’t that much because the name he was born with was John Roland Redd). I shared the article with a fellow KGO producer, Eric Christensen, who grew up in San Francisco and remembered his mother saying she was mesmerized by Pandit’s eyes, which seemed to see right through her.

A portrait of a young Pandit. (Photo: Collection of John Turner)

We agreed that Pandit’s true story was astonishing, tragic, and yet illuminating—the foundation for a movie and a true American archetype of self-invention. Unbeknownst to the rest of us, he had actually been one of the first African-American television stars. Twelve years later, when we were both retired, Eric and I decided to use our pensions and social security to make that movie.

We started by filming Smith, the author of the magazine piece, who had known Pandit in the early ’90s. Only years later, as he was interviewing musicians for a book on L.A.’s great African-American music clubs in the ’40s, did Smith begin to uncover Pandit’s true history. When Smith complimented a piano player of note, Sir Charles Thompson, Thompson said offhandedly that while he thought he was a decent piano player, there was another musician from Columbia, Missouri, who was much better, a fellow named John Redd. He went on to say that when he was working in L.A., he turned on the television and lo and behold, there was John Roland Redd, running over the keys while wearing a turban and going under the Indian name of Korla Pandit. Well, this was a real shocker to Smith, and of course to us.

Smith confirmed that Pandit was indeed John Roland Redd, one of seven children born to Baptist pastor Ernest Redd and Doshia O’Nina Johnson, in St. Louis, Missouri. His love of music took hold in childhood and he played a mean boogie-woogie piano. Smith learned that Frances, one of Redd’s sisters, had preceded him to Hollywood, where she found work as an actress on an all-black film called Midnight Shadow in which a shifty villain wore a turban. When he first came to L.A., Redd changed his name to Juan Rolando, because at that time, Mexican music was in vogue and Mexican musicians had an easier time then African-Americans getting studio and club work.

A photo signed "John Roland Redd" and "Juan Rolando".  (Photo: Courtesy of Gary Cloud) 

Frances had a white roommate who was a Disney artist named Beryl DeBeeson, whom she set up on a date with her brother. Their relationship eventually led to a Tijuana marriage, as interracial marriages were illegal in California at that time. Beryl helped John become Korla Pandit, doing his eye makeup and designing his sets and wardrobe.

One of Redd’s childhood friends filled us in on what life was like for African-Americans living in Columbia in the ’30s. There wasn’t much mingling between the races, as Jim Crow laws were in effect. Blacks weren’t served at the soda fountain and if you wanted to buy clothes at the department store, you couldn’t even try them on. A nephew told us that John was asked to play the piano before the local chapter of the KKK. He also recounted a humorous story about Redd hypnotizing a fellow grade school student for fun. Redd’s childhood friend felt that John’s move to California, after graduating from high school, only helped him.

We asked our interview subjects if John’s version of passing or reinvention was dishonest. Almost all responded that he did what he had to do to navigate the existing racism in the U.S. This overall sense of approval seemed to ring true because while many of the members of his father’s congregation knew of his transformation from John to Korla—as did numerous musicians—no one outed him. He was able to take his secret with him to his grave.

The trailer for Korla, from Appleberry Pictures on Vimeo.

Hollywood was also kind to shape shifters who’d invented their biographies. And Pandit and his wife understood that Americans knew very little of India outside of the magical rope-climbing swamis or men-of-mystery they saw in the movies. With their sets and music, they created an exotic escape in people’s living rooms. Female fans of Pandit have told us that he was their first teenage crush. He was an image that came through their TV screens that they could safely fantasize about.

Korla Pandit understood—far more than anyone realized—that what we saw on TV wasn’t real, but it could be a whole new kind of reality.

John Turner has curated numerous shows on folk and outsider art and has written a biography on the self-taught artist, Howard Finster. For more information about the documentary Korla, visit korlathemovie.com or Korla The Movie on Facebook.

An allowed image of Mysore Palace. (Photo: Ramesh NG/CC BY-SA 2.0)

India’s Mysore Palace is a wonder to behold, not only from the outside, but on the inside as well, although you are not allowed to take pictures in many parts of it. However, all photography restrictions were ignored by a recent couple who controversially took their pre-wedding photos inside the restricted building.

Mysore Palace is an elaborate piece of architectural grandeur, standing as the fourth royal abode of the Wodeyar dynasty. From 1399 to 1947, Mysore stood as the capital of the Kingdom of Mysore, and the grand palace was the centerpiece of the city. The building that stands today is actually the fourth such building to stand in the spot, having been completed in 1912.

While the exterior of the palace, which is stunningly illuminated every night, is a popular tourist attraction, the majority of the interior is off limits to photographers and filmmakers, since the royal estate is protected under a high level of security. The last official film that was shot in the palace was 1975's Mayura, and even that production was not allowed within much of the building.

Nonetheless, a young couple recently created a local scandal when they managed to stage their pre-wedding photoshoot inside the palace’s protected Durbar Hall. While the Mysore royal family has not even released official pictures of this part of the palace, the couple managed to take a number of romantic shots, as well as a full minute of video. How the couple gained access to the restricted area is unclear, but an investigation is underway. The couple did not damage the historic palace, but according to Asia Net News, Mysore queen Pramoda Devi was very annoyed, and the palace’s preservation council was worried that the images would demean the importance and beauty of the palace.

Should the couple be found guilty of trespassing on the historical site, they could face hefty penalties, but so far, they seem to have gotten away with their romantic stunt.

Quebec produced enough syrup this spring to fill approximately 287 million 6-ounce bottles. (Photo: Ano Lobb/CC BY 2.0)

Pancake-lovers, tuck in your napkins: the Federation of Quebec Maple Syrup Producers just announced a banner year for syrup. 148.2 million pounds of the stuff poured out of the province's trees this year—a 23% increase over the previous record, the Montreal Gazette reports.

Your average Québécois syruping season lasts from 20 to 25 days. But as Newswire CA explains, thanks to a spring that alternated between freezing and thawing, this year gave us eight good weeks of tree-tapping. "We've never seen a harvest of this magnitude," Federation president Serge Beaulieu told the outlet. "At times the flow [of maple water] was so strong it was hard to keep up with the boiling."

This year's boom is welcome news for the Federation, which has been trying to stave off both international competition and internal strife while still reeling from 2013's massive syrup heist. That theft saw $18 million worth of syrup stolen, a third of it never to be recovered.

As the Federation helpfully points out, this year's syrup haul would fill 24 Olympic swimming pools. More likely, it will end up in one of Quebec's main syrup export destinations: the U.S., Japan, France, and Germany. Leftovers, if there are any, will get poured into the province's Global Strategic Maple Syrup Reserve, to await their future deployment on waffles across the globe.

Every day, we track down a fleeting wonder—something amazing that's only happening right now. Have a tip for us? Tell us about it! Send your temporary miracles to cara@atlasobscura.com.

Palms in Argentina. (Photo: Public Domain)

Grant Stephenson can rattle off facts about palm trees in the way others chatter about baseball: Did you know palm trees have the largest seed of any plant? Did you know Raffia palms have the longest leaves in the plant kingdom at up to 80 feet long? That there are palms so hard you can throw a spark off them with a machete? Petrified palm wood is the official state stone of Texas and the state fossil of Louisiana. Latin names like Clamus, Ceroxylon, and Lodoicea roll off his tongue like a starting lineup.

“I can talk six or eight hours and still not tell you everything you need to know about trees,” says Stephenson, who speaks with an amiable drawl and runs Horticultural Consultants, Inc. in Marble Falls, Texas, procuring and selling palms and other tropical plants, and advising people on how to care for them. 

Stephenson’s business is palms, but they are also his life. He spends several months a year scouring the earth for them. He estimates he has seen close to 2,000 palm species on over more than 50 expeditions. And on many of these trips he’s not alone—he is joined by hundreds of like-minded fans for whom the tree that has become synonymous with chilling out is much more than a nice landscape feature.

Different species of Arecaceae. (Photo: Public Domain)

Stephenson sits on the board of directors of the International Palm Society, of which he is also a card-carrying lifetime member. Founded in 1956 in Florida, the organization metes out grants for palm research, publishes a journal (Palms), maintains a well-used message board, “Palm Talk” (where “pics please” always means “pictures of palms, and more of them”), and offers trips around the world for hundreds of palm-obsessives, which Stephenson helps organize. Up to 200 people from all over the world attend biennial treks to places like Australia, Thailand and Venezuela in order to mingle with trees all day, then listen to experts talk about trees in the evening. This year’s trip to Borneo is sold out, and promises voyagers the opportunity to see up to 80 different kinds of palms.

“I’ve literally rid trains over the River Kwai, speedboats down it and elephants through it,” says Stephenson, laughing. In photos on his website, Stephenson looks a bit like Indiana Jones meets the Dude—tan with chin-length hair, a brimmed hat and neckerchief. And scaling a palm tree.

Palm trees in the desert: Andreas Canyon in Palm Springs. (Photo: Nina B/shutterstock.com)

Palms have long exerted a mystical pull over travelers. The poets John Milton and William Cullen Bryant name-check them in verse; Alfred Tennyson called them “knots of Paradise”. Modern day wordsmith Channing Tatum told fans in a Reddit AMA that he would like a “magical palm tree that had a lot of shade with instead of coconuts there’s just peanut butter jelly sandwiches with cheetos underneath”.

On PalmTalk, biennial trekkers swap photos, stories and memories, fondly recalling the thrill of seeing palms in their natural habitat, where they photograph them, touch them and sometimes even talk to them. Wrote one traveler, “No matter where people are from, no matter what they do for a living, no matter what other interests or philosophies they may have, for one week everyone has one thing in common: PALMS.”

IPS travelers have hauled themselves by rope up steep hillsides in Thailand to clap eyes on the rare Maxburretia, traveled by donkey, helicopter and hanging bridge, steered dug-out canoes through Madagascar and floated down the Amazon. Once, in Chiang Mai, Thailand, Stephenson handed out leech-proof socks to 200 explorers. They turned out to be only moderately helpful.

“I got an award for having the most leeches with 26,” he says.

Palms at Le Jardin Majorelle in Marrakech. (Photo: Miguel Discart/CC BY-SA 2.0)

What is it about palms that makes plucking a few dozen bloodsucking worms from your body a reasonable obstacle to brave? Stephenson has no shortage of reasons. You can build with them, eat them and make wine from their sap. Seashore palms hold sand dunes together, and palms are remarkably good at taking care of themselves, transforming their own foliage into compost. The Guihaia palm (also known as “The Dainty Lady”) has silvery leaves that look beautiful reflected in water. But beyond their practical and aesthetic appeal, Stephenson says palm trees exert a kind of psychic pull over people.

“There’s something about the sound of the wind blowing through different types of palms that’s very calming, very soothing,” he says.

A forest of palms in Mauritius. (Photo: Miwok/Public Domain)

Hospitals plant palm trees to detract from the somber environment and casinos install them to loosen people up, says Stephenson. Palms just make people happy. 

It is difficult to prove this theory broadly, but if Stephenson is any indication, there might something to it.

Stephenson is on the road a lot, which makes it hard for him to answer pesky reporters with speed. In an email, he apologized for not responding right away. He ended his short note with a sentiment not typically doled out to near strangers, kind of the email equivalent of wind through palm fronds.

“Have a great day, week, month, year,” he wrote. “What the hell, have a great life.”

A 16th-century memento mori attributed to Hans Leinberger. (Photo: The Walters Art Museum/Creative Commons)

There are many additions you can make to your office desk in order to remind yourself to stay motivated, seize the day, and make every minute count. A mini zen garden or framed motivational quote, for instance; maybe a page-a-day calendar with a kitten hanging from a branch.

Or a 16th-century statuette of a rotting corpse.

The wooden carving above, sculpted by German artist Hans Leinberger in the 1520s, is amemento mori—a reminder of human mortality designed to keep its owner humble, focused, and untethered to worldly possessions. In 16th-century Europe, these stark odes to humanity's transience appeared in the form of tomb effigies, full-sized statues, and smaller sculptures perfect for a tabletop.

The predominant image of these artworks was that of the upright corpse, depicted with a torn flesh suit and exposed ribs. The figure sometimes held an object; the corpse in Leinberger's sculpture clutches a scroll with a Latin inscription that translates to "I am what you will be. I was what you are. For every man is this so." 

One of the more striking full-sized memento moris of the era is the statue of René de Chalon, a French prince who died at 25 in the 1544 siege of Saint-Dizier. Known as a transi—for its depiction of human transience—the sculpture shows the prince's desiccated corpse holding his own heart aloft.

The transi of René de Chalon. (Photo: H. Zell/CC BY-SA 3.0)

Post-Renaissance, portable memento moris continued to be sculpted, with half-human, half-skeleton figures offering a slightly less gruesome way to remember one's mortality. The half-half statuettes below were created in the early 19th century to encourage "spiritual contemplation."

Memento mori figures from the early 19th century. (Photo: Wellcome Library/CC BY 4.0)

The wooden carving below, which was created in 19th-century Italy, shows a woman's head with half her skull exposed. Note the baby snake wrapped around her mandible. Note also that despite the facial decay, her ruffled collar and lace cap are perfectly intact.

A 19th-century Italian memento mori. (Photo: Wellcome Library, London/CC BY 4.0)

Those preferring a more subtle, easily concealable reminder of death—one that can be whipped out for contemplation during a train ride, then stashed in a pocket on disembarking—could opt for a pendant-style memento mori like the one below. It dates to either the 18th or 19th century.

A teeny skeleton in a mini coffin. (Photo: Wellcome Library, London/CC BY 4.0)

Regardless of their size and level of grisliness, portable memento moris all offered the same message: life is short, you will die, and earthly possessions don't matter. The fact that this message was contained in an earthly possession is just part of the thrilling paradox that is human existence.

Object of Intrigue is a weekly column in which we investigate the story behind a curious item. Is there an object you want to see covered? Email ella@atlasobscura.com

A solid gold sculpture known as the Maltese Eagle was stolen from its owner during a viole… https://t.co/CjDbmswU1Qpic.twitter.com/eCO2rjNyAS

— TorontoStar (@TorontoStar) May 31, 2016

Around 10 p.m. on Sunday just outside of Vancouver, Canada, an eagle was stolen. But not just any eagle: a solid-gold eagle that's nearly a foot long and weighs over 17 pounds, according to the National Post. 

Said to be worth at least $5 million, the eagle was stolen from the home of its owner, Ron Shore, in what police and Shore have described as a violent theft. Neither have released details beyond that. In all, the eagle has 763 diamonds encrusted on it—weighing over 53 carats—in addition to a 12-carat green emerald attached to its base. 

The eagle, which its owner refers to as the Maltese Eagle (alluding, of course, to Dashiell Hammett), was recently displayed at a Vancouver art show.

It's unclear what Shore was doing with it at the time of the theft. He declined to say when asked by reporters, nor did he discuss how he keeps the Maltese Eagle secure. 

For now, though, police are in hot pursuit of the thieves, while Shore said he was still a little stunned. 

“It was extremely traumatic, basically something out of a movie scene," he told reporters, according to the National Post. "It was crazy."

The Jller is a work of art parading as a scientist. The machine's purpose is to sort through pebbles collected from its namesake river, the Iller, a German tributary of the Danube. It automatically analyzes the stones and place them in lines according to their age, forming a visible timeline of the rocks in the river.

Watch as the machine carefully plucks one rock from platform and scans it for color composition, layers, patterns, grains and surface texture to determine its age and type. The origins of the rocks in the river Iller are known: they were either eroded from the Alps or transported by glaciers. As a result, it's relatively easy for the machine to identify the age and type of rhe stones. 

Jller is a part of "Ignorance," a collaborative exhibition by German artist Benjamin Maus and Czech artist Prokop Bartoníček. 

Every day we track down a Video Wonder: an audiovisual offering that delights, inspires, and entertains. Have you encountered a video we should feature? Email ella@atlasobscura.com.

An engraving of four women wearing different types of bloomers, c. 1850. (Photo: Kean Collection/Getty Images)   

In the summer of 1851, a pair of pants made headlines across America. 

The “bloomer costume,” also called “Turkish trowsers,” set off a storm of commentary from women’s rights activists, fashion enthusiasts, and critics across the country. In an August issue of the Water-Cure Journal, a publication dedicated to alternative medicine and social reform, a woman named Mary Williams described the outfit as “Turkish pantaloons and a short skirt, leaving the upper vestments to be fashioned according to the taste of the wearer.” Williams wrote that the bloomer costume was “infinitely superior” and “ought to receive the friendly countenance of all sensible persons of either sex,” emphasizing that the choice to wear the outfit was based on health and fashion, rather than a desire to wear men’s clothes.

Many historians point to social reformer Elizabeth Smith Miller as the first American to wear the bloomer costume, and Mrs. Miller’s cousin Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and other prominent women’s rights activists of the time did adopt the pants for their public engagements after their stateside debut. But the outfit became most closely associated with Amelia Jenks Bloomer, a women’s rights activist and editor of The Lily, a temperance journal. She was an outspoken proponent of the style, writing about it in TheLily and wearing bloomers to events and rallies. The “bloomer costume” caught on among some white middle-class women who saw “dress reform” as an integral part of the fight for women’s equality in the mid-1800s. Some 50 years before bloomer-clad women rode bicycles in public, heralding a new era of freedom for women, few dared to don the trousers in public. The women who did wear the style became known as Bloomers, partly for their dress and partly for their interest in women’s rights issues.

The bloomer trend may have been short-lived in 1851 but the media storm that followed made it clear that, especially for women, fashion is political, whether we like it or not. 

Amelia Bloomer, c. 1860. (Photo: Public Domain)

Bloomers were initially reported on as an intriguing fad (“The Bloomers were out yesterday in force,” crowed the New York Tribune in June 1851 under the headline “The New Female Costume”) and a pop culture curiosity, popping up in plays, music, and art. But as more women’s rights activists began to adopt the garment and women across the country began making their own bloomers and dictating their own fashion choices in the process, the pants appeared to be more of a threat than a trend. Many people (most of them men) were convinced that bloomers were a political statement instead of a health initiative—writers stoked fears of a women’s takeover of male space, led by Bloomers in “Turkish trowsers.” 

The women who wore them were quickly characterized as independent, exotic, and unpredictable. A New York Times editorial in October 1851 warned readers that for women’s rights activists, “there is an obvious tendency to encroach upon masculine manners, manifested even in trifles, which cannot be too severely rebuked or too speedily repressed.” These “masculine manners” included wearing bloomers, deemed to be too close to men’s garments for men’s comfort. Bloomers (the women and the pants) were derided in magazines like Harper’s Monthly Magazine and London-based Punch. In a Punch cartoon reprinted in Harper’s in August 1851 (one of many in the ensuing years), a Bloomer proudly stands in the middle of a roomful of men, her short skirt displaying the radical pants below.

Bloomers worn by a basketball team, c. 1905. (Photo: Library of Congress/LC-DIG-hec-20627)

The accompanying article, also taken from Punch, was a parody letter to the editor by a feminist named “Theodosia E. Bang.” The fake Theodosia declared “we are emancipating ourselves, among other badges of the slavery of feudalism, from the inconvenient dress of the European female. With man’s functions, we have asserted our right to his garb, and especially to that part of it which invests the lower extremities.” The letter goes on to say that the American woman would next begin to wear men’s hats and jackets in their pursuit of power. Although played for laughs, the fake letter underscored real fears of women’s increasing presence in public life.

A Punch cartoon from 1851 showing women in bloomers smoking, which was deemed unsuitable for women in Victorian society. (Photo: Public Domain)

 The negative responses to the bloomer costume weren’t confined to print alone. In July 1851, the New York Tribune ran a city item describing a “beautiful Bloomer” worn by a young woman, taking care to note that “so far as we saw no impertinent staring was offered,” implying that staring and commenting were a normal response to the clothing. On a darker note, a London correspondent for the Times reported in November 1851 that women in bloomers are “rarely seen in the streets, one reason being that the unlucky wearer of Bloomer attire has an excellent chance of being mobbed for her temerity.” Even two years later, many women were still nervous about wearing bloomers. “I stand alone in this place,” Sarah Selby wrote in The Water-Cure Journal in June 1853, “no one besides myself having dared to meet public scorn in this glorious enterprise.”

In many of these instances, the pants and the women wearing them were one in the same, representing a new kind of woman whose newfangled clothing was connected to a shift in public behavior. In her history of women in pants at The Toast, Kathleen Cooper writes: “In the language of clothes, pants equal power,” underscoring the social fears and possibilities that emerge when women make their own clothing choices. 

A woman in bloomers with a bicycle, 1896. (Photo: Internet Archive/Public Domain)

Amid the seemingly endless mockery during 1851 and for a few years afterward, the most public figures in the women’s rights movement decided to abandon the dress for their public speeches and events, including Amelia Jenks Bloomer herself.

The choice that some women made to stop wearing bloomers caused rifts among activists and their supporters; some felt that dress reform was required for full equality, while others saw it as secondary to issues of property ownership and voting. In The Radical Women’s Press of the 1850s, Ann Russo and Cheris Kramarae include a letter from activist Lucy Stone to the Sibyl magazine in 1857 that reads: “I frankly confess that I do not expect any speedy or widespread change in the dress of women until as a body they feel a deeper disconnect with their present entire position.”

A woman in bloomers defying the "no smoking" sign, c. 1897. (Photo: Library of Congress/LC-USZ62-56425) 

In the ultimate gesture of the personal being political, Jenks Bloomer commented at some length about her feelings on the garment. She said that she wore them for comfort, noting the societal pressure to revert to long skirts, and declared that Elizabeth Cady Stanton ultimately stopped wearing bloomers because of pushback from the men in her family. Ironically, by the turn of the 20th century, bloomers had become associated with bicycles, offering some women the independence and freedom of movement advocated by dress reformers a half-century earlier.

But even with the widespread popularity of pants for women over the past century, they still make headlines today: Hillary Clinton will forever be associated with pantsuits, school dress codes forbid teen girls from wearing leggings as pants, and the Hollywood Reporter spent three paragraphs detailing late-night host Samantha Bee’s pants-based wardrobe in a recent profile. Women wearing pants remain a cultural lightning rod, representing the possibilities that might arise if they have the power to control their own bodies without criticism.

Recalling the bloomer fad in a collected volume of her works edited and published by her husband Dexter in 1895, Jenks Bloomer apparently didn’t see it that way. “In the minds of some people, the short dress and women’s rights were inseparably connected,” she wrote. “With us, the dress was but an incident, and we were not willing to sacrifice greater questions to it.”

Sexist, maybe? Extra wide, pink parking spots for women in China https://t.co/Q0wJIEIjqZpic.twitter.com/Ttpw8hGa3u

— Los Angeles Times (@latimes) May 30, 2016

At a highway service area in the sprawling Chinese city of Hangzhou—around 100 miles southwest of Shanghai—you'll find some interesting looking parking spots. 

Outfitted in pink paint and the universal, skirted "female" symbol, the parking spots are also around 1.5 times wider than the others, according to the Los Angeles Times. 

Why? Let's just say that if you thought it was about common courtesy—an act of chivalry, perhaps, to give women more space—you'd be wrong. 

“The bigger parking spaces are for women drivers whose driving skills are not superb,” Pan Tietong, a service area manager, told the state-controlled Qianjiang Evening News.

Oh. Maybe he just means some women? 

Nah. From the LAT:

He said he had encountered female drivers who were unskilled at backing up into spots, and sometimes asked security guards to help them park.

The spots “are especially designed for women drivers,” he said. “It’s a humane measure.”

Unsurprisingly, this has sparked a debate across Chinese social media, with 63 percent of people in a Weibo poll saying they supported the parking spots. 

But we can settle one thing here. Are men any better than women at driving? Of course not. 

A BBQ chicken Hot Pocket. (Photo: Lenin and McCarthy/CC BY-SA 3.0)

A version of this post originally appeared on Tedium, a twice-weekly newsletter that hunts for the end of the long tail. 

Laugh all you want, but Hot Pockets are the ultimate modern food.

Designed to be incredibly easy to eat and simple to cook, they cleverly were built to be microwavable and completely, utterly portable.

Less known about the Hot Pocket, however, is its origins, which are the product of a duo of Iranian-born Jewish immigrants who arguably popularized the concept of microwavable frozen meals. Jim Gaffigan hates these things, but we admit something of a respect for them as a bottom-up success story that just happens to be incredibly unhealthy.

And let's not discount the unhealthiness angle of Hot Pocket. A single Pepperoni Pizza Hot Pocket has 320 calories, along with a significant amount of fat (15 grams), saturated fat (6 grams), sodium (700 milligrams), and uh, calcium (20 percent of a recommended daily value).

The Hot Pockets website recommends that you "enjoy your Hot Pockets with a side of fruit or vegetables," a piece of advice we're sure millions of people ignore on a daily basis.

You know something that goes pretty good with fruit, though? The original product that Hot Pockets' parent company, Chef America, produced before it got in the miniature calzone business: microwaveable Belgian waffles.

In a patent filed in 1977 and approved in 1983, the company noted that it had figured out a way to take the guesswork out of a breakfast product that was incredibly difficult to make—and it did so, by making it ahead of time, freezing it, and then making it easy to microwave.

"Although there have been many attempts to do so, Belgian waffles are not utilized in restaurants except in some rare specialty houses, because of the difficulty in making the batter and maintaining its freshness as well as in properly cooking the same," the filing stated.

It was actually pretty innovative and probably made brunches a lot less painful for many restaurants, but it was nothing compared to what was to come.

A frozen waffle. (Photo: kim siciliano/CC BY-SA 2.0)

Chef America's start in the late '70s came at a time when it was unclear whether the microwave would take over the U.S. market in the same way the television, a similarly rectangular device with dynamic-changing ramifications, had. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, just 1 percent of American households owned a microwave in 1971, and by their estimates, the number had barely improved to just over 10 percent of households by the late 1970s. But Chef America came around during a tipping point, where the creation of dedicated microwaveable food could have an impact on the appliances we buy.

It took a little while for the Colorado-based company to perfect its approach, however. Those Belgian waffles may have proved a good starting point for the company, but they weren't conversation-starters that could be sold in commercials. Fortunately, the company was willing to experiment, and those experiments led to something totally unique.

Launched in 1980 as Tastywich, the product that became known as the Hot Pocket was the brainchild of two brothers, Paul and David Merage. At the time the duo formed the company in 1977, Paul had existing retail experience, having spent time with Maxwell House and Hunt Wesson as a marketer.

During his time as a marketer, Paul pondered the trend of two working parents, along with the tendency of people to graze, and the growing desire for portable foods. Hot Pockets, as a marketing strategy, effectively combined these three concerns into a single hand-held product.

It wasn't easy, though. See, microwaves aren't perfect, and what works for a Belgian waffle doesn't work for crispy bread. In fact, the Merage brothers struggled to perfect the formula of the bread to ensure it didn't have the texture of either cardboard or rubber. (When they did, they patented the hell out of it, of course.)

The secret to ensuring a crispy bite is in the Hot Pocket's sleeve. The gray surface in the innards of that sleeve is a plasticky metal film called a susceptor. This film basically takes the waves being pushed out by your science oven and captures them, turning the entire sleeve into a tiny broiler, heating up the frozen foodstuff in a couple of minutes, and ensuring that the pocket is heated somewhat consistently.

Meatball and mozzarella hot pocket. (Photo: Mike Mozart/CC BY 2.0)

(Well, somewhat. It often is burning hot on the outsides and cold in the middle, as Jim Gaffigan would tell you.)

Belgian waffles helped Chef America get into restaurants, but it was the rebranded Hot Pocket, which launched in restaurants in 1983 and later made the move to retail outlets, that made the Merage brothers rich.

By 2002, after the company had launched numerous variations on the original idea, Nestlé was knocking on Chef America's door, and the Merage brothers answered the call—agreeing to a buyout worth $2.6 billion, one that made the brothers rich beyond their wildest dreams.

Paul Merage, who served as Chef America's CEO, had big plans to give that money away.

"We've been given the opportunity to really share in the American dream," he told The Wall Street Journal in 2002. "We need to give back."

And give back they did.

The Merage family is currently the 139th-richest family in the United States, according to Forbes, and that wealth has helped the family become major philanthropic figures. Much of that philanthropic interest has gone back into the culture that they left behind before inventing the Hot Pocket.

Not long after selling his company, Paul Merage made his way to Southern California, where a sizable population of Persian Jews moved during the time of the Iranian Revolution in the late 1970s. It was a good fit for Merage; he left Iran for the United States while Mohammad Reza Shah Pahlavi was still in charge, but much like the roughly 50,000 Persian Jews who came to Southern California after the Shah was removed from power, he was separated from his homeland. This phenomenon is called a diaspora, and it's something closely associated with Jewish culture.

Paul's move to Orange County actually caught the Jewish community off-guard, to a degree. When the Merage Jewish Community Center of Orange County opened in Irvine in 2004, some of the names on the donor lists—Andre and Katherine Merage, the parents of the Hot Pocket inventors—were unfamiliar to the locals.

A 'limited edition' spicy beef nacho hot pocket. (Photo: theimpulsivebuy/CC BY-SA 2.0)

While the couple may have been an unknown to the the local Jewish community, they played an important role in their center's creation. It was Andre (who died in 2001 before the completion of the community center), who put Paul on the plane from Tehran to the United States as a teenager in the late '50s, a move that proved fateful for the family.

The campus is named for Anaheim Ducks owner Henry Samueli, but the community center located on that campus where everyone goes is named for the Merage family. And it was Paul who was the driving force for that strategy.

"Paul is very thoughtful and has a well-defined strategy for his philanthropy," noted Ralph Stern, who chaired the committee that built the community center, in comments to the Jewish Journal in 2004.

The strategy is one that Paul has followed through on ever since the sale of Chef America went through. He's associated with the Merage Institute, a nonprofit that's meant to encourage economic growth between Israel and the United States.

"I knew that I wanted to do something meaningful," he said in an interview with the PARSA Community Foundation. "And the way my mind works, which is how it was in business, I felt that if I could do something that was unique, it would be better than just doing what everybody else was doing."

Paul's strategy was so inspiring that he convinced a tenured professor friend of his to quit, and work to give away his money instead. Marshall Kaplan, the onetime dean of the University of Colorado's Graduate School of Public Affairs, made the career shift at the age of 68.

"I used to tell students he is a role model for what a business CEO should be, and if they have a cynicism based on what they're hearing about the Enrons and the Tycos, Paul Merage is the perfect antidote. He's a man of impeccable integrity," he told the Los Angeles Times in 2005.

Not to be outdone, David's side of the Merage family is associated with three generations of charitable foundations.

"Our philanthropic investments are focused on social change and result in children, families and communities improving the quality and circumstances of their lives," the Merage Foundations website states. "The Merage legacy demonstrates a strong commitment to their communities, their Jewish heritage, and their family."

Now, keep in mind, when reading about this, the really crazy thing about this whole state of affairs: Hot Pockets did this. It set the stage for the Merage family to spend the second halves of their lives donating money and time to causes they deemed important.

Ham and cheese hot pickets with a "croissant crust". (Photo: Mike Mozart/CC BY 2.0)

It allowed Paul Merage to donate $30 million to the University of California Irvine, where the graduate business school is now named after him. It allowed David Merage's wife, Laura, to open a major art center in the Denver area. And it allowed the Merage Foundation to take steps that ensure that Iranian Jews, few of whom actually still live in Iran, had their culture properly represented in Israel and elsewhere.

It's a fascinating philanthropic role to play, and it's something that Hot Pockets made possible.

When Nestlé inevitably moved the Hot Pockets headquarters from its longtime Colorado home base a few years ago, the local alt-weekly couldn't even be bothered to snark at the news, Gaffigan-style. The product's benefit to the community was just too hard to ignore.

"While Colorado is losing jobs, a corporate headquarters, and its Hot Pockets claim to fame, at least the invention has left a warm legacy in Denver," Westword cofounder and editor Patricia Calhoun wrote in 2012 blog post, which does not mention Jim Gaffigan's name once.

And if Calhoun or someone else did make the joke, it'd be understandable. Hot Pockets aren't a perfect food. When people talk about how awful and preservative-laden frozen food is, they're usually thinking about Hot Pockets. (Nestlé is trying, though.)

Its ingredient list is long and scary, and it has been the subject of embarrassing recalls in recent years. It is not healthy, but it is fairly cheap.

As a piece of nutrition, you most certainly could do better. But as a cultural product, a piece of nostalgia, and a way for a family to to make a couple billion dollars, I'm willing to give it a pass. It may have ruined our diets, but it's helped inspire a lot of good.

A version of this post originally appeared on Tedium, a twice-weekly newsletter that hunts for the end of the long tail.  

A sawmill in the 1970s. (Photo: Tomas Sennett/NARA 545925)

When the linguists Martin Meissner and Stuart Philpott first started visiting sawmills in British Columbia in the 1970s, they thought they’d find workers communicating without speaking, probably with some simple gestures that contained technical information. There was a long history of such communication in the face of extreme noise: For centuries, American mill workers had used systems of hand signals to tell each other, across the unending roar of the saws, how to cut wood. 

What they discovered, though, floored them. The researchers witnessed a sign language system complete enough that workers could call each other “you crazy old farmer,” tell a colleague that he was “full of crap,” or tell each other when the foreman was “fucking around over there.”

Outside of deaf communities, hearing people sometimes develop what are now often called “alternate sign languages” to communicate when words will not do. In monasteries, monks uses signs to communicate in areas where speech is forbidden, for instance. In industries where machines made speaking impossible—in ships’ engine rooms, in steel mills, textile mills, and sawmills—workers also found ways to communicate with their hands.

In 1955, when Popular Mechanics covered these industrial sign languages, many were already disappearing. But in the 1970s, Meissner and Philpott found a sign language still used in sawmills. Their research further honed in on the culture of one particular mill where workers had developed a system of 157 signs that they used not just to communicate about their work but to trade small talk, tell crude jokes and tease each other. 

The linguist were struck by the language’s “ingenuity and elegance,” they wrote. It was also a secret hidden in plain sight: the mill workers’ bosses, it seems, had almost no idea what they were saying.

Inside a sawmill in 1960. (Photo: NARA 2131702)

The core of the sawmill workers’ sign language was a system of numbers, standardized across the industry. Those signs were shared in a technical notebook, and, the linguists wrote,”in the view of the management, that was about all there was to the language.”  But it covered much more ground than technical communication. Workers could talk about quitting time, lunch time, and cigarette breaks. They could talk about sports and the bets they placed on games. They could talk about their wives, cars, and colleagues. They could tell jokes and comment on what was going on around them without their bosses every knowing.

In one conversation that Meissner and Philpott recorded, one worker pointed out the boss, by signing “Big shot there,” and noted that he was with three women. The worker also commented that one of the women had a great figure and “then drew a rectangle with his index finger and pointed to the head sawyer’s operating cubicle, wanting to liken the woman he described to the calendar nude behind the sawyer,” the researchers wrote. “She’s my girlfriend,” he told the others.

Some of the signs were transparent enough. To ask "What time is it?" or "How long?" a worker would tap his wrist (sign 126 below). Others had straight-forward associations: the sign for "woman" (128 below) was an up-and-down movement "suggesting a woman's breast," the researchers wrote. Some would have been much harder to guess, though: clutching a bicep was the sign for both "weak" and "week" (125 below).

Four of the signs the researchers recorded. (Image: Diana Philpott, A Dictionary of Sawmill Workers' Signs)

There were some social rules governing how these signs were used. All the workers learned the technical signs, but the whole corpus of the language took about six months to master and not everyone managed it. The conversational signs were more likely to be used by people who’d worked together for a few years and had similar status, education and ethnic background. It was also more popular with men who didn’t mind everyone knowing what they had to say.

Lumber at a yard in 1973. (Photo: NARA 553647)

Compared to a fully developed sign language, which can have thousands of signs, this one was limited in its scope. It did provide these men with a way to cover the basic grounds of collegial small talk, and in at least one case, sawmill sign language also worked in the home. A couple of years after Meissner and Philpott published their research on British Columbia’s mills, another linguist, Robert Johnson, found a retired sawmill worker in Oregon who had lost his hearing and used a variant on sawmill sign language to communicate with his wife and son, who was also deaf. About three-quarters of their corpus of 250 signs overlapped with the British Columbia sawmill signs Meissner and Philpott had collected. There was also significant overlap with American Sign Language.

The family used their particular sign language to communicate about the grist of daily life; they had signs for quiet, mirror, eat, shave, stink, happy, deer, fish, church, baby and so on. They never learned ASL because no one around them used it and their system of signs worked well enough. There were shortcomings, though.

“When it comes to feelings, you have real problems,” the wife told the Eugene Register-Guard. “You can say you’re angry...But other feelings are so subtle and complex….” Her solution: just write them down.

When visiting sawmills and other industrial settings, Meissner and Philpott noticed another trend. Where there was more automation, hand signals were less likely to be used. They predicted that as automation in factories increased, the use of sign language would decrease. In other, less noisy industries, radios and walkie-talkies already were limiting the need for hand signals, previously an advantage over shouting.  Today, it’s rare, if not impossible to find reports of site-specific sign languages being used in factories. 

A tree on trial in Somerville, Massachusetts. (Photo: Atlas Obscura)

Sometime last month, the street trees of Somerville, Massachusetts were overtaken by a strange crop. Seemingly overnight, vertical inhabitants of all sorts—sprawling neighborhood giants, slim sidewalk-shaders, even the occasional telephone pole—sprouted identical flyers. In inch-high all-caps, in standard bureaucratic font, the signs carried an ominous message: "NOTICE OF A PUBLIC HEARING," they read, "IN RELATION TO THE REMOVAL OF THIS TREE."

In another city, such an appearance might amount to a death sentence for the trees. It's easy to imagine busy urbanites walking or biking right past these signs, en route to work or the grocery store, thinking "that's too bad"—and then, months later when the chainsaws come, thinking it again.

But this is Somerville, winner of a Tree City USA award at least 17 years running. Such honors do not come without a populace committed to tree preservation. So at 5:30pm on a balmy Thursday, a good 50 people have stuffed themselves inside the city's Water Department Buildingto exercise their arboreal rights. Some have come straight from work, and roll up their shirtsleeves as they step into the stuffy room. Others tote in children, who crane their necks towards the Little League game across the street. The rows of folding chairs filled early, and stragglers are packed into the narrow aisles—meaning the tree hearing is, fittingly, standing room only.

Boston's Liberty Tree, RIP. (Image: Harvard University/Public Domain)

In urban Massachusetts, civic-mindedness has pretty much always included a soft spot for trees. In 1636, colonial Bostonians passed an ordinance insisting that planted trees be "prevented... from being spoiled." In 1775, to mess with revolutionary morale, the British cut down one of the Common's largest elms, the so-called Liberty Tree. Increased industrialization led to a brief period of frenzied chopping, but this was short-lived, and since 1899, Massachusetts statute has mandated that every public tree facing removal must first receive a hearing. Even now, other states that have adopted similar legislation tend to refer to it as "the Massachusetts law."

This particular meeting's main event concerns about 100 ash trees marked for demolition, explains Brad Ross, a designer and data scientist with the Mayor's Office. Somerville officials fear these specific trees will make easy prey for the Emerald Ash Borer, a small beetle that has been devouring its preferred species since it first hitched a ride here from Asia in 2002.

Though the borer has not yet been found in Somerville proper, having vulnerable trees around is likely to speed up its inevitable invasion. "The city strategy is to deny the bug the easy prey, the safe havens," says Ross. Thus, a certain number of already-weak trees must be sacrificed for the greater good. City officials hope to use this meeting to make their reasoning clear to the populace, and to address any concerns. Judging by the hardwooded looks on said populace's faces, they've come with quite a few.

The Emerald Ash Borer, enemy of the state. (Photo: US Department of Agriculture/CC BY-ND 2.0)

But that's later. Like a gladiatorial contest, this hearing starts with a few warmup matches, between individual trees and the particular humans who want them gone. First up is a man from the northwest corner of the city who is tired of cleaning up after his neighbor, a Japanese zelkova tree. The zelkova is a litterbug, dumping twigs and leaves all over his front steps. Someone is going to fall and crack their head open. "It's just a constant mess," he sums up, before sitting down again.

Surprisingly quickly, the crowd begins to bay for blood. Why wouldn't one want to tidy up after a tree? Will the tree be replaced? How quickly? Haven't we heard that before? There is a reason, they seem to suggest, that the zelkova is throwing bits of itself at this man—who, by now, appears flummoxed and somewhat dazed. "If you want, you can come down and clean it too and I won't have to worry about it anymore!" he replies, eventually. The issue is tabled, for now. The verdict will be delivered to the man in a couple of weeks—after which he will either pay for the tree's removal, or keep sweeping.

From then on, the tree-indicters play to their audience—or at least try. Molly Donovan, whose home has long been menaced by a large linden, begins with a soft sell. "I love the tree in front of our house," she says. "My mother-in-law remembers when it was planted. She's 93 years old. The tree was often third base when her kids played kickball.” If said mother-in-law trips over the tree's massive root, which is now pushing up the sidewalk, she will likely die. "Please don't save this tree," Donovan pleads. You get the feeling she has practiced this repeatedly, in front of a mirror.

Bow St. in Somerville, home to some fine street tree specimens. (Photo: Mangostar/CC BY-SA 3.0)

The crowd, though understanding, would still really like to save this tree. Is there any other way? Could they put a raised bump around the tree, to warn about the roots? When someone suggests the city buy some of Donovan's property in order to widen the sidewalk, she finally snaps, barking "I'm not selling my land," and this particular hearing ends. On to the next one, in which two women in baseball caps detail exactly how badly the tree near their house has cracked their driveway, brick wall, and foundation, and how it is letting in a constant stream of squirrels.

"Let's not give squirrels a bad name," responds one woman, standing up in her chair. A young couple interrupts to break out their trump card—they've brought along a petition, signed by 100 people who want that particular tree to stay. "People from, what, out in Acton?" asks the shocked prosecution, now on the defense. "Anyone in the state can voice their opinion about any sidewalk tree," explains Steven MacEachern, the town's Superintendent of Highways, Lights and Lines—also potential tree antagonists. "It doesn't matter if they live on the street or even in the city."

By the time the main event—the discussion of the endangered ash trees—arrives, things are approaching chaos. Ross clicks through his ash borer Powerpoint presentation with the good-natured steely-eyedness of someone ready to lay down some hard truths. "Who remembers that giant willow over by the school?" he begins. "Awesome tree. Had to come down." He explains the city's two surveys, their plan of action, the decimation of other cities' ash populations. "This is the new normal," he insists.

Somerville and Cambridge, viewed from from the air. A certain amount of tree discrepancy is visible. (Photo: Nick Allen/CC BY-SA 4.0)

No slide goes by without an accusation, or a blast of color commentary. Citizens reference scientific papers, age-old reports, and individual grievances with equal facility. Along the way, a few things are cleared up. In their enthusiastic effort to inform the public, the city put signs all over the place, including on trees that won't actually be coming down—only the trees marked with orange spray paint will. (This also explains the telephone poles.) After a brief, self-aware murmur, the crowd quickly recovers. "The orange markings you've already put on the trees don't make us feel like our voices matter," says one woman.

There is likely no saving this batch of trees. If the city doesn't get to them first, the ash borer will, digging curlicues into their cambium until they wither and die. The bugs won't be talked out of it.

For now, though, the people of Somerville continue defending their ideal city—one with a chicken in every pot, a tree in every sidewalk, and a moment of undivided attention for every concerned citizen. Called on by Ross, one man begins his question by waxing poetic about the red oak he just planted in front of his house. "It's going to be huge," he continues, dreamily. "A hundred years from now, people will be screaming that it's cracking their driveway."

Naturecultures is a weekly column that explores the changing relationships between humanity and wilder things. Have something you want covered (or uncovered)? Send tips to cara@atlasobscura.com.

Missing: Horse skull from Yukon's Carcross desert https://t.co/0NmazpstMf

— CBC North (@CBCNorth) May 30, 2016

While it’s not quite an Indiana Jones level heist, according to CBC News, someone has stolen an archaeologically significant horse skull from a recently unearthed skeleton in the Canadian Yukon’s Carcross Desert, and researchers would really like it back.  

Measuring in at around a single square mile, the Carcross Desert is sometimes considered to be the smallest desert in the world. A popular tourist attraction, the little biome, which is not technically a real desert, was formed from the remains of an ancient glacial lake, and has managed to sustain its sandy atmosphere thanks to its specific location in the shadow of some nearby mountains. Just outside of its borders, the land turns starkly into the green firs that dominate most of the region.

A number of ancient horse skeletons have been discovered in the Yukon, providing archaeologists with prime specimens of the ancient animal bones. And yet another skeleton appeared on the edges of the Carcross Desert just last week, likely uncovered by simple wind erosion. It was spotted by a bus driver, who noticed the corpse while stopping at the desert with a group of tourists, and immediately reported it to the local government. Archaeologists were dispatched to the site the next day to check it out, but by the time they arrived, it was too late. Somebody had already stolen the horse’s head.

The horse turned out to be a particularly special find in that it was not as old as many of the ancient specimens usually found in the Yukon, giving researchers a glimpse at another stage in the decomposition. Well, at least for most of the body. They ask that whoever absconded with the horse head please return it so that they can study the complete horse. In other words: it belongs in a museum.

A writing tablet found in the mud. (Photo: MOLA)

Romans were businesspeople, and when they founded London in the 40s—in the first half of the first century A.D.—they were busy trading, lending, and generally making money. Naturally, the writing tablets that turned up in what’s been called“London’s single largest archaeological excavation of all time” document financial transactions.

One, the earliest dated document ever found in Britain, has a freed slave named Tibullus promising repayment of 105 denarii, a hefty sum, to another freed slave, Gratus.

Tibullus made that promise on January 8, 57.

These tablets, more than 400 in all, were found in what the Guardian calls“a sodden hole” under a 1950s office building, the future site of a fancy new Bloomberg headquarters in London. Eighty-seven of the tablets have been deciphered so far, and they include the first ever written reference to London.

The first written mention of London. (Photo: MOLA)

The tablets also include evidence of writing practice, an admonishment from one friend to another that he’s lent too much money and is being gossiped about, and a plea for repayment. These tablets were made of recycled barrel staves, National Geographic notes, and would have been covered in black beeswax, to make the writing legible. When they were found in the mud, they were kept in water, before being cleaned and freeze-dried for preservation.

The marks that were left on the wood were faint scratches of a stylus that had poke through the beeswax. To read the messages preserved on the wood, researchers had to take digital photographs of the tablets from multiple angles, then overlay them so that the marks would emerge more clearly.

The short messages that have been deciphered help corroborate other sources containing details about London's early history, and in one case, correct the date of an important rebellion by a tribe native to the island, which burned the city down. London rebounded.

Bonus finds: Spiky tomato that looks like it's bleeding, 40 dead tiger cubs in a freezer

Every day, we highlight one newly found object, curiosity or wonder. Discover something amazing? Tell us about it! Send your finds to sarah.laskow@atlasobscura.com. 

For a while, Nemo had a pretty difficult life for a British goldfish. A tumor sticking out of the side of his neck grew and grew until it was nearly as big as him. As you can imagine, that's the kind of situation that makes doing goldfish things—swimming, goggling, bobbing up to the surface for food—rough.

As of last month, though, Nemo has a new swish in his fins. After a 200-mile journey, a 45-minute operation under anesthesia, and a couple of hours of recovery, the tumor is out.

"It was difficult keeping him asleep and alive," Dr. Sonya Miles, the veterinarian who removed the tumor, told Metro UK. "There was a hairy moment when his heart stopped, but we managed to revive him."

Nemo the goldfish recovering after rare tumor op https://t.co/OMKbSv9gh0pic.twitter.com/E2PBc4AKHu

— adi (@Adipraze) June 1, 2016

Goldfish tumorectomy, while not a new practice, has not yet reached the level of acceptability of, say, canine cataract surgery or feline hip replacement. As Rebecca Skloot details in a 2004 New York Times Magazine story, vets once only worked with livestock. It took decades for their patient lists to branch out to smaller species—cats, dogs, birds. Though Nemo's story counts as a curiosity right now, odds are fish medicine will swim into the mainstream soon, too.

Nemo, most likely, doesn't care about any of that. He just feels better.

Every day, we track down a fleeting wonder—something amazing that's only happening right now. Have a tip for us? Tell us about it! Send your temporary miracles to cara@atlasobscura.com.

Can that earring pay for his funeral? (Photo: David Goehring/CC BY 2.0)

Avast! Can any one of you scurvy dogs tell me if this earring matches this bandana? While pirates have a reputation for crime and cruelty, they are also known to be flamboyant dressers, if most depictions in popular culture can be believed. And there's one essential accessory sported by everyone from Jack Sparrow to Captain Morgan: the gold hoop earring. 

When exactly men of the sea began to put rings in their ears is anyone’s guess, but there are a handful of legends that claim to explain the fashion. The most popular myth behind the jewelry trend is that sailors would wear gold and silver earrings so that no matter where they died, they would be adorned with a way to pay for their burial. Since gold and silver were accepted forms of payment just about everywhere in the world, having a hunk of it stuck in your ear where it won’t wash away at sea was a pretty solid insurance policy. 

(Photo: Howard Pyle/Public Domain)

There does seem to be some truth to this myth, says pirate historian Gail Selinger. “If you were a pirate or a thief, you were never buried. But if you’re on land and you die, then you have the money for your own burial, “ she says of the earrings. And it wasn’t just earrings that pirates wore to show off their wealth. During the golden age of piracy, pirates were known to drill holes in coins and wear them like necklaces and bracelets. “They’d wear it on their wrist, or around their neck, so that no one could steal their purse. [Archeologists] found quite a few of those [pieces of money jewelry]. So it’s not just a myth,” says Selinger. How widespread the practice was, however, is unknown.

In addition to their possible role as a down payment on a burial, earrings and jewelry were objects of rebellion. During the height of piracy in the 17th and 18th centuries, much of Europe, and especially England, had a number of sumptuary laws in place that regulated what the common people could wear and how they could live. “It was a legal way for the ruling class to separate themselves from commoners, by regulating what they wore, what they could drink, where they could live,” says Selinger.

The stifling laws prescribed things down to what colors people could wear, what genders could sport jewelry—men weren't allowed—and where they could show off the approved things they could afford. Those who refused to obey these laws could face jail time or heavy monetary fines. Unsurprisingly, this culture of control didn’t really gel with the freewheeling lives of pirates. “Pirates basically gave [these laws] a, ‘to hell with you!’ The mindset was, ‘I no longer allow you to tell me what I can and cannot do,’” says Selinger.    

(Photo: Howard Pyle/Public Domain)

According to Selinger, the flamboyant dress that came to be associated with historic pirates was a direct response to these sumptuary laws. “Especially going into town, they would wear clothes that they had stolen or purchased in the town, and then wear them, essentially saying, ‘Here I am, what’re you gonna do about it?’ So, the earrings represented [flouting] these laws.”

However, without a great deal of concrete evidence of what pirates actually wore, and the thinking behind their outfits, not everyone is convinced that pirates’ iconic earrings were ever really a thing. “Pirates didn't really wear earrings at all—or bandanas," says Angus Konstam, author of Pirate: The Golden Age. “Both were the invention of the late 19th-century American artist Howard Pyle. When he was asked to depict pirates for children's books, he based them on drawings he'd made of Spanish peasants and bandits. So, his pirates wore sashes around their waists, headscarves... and earrings.” As Konstam points out, Pyle is often credited with popularizing what is today considered stereotypical pirate dress, and our continued depiction of pirates wearing earrings is likely thanks to his work.

Whether it's a myth based on some truth, or a truth surrounded by myth, swashbuckling seafarer and their earrings are now inextricably linked. Even hundreds of years later, you can't separate a pirate from their treasures. 

(Photo: J.T. Cantley)

The spiky fruit you see above is a newly discovered tomato, but not just any tomato. This one bleeds. 

Christened Solanum ossicruentum (the latter word is a portmanteau of the Latin words for "bone" and "bloody"), the tomato, discovered in Australia, bleeds when cut open. Exposure to the air causes its inside juices to change color from white to red to maroon. 

The burrs likely perform a protective function, as well as helping the plant spread its seeds by getting stuck to other creatures.

The tomato was identified in early May by some American scientists, though the indigenous Walmajarri people in Western Australia have been eating parts of a similar "salty bush tomato" for years. 

Professors involved in the discovery said that it was one of thousands of species yet to be formally identified on the Australian continent. "There is a wealth of museum material just waiting to be given names—and, of course, the organisms represented by those specimens await that recognition, as well as the attention and protection that come with it," said Chris Martine, a professor who was on the team that identified Solanum ossicruentum.

A class of seventh-graders in Pennsylvania, incidentally, helped come up with the new tomato's moniker, homing in, of course, on the blood and bone. 

Toto, I've a feeling we're not in Kansas anymore...we're inside a giant bubble.

The tornado that swept Dorothy away from her bucolic home might be large and destructive, but when it comes to coolness, it's no match for the spinning vortex in this video. Witness as one of nature's most destructive and awe-inspiring forces is captured in an orb of soap.

Using a massive wire bubble wand, the master mini-tornado blower suspends the bubble in the air and carefully pokes a pocket of smoke at the bottom. The vapor rises from the bubble's belly, wrapping around itself to create a spiraling column that escapes through a narrow hole at the top.

And if that weren't cool enough, he does it two more times! The second tornado traps some baby bubbles in its wake, sending them twirling around in a spritely dance. The third bubble just can't take it anymore and collapses on itself mid-tornado, fleeing its own fragile existence. The bubble's contents fly up and out of the hole in the wand. Freedom at last!

Every day we track down a Video Wonder: an audiovisual offering that delights, inspires, and entertains. Have you encountered a video we should feature? Email ella@atlasobscura.com.

The classic purveyors of Canadian accents in the U.S.—from sketch comedy troupe SCTV. (Photo: YouTube)

Considering the geographical, cultural, and economic closeness of our two countries, it’s almost perverse that Americans take so much pride in their ignorance about all things Canada. Drake? Dan Aykroyd? The new hot prime minister? Is that it? But everyone knows what Canadians are supposed to sound like: they are are a people who pronounce “about” as “aboot” and add “eh” to the ends of sentences.”

Unfortunately, that's wrong. Like, linguistically incorrect. Canadians do not say “aboot.” What they do say is actually much weirder.

Canadian English, despite the gigantic size of the country, is nowhere near as diverse as American English; think of the vast differences between the accents of a Los Angeleno, a Bostonian, a Chicagoan, a Houstonian, and a New Yorker. In Canada, there are some weird pockets: Newfoundland and Labrador speak a sort of Irish-cockney-sounding dialect, and there are some unique characteristics in English-speaking Quebec. But otherwise, linguistically, the country is fairly consistent.

The Battery, part of the city of St John's, Newfoundland and Labrador. (Photo: Carolyn Parsons-Janes/shutterstock.com)

There are a few isolated quirks in Canadian English, like keeping the Britishism “zed” for the last letter of the alphabet, and keeping a hard “agh” sound where Americans would usually say “ah.” (In Canada, “pasta” rhymes with “Mt. Shasta”.) But aside from those quirks, there are two major defining trends in Canadian English: Canadian Raising and the Canadian Shift. The latter is known stateside as the California Shift, and it’s what makes Blink-182 singer Tom DeLonge sound so insane: a systematic migration of vowel sounds resulting in "kit" sounding like “ket,” “dress” sounding like "drass," and “trap" sounding like “trop.” The SoCal accent, basically, is being replicated almost entirely in Canada.

But the Canadian Shift is minor compared to Canadian Raising, a phenomenon describing the altered sounds of two notable vowel sounds, that has much bigger consequences for the country’s identity, at least in the U.S. That's where we get all that “aboot” stuff.

A postcard showing Broad Street in Victoria, BC. (Photo: Rob/Public Domain)

First catalogued in the 1940s and named by Jack Chambers in 1973, Canadian Raising is a shift found in Canada and in pockets of the northern United States (and, sort of, in Scotland) affecting two vowel sounds. The first is the sound in the word “write,” and the second is our old friend, “about.”

“Canadian Raising has to do with two diphthongs,” says Jennifer Dailey-O’Cain, a linguist at the University of Alberta who was raised in the U.S. but now sports a fully-functioning (but self-aware) Canadian accent. When we talk about accents in English, we’re almost exclusively talking about vowels; with the exception of dropping “r” sounds at the end of words, English dialects pretty much stick to the same consonant sounds. A “k” is a “k” is a “k,” you know? Not vowels. “These vowel sounds are very slippery and difficult to imitate,” says Taylor Roberts, a Canadian linguist who maintains a popular page on the topic of the Canadian dialect. “Consonants are easy, but vowels are tricky.”

Different vowels are produced by moving the tongue in different parts of the mouth, tapping and curling and poking, while the lips create circles and ovals of varying sizes. Linguists have a map for this, a sort of ungainly parallelogram, but it also helps to just repeat the word to yourself and feel carefully for where your tongue goes. (I have heard Canadians say the word “about” more times in the past week than in the entire four years I lived in Canada.)

Toronto skyline. (Photo: Lissandra Melo/shutterstock.com)

This map features all of the basic vowels in English: “ah,” “ee,” “oh,” “ooh,” “eh,” that kind of thing. Those are called monophthongs. When you combine them you end up with a whole new palette of sounds known as diphthongs, sort of a compound vowel. The vowel in the word “bike” is one of these, made up of either monophthongs “ah” and “ee,” in the southern and western U.S., or “uh” and “ee,” in the Northeast, Midwest, and Canada. This latter is an example of Canadian Raising.  

For the word “about,” we have a diphthong in the U.S., as well. That “ow” sound is made up of an “agh” sound moving to an “ooh” sound. That first sound, the “agh,” is an extremely low vowel on that chart.

Canadians also have a diphthong there, but a much weirder one than ours. Instead of starting with “agh,” they start with a vowel that’s mapped in a mid-range place, but one that is, bizarrely, not represented in American linguistics, period. This is an exclusively Canadian sound, one that the vast majority of Americans not only don’t use where Canadians use it, they don’t use it at all. It’s completely foreign.

Vowel chart of Canada Raising. (Photo: Peter238, CC BY-SA 4.0)

The Canadian diphthong in “about” starts with something closer to “eh,” and migrates to a blank space on the American linguistic map somewhere between “uh,” “oh,” and “ooh.” That transition is actually easier on the mouth than the American version; our vowels go from low to high, and theirs from mid to high.

To say that Canadians are saying “aboot” is linguistically inaccurate; “ooh” is a monophthong and the proper Canadian dialect uses a diphthong. “A-boat” would actually be a bit closer, but still relies on a monophthong. Why can’t Americans get their heads around the Canadian “about”? 

“What's going on is a compound of pronunciation and perception,” says Dailey-O’Cain. “The Canadians do pronounce it differently. Americans hear this and they know it's different—they're hearing a difference but they don't know exactly what that difference is.” Americans do not have the Canadian diphthong present in the word “about,” which makes it hard to understand. We know that the Canadians are doing something weird, but in fact it’s so unlike our own dialect that we can’t even really figure out what’s weird about it.

Our best guess? Well, we can hear that the Canadians are raising that first vowel in the diphthong, even if we don’t know what “raising” means. But in a true American disdain for subtlety, we choose to interpret that as the most extreme possible raised vowel sound: “ooh.” It’s like a beach artist caricature that exaggerates a feature beyond realism and into cartoon-land: we hear a difference, and boost that difference to a height that isn’t actually correct anymore.

Prairies of Saskatchewan. (Photo: Martin Cathrae/CC BY-SA 2.0)

The big question is, well, why did this happen? What possible explanation can there be for the creation of this odd diphthong just north of the border?

Linguists do not generally attempt to answer questions of causality. “Why? I can't answer that,” said Dailey-O’Cain when I asked. “You can look at ongoing changes sometimes if you have the right kind of data but it's very, very hard.” But there are theories. One particularly fascinating explanation has to do with what’s called the Great Vowel Shift. If you’ve ever wondered why English is such a legendarily horrible language to learn, a lot of the problems can be traced back to the Great Vowel Shift.

The only other Canadian export to America besides "aboot" and Drake seems to be poutine. (Photo: Quinn Dombrowski, CC BY-SA 2.0)

There is no firm date on the beginning and end of the Great Vowel Shift, but at most, we can say it happened between the 1100s and the 1700s, with probably the most important and biggest changes happening in the 1400s and 1500s. This coincides with the shift from Middle English to Modern English, and also with the standardization of spelling. The shift itself? Every single “long vowel”—”ey,” “ee,” “aye,” “oh,” “ooh”—changed. (Nobody knows why. Linguistics is turtles all the way down.)

Before the Great Vowel Shift, “bite” was pronounced more like “beet.” “Meat” was more like “mate.” Everything just kind of slipped one notch over. This happened in stages; that first word, “bite,” started out as “beet,” then became “bait,” then “beyt,” then “bite.” You can hear a nice spoken-aloud rundown of those here.

If you’re wondering what the difference between “bait” and “beyt” is, well, there you have one possible origin of Canadian Raising. “Beyt,” one of the later but not the final stage of the Great Vowel Shift, is extremely similar to the Canadian Raised sound spoken today. There is a theory—not necessarily accepted by all—that Canadian Raised vowels are actually a preserved remnant of the Great Vowel Shift, an in-between vowel sound that was somehow stuck in amber in the Great White North.

Maybe a certain population of Englishmen from that particular time period, around 1600, landed in Canada and due to its isolation failed to observe the further changes happening in England. Maybe. 

But I like this explanation. Canadians aren’t weird; they’re respecting the past. One very specific past, that everyone else skipped on by. It’s an awfully nice-sounding diphthong.

Update (6/1): We originally misspelled Dan Aykroyd's surname. We're sorry. It has been corrected.