Things I learned lately 10 May

• Travel sites like Booking.com don’t have any issues randomly cancelling bookings so they can relist them at a significantly higher price.
• Before they were called french fries, they were called french frieds. In Quebec anyway.
• Singapore has used land reclamation to increase its available land area by 23% since 1965.
• In Old English, poetry didn’t rhyme. It was all about the alliteration of the words. Rhyming only came into being after Norman influence. 
• While in English we use "oink oink", the French equivalent animal sound for pigs is "groin-groin". Oinque!
• The name "Scotch tape" originated from an accidental insult during the early development of the adhesive tape by 3M. In the 1920s, 3M employee Richard Drew invented a masking tape to help auto painters achieve clean lines between two paint colors. In the initial prototypes, Drew applied only minimal adhesive to the tape to save costs. When a frustrated auto painter saw the tape failing to stick properly, he remarked that Drew was being too "Scotch", referring to the stereotype of Scottish frugality. Even when 3M later perfected the adhesive tape by applying more glue, the name "Scotch tape" had already caught on among the auto painters who used it. 3M decided to embrace the name and marketed it as the "Scotch" brand. 
• Remember Car2Go? It was a car sharing company operated by Mercedes in Canada and other countries. It didn’t fare well, and many folks assumed that car sharing is dead in Canada. It is not. Communauto is a Canadian car sharing company operating in 15 cities and also Paris, France. It has a fleet of over 4,000 vehicles and over 40,000 members.