This is a partial list of some common misconceptions that I enjoy — there’s a much longer list here.
- The common image of Santa Claus (Father Christmas) as a jolly old man in red robes was not created by The Coca-Cola Company as an advertising gimmick. Santa Claus had already taken this form in American popular culture and advertising by the late 19th century, long before Coca-Cola used his image in the 1930s
- The Chinese word for “crisis” (危机) is not composed of the symbols for “danger” and “opportunity”; the first does represent danger, but the second instead means “inflection point” (the original meaning of the word “crisis”).[79][80] The myth was perpetuated mainly by a campaign speech from John F. Kennedy
- The word “crap” did not originate as a back-formation of British plumber Thomas Crapper’s aptronymous surname, nor does his name originate from the word “crap”. The surname “Crapper” is a variant of “Cropper”, which originally referred to someone who harvested crops. The word “crap” ultimately comes from Medieval Latin crappa
- The Bible does not say that exactly three magi came to visit the baby Jesus, nor that they were kings, or rode on camels, or that their names were Caspar, Melchior, and Balthazar, nor what color their skin was. Three magi are inferred because three gifts are described, but the Bible says only that there was more than one
- The forbidden fruit mentioned in the Book of Genesis is never identified as an apple, as widely depicted in Western art. The original Hebrew texts mention only tree and fruit. Early Latin translations use the word mali, which can mean either “of evil” or “of apple”. In early Germanic languages the word apple and its cognates usually simply meant “fruit”. Jewish scholars have suggested that the fruit could have been wheat, a grape, a fig, or an etrog
- The ancient Greeks did not use the word “idiot” (Ancient Greek: ἰδιώτης, romanized: idiṓtēs) to disparage people who did not take part in civic life or who did not vote. An ἰδιώτης was simply a private citizen as opposed to a government official. Later, the word came to mean any sort of non-expert or layman, then someone uneducated or ignorant, and much later to mean stupid or mentally deficient
- Vomiting was not a regular part of Roman dining customs.[254] In ancient Rome, the architectural feature called a vomitorium was the entranceway through which crowds entered and exited a stadium, not a special room used for purging food during meals.
- Whether chastity belts, devices designed to prevent women from having sexual intercourse, were invented in medieval times is disputed by modern historians. Most existing chastity belts are now thought to be deliberate fakes or anti-masturbatory devices from the 19th and early 20th centuries
- Medieval Europeans did not believe Earth was flat. Scholars have known the Earth is spherical since at least 500 BC. This myth was created in the 17th century by Protestants to argue against Catholic teachings. Christopher Columbus’ efforts to obtain support for his voyages were not hampered by belief in a flat Earth, but by valid worries that the East Indies were farther than he realized. In fact, Columbus grossly underestimated the Earth’s circumference because of two calculation errors
- People accused of witchcraft were not burned at the stake during the Salem witch trials. Of the accused, nineteen people convicted of witchcraft were executed by hanging, at least five died in prison, and one man was pressed to death by stones while trying to extract a confession
- Napoleon Bonaparte was not especially short for a Frenchman of his time. He was the height of an average French male in 1800, but short for an aristocrat or officer. After his death in 1821, the French emperor’s height was recorded as 5 feet 2 inches in French feet, which in English measurements is 5 feet 7 inches (1.70 m). There are competing explanations for why he was nicknamed le Petit Caporal (The Little Corporal), one possibility is that the moniker was used as a term of endearment.
- There was no widespread outbreak of panic across the United States in response to Orson Welles’s 1938 radio adaptation of H.G. Wells’s The War of the Worlds. Only a very small share of the radio audience was listening to it, but newspapers played up isolated reports of incidents and increased emergency calls being eager to discredit radio as a competitor for advertising
- Lemmings do not engage in mass suicidal dives off cliffs when migrating. The scenes of lemming suicides in the Disney documentary film White Wilderness, which popularized this idea, were completely fabricated. The misconception itself is much older, dating back to at least the late 19th century, though its exact origins are uncertain.
- Exposure to a vacuum, or experiencing all but the most extreme uncontrolled decompression, does not cause the body to explode, or internal fluids to boil. (However, fluids in the mouth or lungs will boil at altitudes above the Armstrong limit.) Instead, it will lead to a loss of consciousness once the body has depleted the supply of oxygen in the blood, followed by death from hypoxia within minutes
- Cremated remains are not ashes in the usual sense. After the incineration is completed, the dry bone fragments are swept out of the retort and pulverized by a machine called a Cremulator—essentially a high-capacity, high-speed blender—to process them into “ashes” or “cremated remains”
- The nursery rhyme “Ring Round The Rosie” has nothing to do with the Black Plague, despite the common perception that it does. The rhyme has existed since the 1800s in many forms, and the other variants make it clear that it is about a child’s version of romance and couples rather than a disease.