Ripley's Believe It or Not by Ripley’s Believe It or Not! for January 05, 2015

Julianus bought the empire at auction. The Praetorian Guard were not impressed.http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Didius_Julianus

Roses are red, violets are…. something according to the Russian language.

Violets are си́ний, but the sky is голубо́й. In the russian language light blue and dark blue are different colors, instead of different shades of the same color.

Oh, BTW, the PBS program “American Experience” is going to feature Mr. Ripley on Tuesday night, 8pm on Jan. 6, at least here in the Midwest. Check your local PBS station for air times, if interested.

Neither did the Native American Blackfeet, so called because of the Blue Moccasins they wore.

1) so, which emperor isn’t pictured?;2) fine, just keep the first grown man from biting the other 99;3) they seem to have “no single word” for ‘democracy’, either.

Septimius should’ve been called Quintus.

Things are really getting tough if 100 men have to share one snake bite between them!

Just as Russian has two blues, English has two reds, “red”, and “pink”. Some languages have only two or three colors, counting black and white (and the third one is always red). No one knows why. It’s not that they can’t tell the difference. Americans can tell the difference between the traditional color of IBM mainframes and the color of the sky, but we don’t have two different words for them, while Russians do.

Albinus and Severus? Sounds like a Harry Potter book.

Alright..other than the inordinate amount of flies every where…Another reason not to schedule my vacation to Australia..Plus they have spiders that not just jump…they hunt..YOU!

The bit about Russians are misleading. They don’t have a “Single” word for Blue. They have 2 words for blue. It is just like if a calls a color for Green, but a woman will say.. “mint”, or “olive”.

Of the 10 most venomous snakes in the world, Australia has 5 of them, including No 1, the Eastern Brown snake. Such a boring name for world’s most venomous snake.

This is only counting main color words X such that a native speaker will generally say, “Y is a shade of X”, but not “X is a shade of Z”, so “vermillion”, “brick”, etc., don’t count, because you can say, “Brick is a shade of red,” but you can’t say, “Red is a shade of—” what, actually? Sometimes they change. Only a few centuries ago, “orange” and “pink” were a fruit and a flower; they still are, but now they’re colors, too.