How did the drink Gatorade get its name?


In 1963, Dr. Robert Cade was studying the effects of heat exhaustion
on football players at the University of Florida. After analyzing the
body liquids lost during sweating, Cade quickly came up with a formula
for a drink to replace them. Within two years, Gatorade was a $50-
million business. The doctor named his new health drink after the
football team he used in his study, the Florida Gators.


Why do we call a bad actor a “ham” and silly comedy “slapstick”?


In the late nineteenth century, second-rate actors couldn’t afford cold
cream to remove their stage makeup, so they used ham fat and were
called hamfatters until early in the twentieth century when these bad
actors were simply called “hams.” Physical comedy became known as
“slapstick” because of its regular use of crude sound effects: two sticks
were slapped together off-stage to accentuate a comic’s onstage pratfall
(prat being an Old English term for buttocks).


Why is a formal suit for men called a “tuxedo”?


In the nineteenth century, the accepted formal dress for men was a suit
with long swallowtails. But one evening in 1886, young Griswald
Lorillard, the heir to a tobacco fortune, shocked his country club by
arriving in a dinner jacket without tails. This fashion statement caught
on, and the suit took on the name the place Lorillard introduced it:
Tuxedo Park, New Jersey.


Where did the coffee habit come from?


Muslims were the first to develop coffee. As early as 1524 they were
using it as a replacement for the wine they were forbidden to drink.
According to legend, an astute Arab herder noticed that his goats
became skittish after chewing on the berries of a certain bush, so he
sampled a few himself and found them to be invigorating. The region
of Abyssinia where this took place is named Kaffa, which gave us the
name for the drink we call coffee.


Why do we define the rat race as “keeping up with the Joneses”?


Keeping up with the Joneses has come to mean trying to keep up with
your neighbours, in terms of material possessions, at any cost. The
expression comes from the title of a comic strip that ran in newspapers
between 1913 and 1931 and chronicled the experiences of a newly
married man in Cedarhurst, New York. Originally titled “Keeping Up
With the Smiths,” the cartoon was changed to the “Keeping Up With
the Joneses” because it sounded better.





From The Book Titled "Now You Know" by Doug Lennox