In Hawaii, it was
forbidden -- kapu -- for men and women to eat together…. Breaking a kapu was a
crime, often punishable by death.
By 1826 a committee
of Mikanele and Native Hawaiians got together and voted B, D, R, T, and V out
of the alphabet, leaving us with a modern Hawaiian alphabet of twelve letters
A, E, I, O, U, H, P, L, K, M, N, W.
Harvard did not drop
compulsory Hebrew for all students until 1755.
Until the first
petroleum well was drilled in Pennsylvania in 1859, whale oil was oil.
Processing a whale
takes a couple of days and "could yield up to 2,000 gallons of oil".
A Hawaiian word can
have so many meanings and associations that each noun becomes a portal into
stories and beliefs, like how the word for wealth, waiwai, is just the word for
water spoken twice.
Among the high
chiefs, the nineteenth-century death rate was as high as the birth rate was
low.
