Free Why Do Pirates Love Parrots? by David Feldman Page A

Brooklyn Park, Minnesota.

 
     

Why Is an Elephant’s “Nose” Called a Trunk?
     
     
    A lthough an elephant’s trunk seems to be wide as the back of a Lincoln Continental, the big lugs’ proboscises are named after their resemblance to a tree’s trunk. As veterinarian Myron Hinrichs wrote Imponderables:
     
         The elephant’s trunk looks just like the trunk of a tree, thick and broad at the base and more slender at the tip.
     
     
    The first recorded use of the word “trunk” to describe an elephant’s nose was in 1565, in a translation by Richard Eden, an English translator of many books on travel, geography, and navigation. According to the Oxford Dictionary of English Etymology, “trunk” was first used to describe the main stem of a tree only a century before.
     
     
     
    Submitted by Michael Green of New York, New York. Thanks also to Jennifer Erin Hester of Albany, Georgia.

Why Are American Football Fields 53 1 / 3 Yards Wide?
     
     
    I n Do Penguins Have Knees? , we answered a similar Imponderable about the weird distance between the pitcher’s mound and home plate (sixty and one-half feet), and concluded that most likely the culprit was a misread of architectural drawings that called for a nice, even sixty feet. Although no one knows for sure, including the National Football League and the Pro Football Hall of Fame, our guess is that some faulty arithmetic might be to blame for the weird asymmetry of the football field.
    Bob Carroll, executive director of the Pro Football Research Association, is our go-to guy about football history, and he filled us in on the ever-shifting dimensions of football fields. In the early days of football, the field was 420 feet by 210 feet—a tidy 2:1 ratio. But in 1881, the length was reduced to 330 feet or 110 yards. All of this length was used for the game itself; end zones did not exist because the forward pass had not yet been introduced. But in 1881, the width was not reduced to exactly half the length; 160 rather than 165 feet was chosen as the width, possibly because it was an even number, possibly because someone hadn’t done a very good job comprehending their pre-algebra lessons. The playing area was later reduced to 100 yards, with two ten-foot end zones, but the damage had been done: The 2:1 ratio of length to width was a thing of the past.
     
     
     
    Submitted by John Martin of Sebastopol, California.

 
     

Why Do Books, Legal and Financial Documents, Manuals, Pamphlets, Musical Scores, and Standardized Tests Sometimes Have Pages That Say: “This Page Intentionally Left Blank”?
     
     
    A lmost ten years ago, we received a thick envelope from Bill C. Davis of Portland, Oregon. He posed this Imponderable and mentioned that he stumbled upon a book that was a “gold mine of pages left intentionally blank.” The book, an instruction manual for the Microcom QX/2400t Error-Correcting Modem, might not have been a bestseller, but it was a perfect illustration of Bill’s point. He noted that the blank pages were numbered and each blared “This Page Intentionally Left Blank,” with each word capitalized.
    For proof, he included a sample of each of the blank pages:
     
         I copied these pages at PIP Printing in Portland. The lady at the counter was looking at me funny. I would guess that not that many people come in to copy intentionally left blank pages! Her name is Margaret and I asked her if she remembered seeing intentionally left blank pages before. She said that printers will print pages in this manner for their purposes and that leaving this on the page may be a mistake. I think what she was saying was that it may not be intentional to print “This Page Intentionally Left Blank” on the page!
     
     
    For Bill, Margaret, and the other readers who have pondered this mystery, we’re here to help.
    As we wrote in our first volume of Imponderables, most books have a few empty pages at the front or the back. We in the publishing