"Early School Rules"

Now be honest. How many of you pulled these kinds of pranks when you were kids?

Early School Rules of etiquette from around 1900:

"Neither boys nor girls must wink at one another. Boys shall not carry any girls in their arms or on their backs unless heavy rains or mush ice have made the creeks and branches impossible to cross. No hugging, squeezing, or kissing shall take place while the girl is being transported across the water...Don't pretend to see ghosts in an effort to frighten younger pupils...You shall not go in swimming naked within 200 yards of the schoolhouse...You shall not bring to school any hawk's claw for use in pinching the ears and noses of others...Do not put any dead pigs, polecats or other dead animals in the schoolhouse loft to create a stink...You shall not argue hotly as to whether the earth is round or flat".

North Carolina Mountain Folklore (1972)

"Philomathic"

which means having a love of letters. And what better way to celebrate letters than to talk about the history of Scrabble.

On April 4, 1993, the inventor of the board game Scrabble died. Alfred Mosher Butts was born in 1899 and "while unemployed during the depression, he surveyed the English language as found on the front page of the New York Times, determining the frequency with which letters were used. From this he gave each a value-the commonest being worth one point and the least common, Q and Z, worth ten-which was used for scoring. First dubbed Lexiko and later Criss Cross Words, his game was played beginning in 1938, but no manufacturer showed interest in mass-producing it. His wife, Nina, once amazed him by scoring 214 points with quixotic. Butts eventually put his game aside before selling it outright to entrepreneur James Brunot. In 1948 Brunot renamed it Scrabble, (from Dutch schrabben, to scrape or scratch) and set up a Scrabble factory in an abandoned schoolhouse in Dodgington, Connecticut. Since then, over a hundred million sets have been sold, and more than a million are still sold each year".

Forgotten English