fun facts for the next time someone asks

There is no formula, scoring system or checklist. One thing to remember is that it is not our intent to honor the dead; we leave the tributes to the eulogists. We seek only to report deaths and to sum up lives, illuminating why, in our judgment, those lives were significant. The justification for the obituary is in the story it tells.

Behavioral Inevitability : “History never repeats itself; man always does.” – Voltaire

One could also be “crushed” — broken down or destroyed — by sadness or stress, for example. Kory Stamper, a senior editor of lexicography at Dictionary.com, said this figurative sense of “crush” developed alongside the literal meaning. “The historical record is full of the crush of melancholy, the crush of despondency, the crush of death,” Ms. Stam... See more

ltimately this whole theory amounts to an argument for breaking down the barriers that prevent people from understanding delicious food from other cultures. Europeans like sauerkraut—but kimchi is this weird foreign entity. They’re both salty, rotten cabbage! It shows you just how shallow human nature is, for someone to say, oh I’ll eat this but I’... See more

A bibliophagist is a devourer of books.

Three Men Make a Tiger: People will believe anything if enough people tell them it’s true. It comes from a Chinese proverb that if one person tells you there’s a tiger roaming around your neighborhood, you can assume they’re lying. If two people tell you, you begin to wonder. If three say it’s true, you’re convinced there’s a tiger in your neighbor... See more

Cobra Effect: Attempting to solve a problem makes that problem worse. Comes from an Indian story about a city infested with snakes offering a bounty for every dead cobra, which caused entrepreneurs to start breeding cobras for slaughter.