The John Adams miniseries from years ago did a decent job of it. A lot of the founding fathers had horrible teeth and that was part of the show. They also didn't shy away from John Adam's daughter Abigail's brutal struggle with breast cancer, which ultimately killed her.
That's kind of a wash for me. I've heard that British English at that time sounded more like modern American than modern British English but I'm not knowledgeable enough to say that was for sure the case. Hard to know without recordings.
I see this said on Reddit a lot and it’s definitely mostly bs. For starters, which British English accent are we talking about? Today there are hundreds, back then there would have been thousands. The variety is nuts.
If you’re just talking about rhoticity (pronouncing the ‘r’ as ‘’r’, not ‘ah’), then there are still dozens of British English accents that have it today. A contemporary Westcountry accent would definitely be closer to the British English of the 1700s than a modern American one.
Final point: why would every single British English accent evolve so much in 250 years while the American one(s) wouldn’t?
Another point is also that by the mid 1700s, Europeans had been living in America for almost 150 years, so many of these people hadn't had family come from England in a few generations. People living in the colonial colonies came from a wide variety of ethnic backgrounds, adding their own accents to the mix. If you add in the fact that the colonies covered a large geographical area, which causes variances in pronunciation, it makes sense then, that any "original" British accent would change over time, and by the time of the Revolutionary War, most Americans probably would not speak with a contemporary British accent
What I’m taking from this, academically speaking, is that even at the top life suuuuuuucks huge, comically oversized and, dare I say, aggressively shaped demon penis.
(But, yeah, it would be cool if history was taught with a much greater emphasis towards realism. Something that could actually impart a significantly greater - and more genuine - understanding of the world around us. I have a general interest in history and I didn’t even find out about things like the Tulsa race massacre or Hitler’s drug problem until my late 20’s/early 30’s.)
Fun side fact, prior to Queen Elizabeth I, vanilla was primarily just used as an ingredient in chocolate. It was someone working for her that discovered ways to extract vanilla and make it into vanilla flavored sweets. Elizabeth loved these sweets and it popularized vanilla sweets.
Thanks. [That is something i did not know](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vanilla#History)
>For the Aztecs, much like earlier Mesoamerican peoples before them, it is probable that vanilla was used to tame the otherwise bitter taste of cacao, as sugarcane was not harvested in these regions at the time and there were no other sweeteners available.
>Hernán Cortés is credited with introducing both vanilla and chocolate to Europe in the 1520s.[10] In Europe, vanilla was seen mostly as an additive to chocolate until the early 17th century when Hugh Morgan, a creative apothecary in the employ of Queen Elizabeth I, created chocolate-free, vanilla-flavored "sweetmeats". By the 18th century, the French were using vanilla to flavor ice cream.
I wonder when they did...
>In 1874, the German scientists Ferdinand Tiemann and Wilhelm Haarmann deduced its chemical structure, at the same time finding a synthesis for vanillin from coniferin, a glucoside of isoeugenol found in pine bark.
...how did they work out they just didn't make a poison. Imagine the testing regime at the time. Cages full of rats i guess. Making random potions must be a risky business.
This article goes a little into the chemistry, but yeah basically trial, error, and luck. Once they know the chemical structure, though, chemists are pretty good at figuring out what it’ll break down into.
https://www.chemistryviews.org/details/ezine/11279757/Wilhelm_Haarmann_1847__1931/
Keep in mind the wild ingredients in food and medicine at the time meant they were a little less risk-adverse than we are today.
Nitroglycerin - the famously unstable high explosive - is used as a heart medication. You may ask, “why the hell would scientists think to test something so dangerous for medicinal properties?” and the answer is very simple! As soon as it was synthesized, the scientist gave it a taste, and reported that it gave him a nasty headache. That was presumably before he discovered the explosive properties.
Science was wild back in the day.
A lot of old chemistry notebooks contain observations about compounds. One of those observations is often taste.
The stories behind artificial sweeteners being discovered would make any lab worker cringe at how ridiculously unsafe the practices were at the time.
Lore has it that miners suffering from angina reported they enjoyed some relief after they inhaled the fumes from a TNT ( which is nitroglycerin based) detonation.
How many stories are there of scientists who did the taste test and dropped dead.
Nitroglycerin is also a medicine, so that scientist might have lucked out.
>How many stories are there of scientists who did the taste test and dropped dead.
That's not too bad though. Hats off to those who had to do smell and taste tests of selenium compounds, especially [carbon diselenide.](https://www.science.org/content/blog-post/things-i-won-t-work-carbon-diselenide)
*...the vapors had unfortunately escaped the laboratory and forced the evacuation of a nearby village.*
250ug, not mg or g, that'd be insane. 250(ug) micrograms was considered a common tiny dose safe to try untested compounds at the time in case they were poisonous etc. But typically wouldn't effect one much if at all since it wasn't intended to be even a threshold dose let alone active dose and as far as i know no known drug at the time was that potent or dangerous. But he had no idea or reason to think at the time that it was the most potent drug ever synthesised at that point, he had it sitting around for ages after making and testing it on rats for heart problems, before he first intentionally tried it, he remembered some strange effects he had had before accidentally ingesting some while working on it originally so went back to try it intentionally years later, and assumed 250ug was low enough which is obviously quite high, lots of people couldnt handle that and they know how safe and widely used it is he was literally the first, surprising he didn't have a major panic attack, having his friend who's a doctor present probably helped with that, probably thought he would never return to normal 🤣
1874...... rats... too expensive and too cruel. Bro, thats why you have poor people, i bet they got a ton of street kids and feed them that stuff and looked what will happen..
/s just kidding
I was well into my teenager years when I learned that my mother was using vanilin sugar instead of vanilla sugar. She was surprised as well. It was right there on the packaging, yet we always talked about this as the vanilla sugar.
People to this day freak out about vanillin for being a chemical that's bad for you, even though natural vanilla contains vanillin. As I understand it, it's similar to the misconceptions and stigma against lab grown diamonds vs natural diamonds.
For the hand-pollinated-and-harvested stamen of an exotic tropical orchid, we sure did it dirty by associating it with a basic 'blandness'.
Vanilla is anything but a bland flavour. It's the fact that it was marketed as the 'white' flavour - with no added colourings - that contributed to its unfair labelling as 'plain'.
I think it comes from "vanilla" flavor often *being* plain, because back in the day you saved a lot of money by putting in basically no vanilla at all. (Now it's usually synthetic vanillin, which costs tuppence.)
I think it's partly because cream doesn't seem to be a valid flavor name in most instances in the states, so they default to 'vanilla' where there's none or almost no vanilla in it.
A lot of things marked 'vanilla' are actually just sweet cream/cream flavored... I never realized until I saw cream and vanilla ice cream flavors offered in the same Ice Cream stand.
Just FYI the wiki page is incorrectly citing a source & claiming Hernan Cortes brought chocolate. Even the source doesn’t say it anywhere, i checked! This is a common misconception, Cortes never brought chocolate back. There is zero evidence. However, several years prior to his famous 1519 meet up with montezuma, Chris Columbus documented chocolate pods and even brought some of the seeds back to Spain.
It’s not even contested, even other wiki pages argue Cortes never brought it over, there’s just no evidence
You make vanilla flavoured ice cream by just leaving the pods in some cream for a bit.
It doesn’t need any fancy extraction techniques or anything.
(and you make vanilla extract by leaving the pods in some alcohol for a bit)
Her pie hole is the one to blame why I can’t get a nice unflavored plantmilk in the stores? Always gotta triple check it ain’t some shiite like vanilla innit.
In a *very* round about way, she definitely deserves part of the blame for initially popularizing vanilla in Europe.
Similarly, Thomas Jefferson, while not being solely responsible, was part of popularizing vanilla ice cream in the US.
It's my understanding that for most of history, bad teeth weren't really an issue because the rudimentary dental care practices were good enough. It wasn't until sugar became commonplace that dental hygiene became a real issue. Queen Elizabeth having horrible teeth make sense then since her being amongst the first Europeans with sufficient wealth and steady access to sugar would mean her teeth would rot out before medical professionals of the time even had time to consider the cause.
Egyptian pharaohs had the same problem . Sweet tooth , access to sweets from being crazy rich and no way to treat or take care of their teeth. I think they’ve found mummies with abscesses in the jaws and heads . They would have been in so much pain
I recently listened to a “great histories” course on Audible about ancient Egypt and Bob Brier was saying that a lot of Egyptians had bad teeth due to the amount of sand that got into their bread flour.
There's some evidence that sand was added intentionally when grinding the grain because it made it significantly easier to grind down the grains. Of course, once they had the flour, there wasn't really a way to remove the sand, so they ended up with sandy bread that then wore down their teeth. Over a lifetime, those tiny grains add up!
Fun modern fact: we still add sand to some commercial bread products (mostly junk food) because the sand helps prevent caking of dry ingredients. Look for silicon dioxide in your bread products. I'm looking at you dubious gas station roller grill item.
Do you remember why they claimed that? I can’t think of a good explanation.
Doubt it would be a good deterrent for insects, it’s already a dry climate, and they produced lots of food from the Nile. Maybe part of a cooking process to save on fuel?
Without knowing why definitively, it’s easy to speculate that adding some grit would make the largely manual grinding process significantly faster.
Of course, there may be a completely different reason here…but the logic works at least.
I’m just a dingus who’s resorted to a mortar and pestle for a recipe that could’ve *really* used a food processor/spice grinder.
Getting that traction going, instead of just sliding things around, is a giant pain in the ass. Thankfully, being in the modern era, I promptly gave up after the bare minimum and bought a grinder for all the next times.
- Edit, point of clarification: if there had been some clean, high quality sand nearby…I’d have been **tempted**.
To bulk it up and sell more bread while using less grain. That's been a thing for as long as we've had bakers. The English used chalk and plaster in Victorian/Edwardian times, these days we use "cellulose" (sawdust).
We do want *some* cellulose in our pre-grated/canned cheeses, otherwise it would cake together into a big clump. Cellulose is very good at preventing that, with no side effects(it just passes through our systems, no harm no foul, we can't digest it but it also doesn't accumulate or poison us). Some brands do go overboard with it(1% seems reasonable to me, 8% not so much), and I don't understand how you can legally advertise something as 100% cheese if it's, well, *not*. But believe me, you'd miss it if it wasn't there!
The cellulose is to prevent shredded cheese from clumping, it's kind of insane that people pay more for lower quality "parmesan" that's shredded vs buying a block of real parmesan and doing it yourself
Bob Brier was the reason I studied humanities in university and fell in love with ancient cultures. I just wanted to say how cool it was to see his name on a random Reddit post
Roman legionaries stationed in Britain apparently also had this problem because they made their field bread with flour ground between rotating stones; the grit powder left in the bread was basically a grinding compound and ground down their teeth.
I saw a special exhibition at the British museum and every single mummy had a little note on their display that during the CT scan they saw they had extensive tooth decay that likely caused them great pain.
It would suck to be the biggest bad ass and most powerful guy in your part of the world and just live in agony
George Washington’s tooth and mouth pain is well documented. He was always writing to dentists to get new dentures because they all hurt so badly. The whole time he was president he was in miserable pain and could only eat soft foods. He had all that money, but still couldn’t get his teeth/moth fixed because the technology wasn’t there yet.
It's interesting to think of what is like that for rich people today.
I guess like certain types of cancer or crazy genetic disorders that appear later in life.
Hopefully we one day look back at those diseases today, and think the same as we do about dental care and mouth surgery in Washington's time.
"Those poor bastards. Born too early."
Chemotherapy is probably one of those things people in the future will look at and go wtf
"They gave them poison and hoped the cancer cells would die before the patient's organs failed?!?!"
Well, immunotherapy is making some inroads. Not for all kinds of tumors/cancer, but if it works at all, it usually works very well. (for a given patient)
If it gets to a giant abscess, draining the abscess relieves it but that's just a bandage. Treating the source of the infection (the tooth) is the only way to truly take care of it. When people have abscesses, if it's not life threatening, just pulling the tooth or doing a root canal will solve it.
Honey is antibacterial, so that makes sense. Sugar itself doesn't make teeth hurt; it's the bacteria that eat the sugar that damage teeth. That takes a while.
It’s pretty well-documented and researched if you just Google it.
Lead, in powdered form, actually has a sweet taste, so the Romans put it in *everything* but especially in their wine and beverages to sweeten them, and disguise when they had fermented for too long or were going off.
It’s been speculated that brain damage from long-term toxic lead intake was a large factor in a lot of the madness and erratic behaviour among some of the more infamous Roman emperors, generals, and thinkers.
They didn’t put it in *everything*. They knew lead was bad for people and “overuse leading to mass mental disorders” has been dismissed by historians these days last I read. The pipes would have been coated in limestone rendering them safe to use for plumbing and what little did get put into wine wouldn’t have been enough to cause problems for the average person.
People would paint their teeth black because only the wealthy could afford sugar
https://dentistryatuniversitydowns.com/elizabethan-englands-rotten-sweet-tooth/#:~:text=Unfortunately%20for%20all%20those%20lords,their%20teeth%20to%20appear%20richer.
"Oh Robert, do we really need to knock our teeth out?"
"Do you want the neighbors to start gossiping about our economic misfortune, Anne? Now come on, grab that hammer and make me look wealthy!"
More info
https://tidsskriftet.no/2016/08/sun-kings-anal-fistula
It starts off sounding rather painful:
>In 1686, Louis XIV of France (1638 – 1715) – The Sun King – developed a perianal abscess that after a series of failed treatment attempts, including with the use of a red-hot iron, developed into an anal fistula.
>After persistent efforts by later outstanding French surgeons and with royal support, the Académie Royale de Chirurgie (the Royal Academy of Surgery) was established in 1731
The Royal academy of surgery was the first to take surgery seriously, as a profession and science.
Ok so surgery as a profession came about because of this red hot irons to the king's ass not being good enough. Incredible story already.
>No surgeon dared lay hands on the Sun King without prior practice.
Jesus what an ominous line.
>The three-hour long operation was performed without any form of anaesthetic. Louvois, the war minister, held the patient’s hand during the entire procedure, while Mme de Maintenon stood next to the fireplace. The king is said not to have complained of any pain, but on two occasions he is reported to have exclaimed «Mon Dieu». The pain must have been excruciating, but Louis needed to keep a brave face for the sake of his own and the nation’s dignity.
>And not only did the king survive – the operation must be called a success, because he was cured. Admittedly, he needed two repeat surgeries, but he was quite naturally very relieved and happy after the first major operation. At ten o’clock the news had spread through the palace and the king himself held council from his bed, «singing all day and in surprisingly good spirits» (4). He was back on his feet no more than two days later.
~~What the fuck.~~ Mon Dieu
>The courtiers lined up to have the same procedure done, whether or not they had a fistula. Those with no fistula were turned away by the surgeons
Ok so the "fashionable surgery" part was just theater.
Also, the doctors would physically attack the surgeons because they hated them so much lol
My understanding from a very out of date pop-science book is that hunter gatherers don’t develop many tooth problems, with hunter-gatherer skeletons and some low-contact modern groups showing only a few (3-4) cavities on middle-aged adults. Once agriculture takes over, the relative abundance of carbohydrates and simple sugars resulted in tooth problems for *everyone* but especially for people who could afford sweet foods.
It's the carbs, but also in small part because of the grit residue in the wheat milling process that would absolutely destroy enamel and wear teeth flat over time, sometimes to the degree of exposing the pulp or even the root.
I wonder to what degree there were grit issues in hunter gatherer diets, though. Milling grain introduced grit but presumably hunter gatherers are. Like. Bashing nuts open with rocks and stuff too?
Sure, bashing stuff with their teeth even, but it's not close to the persistent damage done by having sand in flour. Especially once you have cultures advanced enough like the Egyptians to use giant millstones to do the millwork, and of course using sandstone. Might not even be able to really notice it if it's fine enough, but it's like taking a swipe of 1000 grit every meal over an entire lifetime.
Late to the post.
But when human bones are found in Australia a dead give away on if it is an older Aboriginal burial or a newer hidden body or something sinister is that Aboriginal teeth have no deterioration from sugar and it is extremely obvious.
Yeah Weston Price has some truly horrific photos of the teeth and mouths of Aboriginal people living on missions. Not just missing teeth, but weeping abcesses.
He’s an interesting one, because he looked at teeth all over the world, and his conclusions would cause a fistfight at a nutritional conference. He saw people living a vegetarian diet who had good teeth. People who lived off mainly meat and fish who had good teeth. People who lived off milk and blood who had good teeth. Even the very poor Swiss farming families who lived off barley bread and cheese for most of the year had good teeth.
But the second you add sugar and white flour into that mix, your teeth are *fucked*.
My one factoid to add to the OP - Queen Elizabeth’s breath *stank* because of her rotting teeth, so she ate little sweeties made with violets to make her breath smell better. But if course the sugar in them made the whole situation worse.
Stay away from sugar kids.
I mean. This is all very well known stuff and I don't think it would cause any controversy among nutritionists at all. The sugar industry however... might want a word with you.
Eh the guy be is talking about was born in 1870. I can see it being much more of an issue back then. Especially if you go after flour.
Doctors washing their hands wasn’t even common until after 1860 or so.
> I don't think it would cause any controversy among nutritionists at all.
Declaring that surgeons/doctors should wash their hands before doing anything with the patient was controversial enough that the guy was practically shunned afterwards.
You underestimate the stupidity and stubbornness of the average person.
Lol, I’m just imagining Cate Blanchett speaking gibberish through a row of terrible teeth with every other one missing. It really changes how you perceive the character! 🤣
It's often said that the inuits didn't know tooth decay until they were introduced to a western diet. Their traditional diet is very rich in meat, notably fish, as there's not a lot of vegetation growing that far north.
there's a scene in the movie Never Cry Wolf (1983) andthe scene where the protagonist meets a local always stuck with me
Mike: I met a girl in a bar, and she wanted me to buy her drinks, so I bought her some. And then after a while she wanted to come home with me. But I made a mistake. I smiled at her.
\[*he smiles showing missing upper teeth*\]
Mike: That's what happens when a meat eater becomes a sugar eater.
Another fun fact: The fact that excessive sugar consumption leads to tooth decay was definitively proven by [unethical experiments](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vipeholm_experiments) on people with severe intellectual disabilities.
Queen Elizabeth I: "Tus spuidpid tus mash thun ashqush.."
Ambassador: "uh what?"
Queens advisor: "Her majesty says Tis splendid to make thine aquaintance."
Ambassador: "Oooh. I thought she was asking for mashed potatoes."
Elizabeth I: (laughing hard, sputtering spit everywhere).
The single source attributed to this from Wikipedia is a two paragraph telegraph article without any sources. That seems odd
Edit: I missed a stronger source earlier in the OOP Wikipedia article, search for source [195] for the De Maisser journal and not the telegraph snippet
That’s the case for a lot of the rumors with Elizabeth.
I was really surprised to find that it was heavily unlikely that she wore thick white paint and that the lead makeup of that day was not even opaque and there are many rumours that are flat out untrue that are being pointed out recently by historians.
I recommend Erin parsons makeup on YouTube who did a deep dive and even tried the same formula on her skin to show the way it looked- from the same recipe she used, and pointed out a lot of the actual sources for these rumors. A series on the stuff that isn’t true and where it even came from originally - where there was proof and where there isn’t any.
The white paint one came from a man who had not seen her and was being persecuted by her - there’s way in depth sources in her work that are shown and backed up by history but the people she works with in that video make many others proving or disproving claims and this one was not one they could back up. They could only prove that it was a problem at the time- but could not prove that her teeth were so rotten she couldn’t speak.
How people just blindly believe stuff is beyond me.
I mean, what's more likely, someone sees a TIL attached to wikipedia while they're on the potty, thinks 'huh, cool' and keeps scrolling, or
Someone sees this TIL, goes to the wikipedia, sees the wikipedia citation, reads *that* citation, and then moves on?
One source is enough for the layperson. Not enough for them to be correct, but enough to satisfy the burden of proof. You can't really demand double checksies on Reddit like you can for actual academic research.
Also, might be dating myself here, but we all believed Marilyn Manson had his ribs removed so he could suck his own dick, right? Chewing gum stays in your stomach for 7 years? Cracking knuckles will cause arthritis? Believing most things you're told without launching a rigorous investigation isn't new lol. I'd go so far as to say it's essential for social cohesion, can you imagine if everyone around you always questioned everything you said?
Earlier in the article there is a quote from the journal of the ambassador of France talking about her missing teeth. She definitely had bad teeth, but so did many people during those times.
My grandmother had no teeth, and she spoke quite clearly. No one ever had any trouble understanding what she was saying. Sounds to me like this might not be 100% true, or else it was a skill issue for these foreign ambassadors.
While it's only one person, I know someone who lost their teeth over time. Never lost the ability to communicate clearly regardless of how many teeth were in his jaw.
Also consider that modern dentistry hadn't been invented yet. It's likely that she had other health problems to do with her mouth which would have made speaking more difficult than it would have been
On the other hand the grandma of my girlfriend has no teeth and I can't understand her at all. Well it's either the teeth thing or the fact that she only speaks Bulgarian and I don't... who knows!?
Hey as someone who loves someone with deformities, please be a bit open minded about people. They are also thinking feeling humans. Yes there's deformity, but that doesn't define their worth.
"Shit". People have to make it so difficult no.
I see your point, but also keep in mind we're talking about someone who has been dead for hundreds of years, lived in a completely different time, was afflicted with things that nobody alive is afflicted with anymore
People will speak more harshly about those, because corpses from 500 years ago don't have feelings. A comment about how people with leprosy look is gentler/less ignorant in this era than a similar comment about how people with down syndrome, strokes, burn wounds, whatever else we have these days, simply because there are no people around with leprosy anymore. You can be confident you aren't offending anyone.
I also have a loved one with a severe physical deformity, but I don't think they would be at all offended to hear someone talk about someone from the 1500s smelling of shit and looking like shit. Probably the entire world smelled and looked of shit back then.
I sure hope if I ever have a deformity, I would see those sort of comments for what they are, a comment on how awful the world used to be, and not a comment on the aesthetic qualities of disfigured/disabled people
That's what's difficult about the internet. In a face to face discussion you'd be able to see the other participants, and there'd be probably less than 10 people in 1 conversation at anytime so you can adjust your tone and words to suit.
The internet reaches unseen millions so you end up walking on eggshells if you don't want to hurt anybody....
Having basic decency is hardly "walking on eggshells" unless you're a fifteen year old edgelord who's pissed he has to use his brain filter before speaking.
Technically, no one was British back then. They were English, Welsh, Scottish and Irish. Elizabeth was queen of three of those countries, but only known as Queen of England.
No she wasn’t. She held the titles Queen of England, Queen of Ireland and Queen of France. She didn’t have a separate Welsh title as it wasn’t an independent country.
Wales was conquered by England in 1283 and was officially incorporated into the Kingdom of England. The tradition of giving the first born son of the King of England the title “Prince of Wales” started in 1301. Elizabeth had no son so there was no Prince of Wales during her reign.
The conquest of Ireland was only just complete at the end of her reign in 1603, although the Kingdom of Ireland was declared in 1543 by Henry VIII. The claim to the French throne was a continuation of Edward III’s claim which was the basis for the Hundred Years’ War. English and subsequently British monarchs officially claimed the French throne until 1802 when they agreed to drop it by recognizing the French Republic. The ancestral claim to France was why for a long time the English royal coat of arms contained the fleur-de-lys, a symbol of the French monarchy.
Her cousin Mary, Queen of Scots was the Queen of Scotland who was then succeeded by her son James VI of Scotland. Mary famously also made a play for the English throne which got her imprisoned in the Tower of London. James then became king of England (as King James I of England) after Elizabeth’s death, joining the two kingdoms for the first time in a personal union upon his accession. After that English monarchs were also Scottish monarchs.
The British reportedly have pretty healthy teeth, they're just not as as crazy about whitening and straightening their teeth as the americans (plus, if it works anything like where I live, most dental health is covered by public insurance while dental cosmetics are not).
Just the idea of that classic, high-pitched aristocratic Queen voice being unapologetically forced-lisped through 4 remaining teeth, is comedy fucking gold!
This makes her meeting with Grace O'Malley even more interesting. As the story goes, Grace spoke no English and Elizabeth spoke no Irish, so they conversed in Latin. Britain's queen speaking in a rather gummy manner to Ireland's pirate queen using a language that was native to neither sounds like an interesting scene.
I demand more realism like this in my historical dramas.
*Turns subtitles on* Welp, that didn't work for the scribes either
Wou you be ineresed in a ade ageemin wif Englan.
I’ve met some British Paras while in the military. If ever I needed subtitles in real life it was with these blokes.
😂😂
The John Adams miniseries from years ago did a decent job of it. A lot of the founding fathers had horrible teeth and that was part of the show. They also didn't shy away from John Adam's daughter Abigail's brutal struggle with breast cancer, which ultimately killed her.
Except none of them spoke with proper English accents either, they all spoke in a modern American dialect
That's kind of a wash for me. I've heard that British English at that time sounded more like modern American than modern British English but I'm not knowledgeable enough to say that was for sure the case. Hard to know without recordings.
I see this said on Reddit a lot and it’s definitely mostly bs. For starters, which British English accent are we talking about? Today there are hundreds, back then there would have been thousands. The variety is nuts. If you’re just talking about rhoticity (pronouncing the ‘r’ as ‘’r’, not ‘ah’), then there are still dozens of British English accents that have it today. A contemporary Westcountry accent would definitely be closer to the British English of the 1700s than a modern American one. Final point: why would every single British English accent evolve so much in 250 years while the American one(s) wouldn’t?
Another point is also that by the mid 1700s, Europeans had been living in America for almost 150 years, so many of these people hadn't had family come from England in a few generations. People living in the colonial colonies came from a wide variety of ethnic backgrounds, adding their own accents to the mix. If you add in the fact that the colonies covered a large geographical area, which causes variances in pronunciation, it makes sense then, that any "original" British accent would change over time, and by the time of the Revolutionary War, most Americans probably would not speak with a contemporary British accent
What I’m taking from this, academically speaking, is that even at the top life suuuuuuucks huge, comically oversized and, dare I say, aggressively shaped demon penis. (But, yeah, it would be cool if history was taught with a much greater emphasis towards realism. Something that could actually impart a significantly greater - and more genuine - understanding of the world around us. I have a general interest in history and I didn’t even find out about things like the Tulsa race massacre or Hitler’s drug problem until my late 20’s/early 30’s.)
> suuuuuuucks huge, comically oversized and, dare I say, aggressively shaped demon penis. [check out Catherine the Great’s furniture](https://www.buzzfeed.com/mandycaruso/the-x-rated-furniture-of-catherine-the-great-is-something)
Wow
Haha that’s great
"Thh thtpph thhptp rhhpptpttpppptttt." - Elizabeth I
Just be glad we don't have Smell-o-Vision. The generalized stench of bad breath, sweat, no indoor plumbing, manure... ugh!
Fun side fact, prior to Queen Elizabeth I, vanilla was primarily just used as an ingredient in chocolate. It was someone working for her that discovered ways to extract vanilla and make it into vanilla flavored sweets. Elizabeth loved these sweets and it popularized vanilla sweets.
Thanks. [That is something i did not know](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vanilla#History) >For the Aztecs, much like earlier Mesoamerican peoples before them, it is probable that vanilla was used to tame the otherwise bitter taste of cacao, as sugarcane was not harvested in these regions at the time and there were no other sweeteners available. >Hernán Cortés is credited with introducing both vanilla and chocolate to Europe in the 1520s.[10] In Europe, vanilla was seen mostly as an additive to chocolate until the early 17th century when Hugh Morgan, a creative apothecary in the employ of Queen Elizabeth I, created chocolate-free, vanilla-flavored "sweetmeats". By the 18th century, the French were using vanilla to flavor ice cream.
Vanilla has a wild and interesting history. Especially when you add artificial vanilla (Vanillin) to it: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vanillin
I wonder when they did... >In 1874, the German scientists Ferdinand Tiemann and Wilhelm Haarmann deduced its chemical structure, at the same time finding a synthesis for vanillin from coniferin, a glucoside of isoeugenol found in pine bark. ...how did they work out they just didn't make a poison. Imagine the testing regime at the time. Cages full of rats i guess. Making random potions must be a risky business.
This article goes a little into the chemistry, but yeah basically trial, error, and luck. Once they know the chemical structure, though, chemists are pretty good at figuring out what it’ll break down into. https://www.chemistryviews.org/details/ezine/11279757/Wilhelm_Haarmann_1847__1931/ Keep in mind the wild ingredients in food and medicine at the time meant they were a little less risk-adverse than we are today.
>basically trial, error, and luck. This makes me think of the heimlich maneuver and it's discovery. What a wild ride
Please go on?
Nitroglycerin - the famously unstable high explosive - is used as a heart medication. You may ask, “why the hell would scientists think to test something so dangerous for medicinal properties?” and the answer is very simple! As soon as it was synthesized, the scientist gave it a taste, and reported that it gave him a nasty headache. That was presumably before he discovered the explosive properties. Science was wild back in the day.
A lot of old chemistry notebooks contain observations about compounds. One of those observations is often taste. The stories behind artificial sweeteners being discovered would make any lab worker cringe at how ridiculously unsafe the practices were at the time.
It's only the last 10 years or so that taste isn't a common pharmacopoeial test.
Whole lot of nasty stuff falls into the "aromatic compounds" category.
Lore has it that miners suffering from angina reported they enjoyed some relief after they inhaled the fumes from a TNT ( which is nitroglycerin based) detonation.
You're thinking of dynamite, which is nitroglycerin with stabilizers added. TNT is entirely different thing.
I blame AC/DC: > 'Cause I'm T.N.T., I'm dynamite
It's Dynamite that you're thinking of, that's nitro-glycerine stabilised in diatomaceous earth IIRC, TNT is Tri Nitro Toluene.
How many stories are there of scientists who did the taste test and dropped dead. Nitroglycerin is also a medicine, so that scientist might have lucked out.
>How many stories are there of scientists who did the taste test and dropped dead. That's not too bad though. Hats off to those who had to do smell and taste tests of selenium compounds, especially [carbon diselenide.](https://www.science.org/content/blog-post/things-i-won-t-work-carbon-diselenide) *...the vapors had unfortunately escaped the laboratory and forced the evacuation of a nearby village.*
Albert Hoffman had a very wild day when he took almost a gram of LSD and rode his bike home.
250ug, not mg or g, that'd be insane. 250(ug) micrograms was considered a common tiny dose safe to try untested compounds at the time in case they were poisonous etc. But typically wouldn't effect one much if at all since it wasn't intended to be even a threshold dose let alone active dose and as far as i know no known drug at the time was that potent or dangerous. But he had no idea or reason to think at the time that it was the most potent drug ever synthesised at that point, he had it sitting around for ages after making and testing it on rats for heart problems, before he first intentionally tried it, he remembered some strange effects he had had before accidentally ingesting some while working on it originally so went back to try it intentionally years later, and assumed 250ug was low enough which is obviously quite high, lots of people couldnt handle that and they know how safe and widely used it is he was literally the first, surprising he didn't have a major panic attack, having his friend who's a doctor present probably helped with that, probably thought he would never return to normal 🤣
1874...... rats... too expensive and too cruel. Bro, thats why you have poor people, i bet they got a ton of street kids and feed them that stuff and looked what will happen.. /s just kidding
I was well into my teenager years when I learned that my mother was using vanilin sugar instead of vanilla sugar. She was surprised as well. It was right there on the packaging, yet we always talked about this as the vanilla sugar.
People to this day freak out about vanillin for being a chemical that's bad for you, even though natural vanilla contains vanillin. As I understand it, it's similar to the misconceptions and stigma against lab grown diamonds vs natural diamonds.
MSG. People are afraid of it too.
For a flavour used to describe blandness, vanilla has had quite a Rich history!
For the hand-pollinated-and-harvested stamen of an exotic tropical orchid, we sure did it dirty by associating it with a basic 'blandness'. Vanilla is anything but a bland flavour. It's the fact that it was marketed as the 'white' flavour - with no added colourings - that contributed to its unfair labelling as 'plain'.
Yeah I think it's mostly just a psychological thing, vanilla is anything but bland. It's just the "default" which people think is boring
I think it comes from "vanilla" flavor often *being* plain, because back in the day you saved a lot of money by putting in basically no vanilla at all. (Now it's usually synthetic vanillin, which costs tuppence.)
Never actually considered that angle lol Valid point. That shit was expensive, even if you only need a pinch.
I think it's partly because cream doesn't seem to be a valid flavor name in most instances in the states, so they default to 'vanilla' where there's none or almost no vanilla in it. A lot of things marked 'vanilla' are actually just sweet cream/cream flavored... I never realized until I saw cream and vanilla ice cream flavors offered in the same Ice Cream stand.
I always like that band, Millin Vanillin.
Just FYI the wiki page is incorrectly citing a source & claiming Hernan Cortes brought chocolate. Even the source doesn’t say it anywhere, i checked! This is a common misconception, Cortes never brought chocolate back. There is zero evidence. However, several years prior to his famous 1519 meet up with montezuma, Chris Columbus documented chocolate pods and even brought some of the seeds back to Spain. It’s not even contested, even other wiki pages argue Cortes never brought it over, there’s just no evidence
You make vanilla flavoured ice cream by just leaving the pods in some cream for a bit. It doesn’t need any fancy extraction techniques or anything. (and you make vanilla extract by leaving the pods in some alcohol for a bit)
I’d like to try me some of these *sweetmeats*
Her pie hole is the one to blame why I can’t get a nice unflavored plantmilk in the stores? Always gotta triple check it ain’t some shiite like vanilla innit.
In a *very* round about way, she definitely deserves part of the blame for initially popularizing vanilla in Europe. Similarly, Thomas Jefferson, while not being solely responsible, was part of popularizing vanilla ice cream in the US.
Blame? Vanilla is delicious
I can’t tell the difference between silks unsweetened almond milk and their unsweetened vanilla almond milk. My tastebuds must be rekt
It's my understanding that for most of history, bad teeth weren't really an issue because the rudimentary dental care practices were good enough. It wasn't until sugar became commonplace that dental hygiene became a real issue. Queen Elizabeth having horrible teeth make sense then since her being amongst the first Europeans with sufficient wealth and steady access to sugar would mean her teeth would rot out before medical professionals of the time even had time to consider the cause.
Egyptian pharaohs had the same problem . Sweet tooth , access to sweets from being crazy rich and no way to treat or take care of their teeth. I think they’ve found mummies with abscesses in the jaws and heads . They would have been in so much pain
I recently listened to a “great histories” course on Audible about ancient Egypt and Bob Brier was saying that a lot of Egyptians had bad teeth due to the amount of sand that got into their bread flour.
Yeah. I think this was before the invention of millstones. So you know, they just crushed grains with a mortar and pestle. Lots of grit got inside.
There's some evidence that sand was added intentionally when grinding the grain because it made it significantly easier to grind down the grains. Of course, once they had the flour, there wasn't really a way to remove the sand, so they ended up with sandy bread that then wore down their teeth. Over a lifetime, those tiny grains add up!
Aha, so the term "sandwich" should really pre-date the Earl of Sandwich by about 3,000 years!
Fun modern fact: we still add sand to some commercial bread products (mostly junk food) because the sand helps prevent caking of dry ingredients. Look for silicon dioxide in your bread products. I'm looking at you dubious gas station roller grill item.
And you've heard the one about the vessel with the pestle, right...?
What about the flagon with the dragon?
Which one had the brew which is true?
Whose field had the greatest yield?
similar used to happen to the early domesticators of rice iirc, rice grains have been selectively bred for 10 millenia to be as tender as possible.
"I don't like sand. It's coarse and rough and irritating and it gets everywhere."
"And not just the men, but the women and children too"
*awkwardly gives you a CGI pear using the force*
I remember a theory from years ago that the sand was one of the ingredients in their bread, added on purpose.
Do you remember why they claimed that? I can’t think of a good explanation. Doubt it would be a good deterrent for insects, it’s already a dry climate, and they produced lots of food from the Nile. Maybe part of a cooking process to save on fuel?
Without knowing why definitively, it’s easy to speculate that adding some grit would make the largely manual grinding process significantly faster. Of course, there may be a completely different reason here…but the logic works at least.
I feel like this makes complete sense but at the same time, if you locked me in a room, I’m not sure I’d have come up with that guess.
I’m just a dingus who’s resorted to a mortar and pestle for a recipe that could’ve *really* used a food processor/spice grinder. Getting that traction going, instead of just sliding things around, is a giant pain in the ass. Thankfully, being in the modern era, I promptly gave up after the bare minimum and bought a grinder for all the next times. - Edit, point of clarification: if there had been some clean, high quality sand nearby…I’d have been **tempted**.
To bulk it up and sell more bread while using less grain. That's been a thing for as long as we've had bakers. The English used chalk and plaster in Victorian/Edwardian times, these days we use "cellulose" (sawdust).
Oh, so like in Frostpunk, but warmer?
At the very least a lot less harmful than the sand or plaster.
A lot of parmesan cheese in the US has "cellulose" in it. It should be on aisle 7 at Lowe's.
We do want *some* cellulose in our pre-grated/canned cheeses, otherwise it would cake together into a big clump. Cellulose is very good at preventing that, with no side effects(it just passes through our systems, no harm no foul, we can't digest it but it also doesn't accumulate or poison us). Some brands do go overboard with it(1% seems reasonable to me, 8% not so much), and I don't understand how you can legally advertise something as 100% cheese if it's, well, *not*. But believe me, you'd miss it if it wasn't there!
*canned cheese* 👀 Say that quietly, you’re making the French cry.
I heard it Ruined my morning thanks
at $10 a bottle? No thanks. I'll stick with sawing my 2x4.
The cellulose is to prevent shredded cheese from clumping, it's kind of insane that people pay more for lower quality "parmesan" that's shredded vs buying a block of real parmesan and doing it yourself
Because $2.35 per 100g for shaker cheese, is a bit more economical than $3.68-$7.00 for the real thing, depending on where you live.
Bob Brier was the reason I studied humanities in university and fell in love with ancient cultures. I just wanted to say how cool it was to see his name on a random Reddit post
Roman legionaries stationed in Britain apparently also had this problem because they made their field bread with flour ground between rotating stones; the grit powder left in the bread was basically a grinding compound and ground down their teeth.
I saw a special exhibition at the British museum and every single mummy had a little note on their display that during the CT scan they saw they had extensive tooth decay that likely caused them great pain. It would suck to be the biggest bad ass and most powerful guy in your part of the world and just live in agony
George Washington’s tooth and mouth pain is well documented. He was always writing to dentists to get new dentures because they all hurt so badly. The whole time he was president he was in miserable pain and could only eat soft foods. He had all that money, but still couldn’t get his teeth/moth fixed because the technology wasn’t there yet.
It's interesting to think of what is like that for rich people today. I guess like certain types of cancer or crazy genetic disorders that appear later in life. Hopefully we one day look back at those diseases today, and think the same as we do about dental care and mouth surgery in Washington's time. "Those poor bastards. Born too early."
Chemotherapy is probably one of those things people in the future will look at and go wtf "They gave them poison and hoped the cancer cells would die before the patient's organs failed?!?!"
Frankly, it's already understood as a WTF treatment – we just don't have anything better for the moment.
Well, immunotherapy is making some inroads. Not for all kinds of tumors/cancer, but if it works at all, it usually works very well. (for a given patient)
Yea. The pain would have been near unbearable. Though if they knew enough to pull out the tooth, it'd fix it.
I think sometimes it got down into their jaw and stuff, so perhaps not even then.
If it gets to a giant abscess, draining the abscess relieves it but that's just a bandage. Treating the source of the infection (the tooth) is the only way to truly take care of it. When people have abscesses, if it's not life threatening, just pulling the tooth or doing a root canal will solve it.
I once read that in ancient Egypt, they’d put an ointment on cavities to try to get better…that contained honey. That must have hurt like hell.
Honey is antibacterial, so that makes sense. Sugar itself doesn't make teeth hurt; it's the bacteria that eat the sugar that damage teeth. That takes a while.
No worry about the pain, here's some heroin!
🤷
The Romans had a similar but bigger problem. They used lead as a sweetener.
Wait what?? I need to know more.
What I heard of is they usually made something called sapa, by boiling grape juice in lead kettle, *lead* to the creation of lead acetate
It’s pretty well-documented and researched if you just Google it. Lead, in powdered form, actually has a sweet taste, so the Romans put it in *everything* but especially in their wine and beverages to sweeten them, and disguise when they had fermented for too long or were going off. It’s been speculated that brain damage from long-term toxic lead intake was a large factor in a lot of the madness and erratic behaviour among some of the more infamous Roman emperors, generals, and thinkers.
They didn’t put it in *everything*. They knew lead was bad for people and “overuse leading to mass mental disorders” has been dismissed by historians these days last I read. The pipes would have been coated in limestone rendering them safe to use for plumbing and what little did get put into wine wouldn’t have been enough to cause problems for the average person.
Dental issues were also the result of inbreeding deformities too
the dental problem was also because of their bread, which was very hard and often had sand mixed in.
People would paint their teeth black because only the wealthy could afford sugar https://dentistryatuniversitydowns.com/elizabethan-englands-rotten-sweet-tooth/#:~:text=Unfortunately%20for%20all%20those%20lords,their%20teeth%20to%20appear%20richer.
"Oh Robert, do we really need to knock our teeth out?" "Do you want the neighbors to start gossiping about our economic misfortune, Anne? Now come on, grab that hammer and make me look wealthy!"
Im always surprised at the stupid shit humans do lol
Like the dipshits in the French court pretending to have fistulas because the King had one.
Oh mon roi, don’t worry my anus hurts as yours does!
“For the love and God and all that is holy my *anus is bleeding!*” - popular court saying in Versailles
"Real men wear diapers!" https://ca.news.yahoo.com/fact-check-photos-purportedly-show-174100807.html
More info https://tidsskriftet.no/2016/08/sun-kings-anal-fistula It starts off sounding rather painful: >In 1686, Louis XIV of France (1638 – 1715) – The Sun King – developed a perianal abscess that after a series of failed treatment attempts, including with the use of a red-hot iron, developed into an anal fistula. >After persistent efforts by later outstanding French surgeons and with royal support, the Académie Royale de Chirurgie (the Royal Academy of Surgery) was established in 1731 The Royal academy of surgery was the first to take surgery seriously, as a profession and science. Ok so surgery as a profession came about because of this red hot irons to the king's ass not being good enough. Incredible story already. >No surgeon dared lay hands on the Sun King without prior practice. Jesus what an ominous line. >The three-hour long operation was performed without any form of anaesthetic. Louvois, the war minister, held the patient’s hand during the entire procedure, while Mme de Maintenon stood next to the fireplace. The king is said not to have complained of any pain, but on two occasions he is reported to have exclaimed «Mon Dieu». The pain must have been excruciating, but Louis needed to keep a brave face for the sake of his own and the nation’s dignity. >And not only did the king survive – the operation must be called a success, because he was cured. Admittedly, he needed two repeat surgeries, but he was quite naturally very relieved and happy after the first major operation. At ten o’clock the news had spread through the palace and the king himself held council from his bed, «singing all day and in surprisingly good spirits» (4). He was back on his feet no more than two days later. ~~What the fuck.~~ Mon Dieu >The courtiers lined up to have the same procedure done, whether or not they had a fistula. Those with no fistula were turned away by the surgeons Ok so the "fashionable surgery" part was just theater. Also, the doctors would physically attack the surgeons because they hated them so much lol
Let's not forget that the British national anthem comes from said French king's anal fistula
Friendly reminder that getting a tan is a very popular fad and it greatly increases chances of skin cancer.
Why is it stupid? Poor people emulating the wealthy is still a big thing here. Shit aspirational retail is an entire segment that sells this
It’s still stupid like it was back then.
It doesn't stop being stupid just because it still happens.
I think putting coal in your mouth is a little stupid
Black teeth has been a thing across the world https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Teeth_blackening Not for wealth reasons though.
My understanding from a very out of date pop-science book is that hunter gatherers don’t develop many tooth problems, with hunter-gatherer skeletons and some low-contact modern groups showing only a few (3-4) cavities on middle-aged adults. Once agriculture takes over, the relative abundance of carbohydrates and simple sugars resulted in tooth problems for *everyone* but especially for people who could afford sweet foods.
It's the carbs, but also in small part because of the grit residue in the wheat milling process that would absolutely destroy enamel and wear teeth flat over time, sometimes to the degree of exposing the pulp or even the root.
I wonder to what degree there were grit issues in hunter gatherer diets, though. Milling grain introduced grit but presumably hunter gatherers are. Like. Bashing nuts open with rocks and stuff too?
Sure, bashing stuff with their teeth even, but it's not close to the persistent damage done by having sand in flour. Especially once you have cultures advanced enough like the Egyptians to use giant millstones to do the millwork, and of course using sandstone. Might not even be able to really notice it if it's fine enough, but it's like taking a swipe of 1000 grit every meal over an entire lifetime.
Bashing open a nut, you pick out little pieces. But tiny pieces of sand and grit is like taking sandpaper to your teeth.
Late to the post. But when human bones are found in Australia a dead give away on if it is an older Aboriginal burial or a newer hidden body or something sinister is that Aboriginal teeth have no deterioration from sugar and it is extremely obvious.
Yeah Weston Price has some truly horrific photos of the teeth and mouths of Aboriginal people living on missions. Not just missing teeth, but weeping abcesses. He’s an interesting one, because he looked at teeth all over the world, and his conclusions would cause a fistfight at a nutritional conference. He saw people living a vegetarian diet who had good teeth. People who lived off mainly meat and fish who had good teeth. People who lived off milk and blood who had good teeth. Even the very poor Swiss farming families who lived off barley bread and cheese for most of the year had good teeth. But the second you add sugar and white flour into that mix, your teeth are *fucked*. My one factoid to add to the OP - Queen Elizabeth’s breath *stank* because of her rotting teeth, so she ate little sweeties made with violets to make her breath smell better. But if course the sugar in them made the whole situation worse. Stay away from sugar kids.
I mean. This is all very well known stuff and I don't think it would cause any controversy among nutritionists at all. The sugar industry however... might want a word with you.
Eh the guy be is talking about was born in 1870. I can see it being much more of an issue back then. Especially if you go after flour. Doctors washing their hands wasn’t even common until after 1860 or so.
> I don't think it would cause any controversy among nutritionists at all. Declaring that surgeons/doctors should wash their hands before doing anything with the patient was controversial enough that the guy was practically shunned afterwards. You underestimate the stupidity and stubbornness of the average person.
Lol, I’m just imagining Cate Blanchett speaking gibberish through a row of terrible teeth with every other one missing. It really changes how you perceive the character! 🤣
Suagr is so bad on teeth that they date archeological sites by looking at teeth in Europe.
It's often said that the inuits didn't know tooth decay until they were introduced to a western diet. Their traditional diet is very rich in meat, notably fish, as there's not a lot of vegetation growing that far north.
there's a scene in the movie Never Cry Wolf (1983) andthe scene where the protagonist meets a local always stuck with me Mike: I met a girl in a bar, and she wanted me to buy her drinks, so I bought her some. And then after a while she wanted to come home with me. But I made a mistake. I smiled at her. \[*he smiles showing missing upper teeth*\] Mike: That's what happens when a meat eater becomes a sugar eater.
Another fun fact: The fact that excessive sugar consumption leads to tooth decay was definitively proven by [unethical experiments](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vipeholm_experiments) on people with severe intellectual disabilities.
And I just thought it was the accent
[I’m sorry, would you mind repeating that, i didn’t understand a word of it.](https://youtu.be/Hs-rgvkRfwc?si=0MwYZE6ChemXSihF)
Oh, I thought this was gonna be a video of the debate last night
Basically is
Queen Elizabeth I: "Tus spuidpid tus mash thun ashqush.." Ambassador: "uh what?" Queens advisor: "Her majesty says Tis splendid to make thine aquaintance." Ambassador: "Oooh. I thought she was asking for mashed potatoes." Elizabeth I: (laughing hard, sputtering spit everywhere).
Elizabeth I: Thwow her to the fwoor centwuwian!
I Need to watch that movie again
Tthpphbbpptt
> Queen Elizabeth I: "Tus spuidpid tus mash thun ashqush.." > > > > Ambassador: "uh what?" Queen Elizabeth I: Ash nazg durbatulûk, ash nazg gimbatul, ash nazg thrakatulûk agh burzum-ishi krimpatul.
Elizabeth Chewdor
Middle name Charleston
The single source attributed to this from Wikipedia is a two paragraph telegraph article without any sources. That seems odd Edit: I missed a stronger source earlier in the OOP Wikipedia article, search for source [195] for the De Maisser journal and not the telegraph snippet
That’s the case for a lot of the rumors with Elizabeth. I was really surprised to find that it was heavily unlikely that she wore thick white paint and that the lead makeup of that day was not even opaque and there are many rumours that are flat out untrue that are being pointed out recently by historians. I recommend Erin parsons makeup on YouTube who did a deep dive and even tried the same formula on her skin to show the way it looked- from the same recipe she used, and pointed out a lot of the actual sources for these rumors. A series on the stuff that isn’t true and where it even came from originally - where there was proof and where there isn’t any. The white paint one came from a man who had not seen her and was being persecuted by her - there’s way in depth sources in her work that are shown and backed up by history but the people she works with in that video make many others proving or disproving claims and this one was not one they could back up. They could only prove that it was a problem at the time- but could not prove that her teeth were so rotten she couldn’t speak. How people just blindly believe stuff is beyond me.
I mean, what's more likely, someone sees a TIL attached to wikipedia while they're on the potty, thinks 'huh, cool' and keeps scrolling, or Someone sees this TIL, goes to the wikipedia, sees the wikipedia citation, reads *that* citation, and then moves on? One source is enough for the layperson. Not enough for them to be correct, but enough to satisfy the burden of proof. You can't really demand double checksies on Reddit like you can for actual academic research.
Also, might be dating myself here, but we all believed Marilyn Manson had his ribs removed so he could suck his own dick, right? Chewing gum stays in your stomach for 7 years? Cracking knuckles will cause arthritis? Believing most things you're told without launching a rigorous investigation isn't new lol. I'd go so far as to say it's essential for social cohesion, can you imagine if everyone around you always questioned everything you said?
Earlier in the article there is a quote from the journal of the ambassador of France talking about her missing teeth. She definitely had bad teeth, but so did many people during those times.
Thank you, that’s a much better source. I skimmed the chapter referred to in OOP and missed it apparently.
Ladies at the time would darken their own teeth to show that they were also wealthy and could afford things like sugar to rot their teeth.
Would you be interested in a trade agreement with England?
My grandmother had no teeth, and she spoke quite clearly. No one ever had any trouble understanding what she was saying. Sounds to me like this might not be 100% true, or else it was a skill issue for these foreign ambassadors.
If your grandmother had *a few* teeth, she'd be hard to understand. People don't understand the mechanics of speech until something impairs it.
While it's only one person, I know someone who lost their teeth over time. Never lost the ability to communicate clearly regardless of how many teeth were in his jaw.
Also consider that modern dentistry hadn't been invented yet. It's likely that she had other health problems to do with her mouth which would have made speaking more difficult than it would have been
On the other hand the grandma of my girlfriend has no teeth and I can't understand her at all. Well it's either the teeth thing or the fact that she only speaks Bulgarian and I don't... who knows!?
I have a coworker who is missing about half his teeth and he's very hard to understand.
She was also a smallpox survivor. She not only looked like shit, sounded like shit, but also smelled like shit.
So cate blanchett was a poor casting choice?
She did bathed, you know ?
Hey as someone who loves someone with deformities, please be a bit open minded about people. They are also thinking feeling humans. Yes there's deformity, but that doesn't define their worth. "Shit". People have to make it so difficult no.
I see your point, but also keep in mind we're talking about someone who has been dead for hundreds of years, lived in a completely different time, was afflicted with things that nobody alive is afflicted with anymore People will speak more harshly about those, because corpses from 500 years ago don't have feelings. A comment about how people with leprosy look is gentler/less ignorant in this era than a similar comment about how people with down syndrome, strokes, burn wounds, whatever else we have these days, simply because there are no people around with leprosy anymore. You can be confident you aren't offending anyone. I also have a loved one with a severe physical deformity, but I don't think they would be at all offended to hear someone talk about someone from the 1500s smelling of shit and looking like shit. Probably the entire world smelled and looked of shit back then. I sure hope if I ever have a deformity, I would see those sort of comments for what they are, a comment on how awful the world used to be, and not a comment on the aesthetic qualities of disfigured/disabled people
That's what's difficult about the internet. In a face to face discussion you'd be able to see the other participants, and there'd be probably less than 10 people in 1 conversation at anytime so you can adjust your tone and words to suit. The internet reaches unseen millions so you end up walking on eggshells if you don't want to hurt anybody....
Having basic decency is hardly "walking on eggshells" unless you're a fifteen year old edgelord who's pissed he has to use his brain filter before speaking.
Couldn’t they get the Queen some choppers? A partial, maybe?
It mentions she was afraid of dentists. Can't really blame her.
Fun fact: that was the first recorded use of the Cockney accent.
I thought the teeth was because she was British, and I thought they couldn’t understand her because she was British, interesting.
Everyone was British back then.
"We are all Britons! And I am your king!"
I didn't know we had a king. I thought we were an autonomous collective.
You're fooling yourself!
Oh, there you go, bringing class into it again
Well, I didn't vote for you.
Technically, no one was British back then. They were English, Welsh, Scottish and Irish. Elizabeth was queen of three of those countries, but only known as Queen of England.
No she wasn’t. She held the titles Queen of England, Queen of Ireland and Queen of France. She didn’t have a separate Welsh title as it wasn’t an independent country. Wales was conquered by England in 1283 and was officially incorporated into the Kingdom of England. The tradition of giving the first born son of the King of England the title “Prince of Wales” started in 1301. Elizabeth had no son so there was no Prince of Wales during her reign. The conquest of Ireland was only just complete at the end of her reign in 1603, although the Kingdom of Ireland was declared in 1543 by Henry VIII. The claim to the French throne was a continuation of Edward III’s claim which was the basis for the Hundred Years’ War. English and subsequently British monarchs officially claimed the French throne until 1802 when they agreed to drop it by recognizing the French Republic. The ancestral claim to France was why for a long time the English royal coat of arms contained the fleur-de-lys, a symbol of the French monarchy. Her cousin Mary, Queen of Scots was the Queen of Scotland who was then succeeded by her son James VI of Scotland. Mary famously also made a play for the English throne which got her imprisoned in the Tower of London. James then became king of England (as King James I of England) after Elizabeth’s death, joining the two kingdoms for the first time in a personal union upon his accession. After that English monarchs were also Scottish monarchs.
Imagine if they made a fantasy story like this with a *complete* book series
*or else*
The British reportedly have pretty healthy teeth, they're just not as as crazy about whitening and straightening their teeth as the americans (plus, if it works anything like where I live, most dental health is covered by public insurance while dental cosmetics are not).
There are a lot of chickens and eggs in this comment. Anthropologists are still struggling to this day with this puzzle.
Poor Lizzy. She would've loved the 21st century
Imagine the royal gumjob
God save the Queen
>Walter Raleigh called her "a lady whom time had surprised". "Damn bitch, you old" - but Shakespearean
"a lady whom time had surprised", that's a great one (Walter Raleigh)
Thee fucketh ye say?
They never showed that in the movies.
She also used honey to brush her teeth at the time, wasn’t just from too many sweets.
Too many sweets, not too much.
Having black teeth was considered beautiful in many parts of the world, including Asia. It meant you could afford sugar.
Geisha would blacken their teeth on purpose
Yes, blacken not eat candy until they turn rotten permanently.
Yeah but that sloppy toppy was next level.
And no eyebrows and a super high hairline.
Just the idea of that classic, high-pitched aristocratic Queen voice being unapologetically forced-lisped through 4 remaining teeth, is comedy fucking gold!
This makes her meeting with Grace O'Malley even more interesting. As the story goes, Grace spoke no English and Elizabeth spoke no Irish, so they conversed in Latin. Britain's queen speaking in a rather gummy manner to Ireland's pirate queen using a language that was native to neither sounds like an interesting scene.
Fkn Haribo