A low blow, even by the standards of Shakespeare. (OK, “Dick” here means “Richard”–“dick” didn’t become slang for penis until the late 19th century. But then again, Shakespeare’s work is so full of penis jokes that we might as well give this one to him.)

Another favorite from Henry V:

Thou damned and luxurious mountain goat

Joachimstal, Bohemia
(now called Jáchymov in the Czech Republic)

In the early 1500s, silver was found, and subsequently heavily mined, in the town’s mountainous terrain. Side note: coins minted by the local royalty provide the etymology for our word “dollar”: Joachimstaler → thaler → dollar

However in 1911, a new element (the 92nd) was discovered by Miss Curie in the area’s local pitchblende: radium! The first, and for a while, the only, known deposit of the ore, the area’s soil was shooting off electrons. It takes 7 tons of pitchblende to produce one gram of the necessary U-235 or U-238, so the Nazis quickly cut off any transfer of the glowing gold to stockpile for their own use.

Extra tidbit: the town touted its nuclear rocks and drew tourists with the allure of radon spas, a practice that probably wasn’t so healthy given that once Pierre and Marie had been displaying concentrated uranium to other scientists manually their fingernails began falling out.

Dire wolves were real dog/wolf relatives that lived around 1 and ¾ million years ago and only became extinct more recently.

The series' species was indeed based on Canis dirus: larger than regular wolves (small horse size), social in a pack, and faces that accommodate killing people quite well.

House Stark’s sigil

Some of the problems with political science, social theory, global economics, and the study of power are that they exist solely in the realm of theory – that is, they are sometimes beyond the boundary of testable predictions (which establishes a field as a true science).

“polysyllabic”, by the way, means consisting of two or more syllables

However, Chomsky understands the word; he instead means that the theories postulated by eminent people in these fields are full of words that obfuscate semantic value (see what I did there?). Consult Orwell’s “PATEL” for more info.

But they’re everrrrrywhere! While flies are actually pretty gross, mosquitoes only torment you if you itch, itch, itch after a bite.

If we look at this as a broad metaphor for one’s life, it’s probably pretty close to:

Don’t sweat the small stuff

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VI7IAO4s0_E

Well, it wasn’t not oil.

Though still ongoing, 4,487 Americans (and 16,623 Iraqi security forces) died during the conflict to root out insurgents, a body count that towers over the 2,996 killed in the 9/11 attacks that prompted a coalition invasion.

see: Casualties and losses, IraqBodyCount.org

The use of “sons” is a strong emotional appeal (would you want your son shot?)

Calling taking statistics into account an “excuse”, though, is a bit unfair: the world operates on the notion that compiled statistics can, and should, be used in a pragmatic fashion.

(For example: I figured Blacks and Whites probably have different life expectancies – they do. This fact is most likely taken into the account of actuarial tables, which, it can then be guessed, leads to different prices of insurance for the two races on the basis of statistics. Is that not being “treated differently”? coughObamacarecough)

From Shakespeare’s The Two Noble Kinsmen (II.i.267). Palamon, a nephew of the king of Thebes doesn’t approve of his cousin Arcite (also a nephew of the king of Thebes) macking on Princess Emilia – scandalous!

“Cutpurse” is a synonym of “pickpocket,” and it appears that the slang basic has archaic origins as well.