When you hear the word cheers, you might start to hear the theme song from the iconic NBC sitcom playing in your ear. Cheers was a place where “everybody knows your name.” Each week on Thursday nights, millions tuned in to watch the hijinks of a bunch of beer-drinking Bostonians. The downstairs bar was a favorite for characters Norm Peterson, Cliff Clavin, Frasier Crane, and Lilith Sternin. George Wendt, John Ratzenberger, Kelsey Grammer, and Bebe Neuwirth brought the beloved characters to life. Cheers’ biggest character Ted Danson‘s Sam Malone. During a recent podcast episode of Where Everybody Knows Your Name, Ted said Cheers nearly went on without him. He explained the story to co-hosts Woody Harrelson and Harrison Ford. NBC Apparently Had No Interest in Ted Danson for ‘Cheers’ Ted Danson said NBC didn’t want him on Cheers. “I got blacklisted for ‘Cheers’ from NBC,” Ted recalled. “I mean, A memo to everybody: ‘Don’t hire him.’” The network evidently blamed him for an ill-fated detective drama set in California that didn’t take off the way producers hoped. “We were supposed to be father-daughter detectives in San Francisco, and it just didn’t work,” Ted said. “It sucked, and he blamed me for that, and literally, there was a memo.” Fans loved seeing the men together and sharing stories. “THIS!!! This right here, is probably the most iconic interview I can remember seeing. All 3 icons, all at ease with each other, and Harrison is very loose and genuinely having a ball. What a joy this was. Thank you to all three gentlemen for this,” someone wrote in the YouTube comments. Cheers without Ted Danson simply wouldn’t have been the same. Thankfully, someone had a change of heart. This story’s featured image is by Paul Drinkwater/NBCU Photo Bank/NBCUniversal via Getty Images via Getty Images

Childhood is fleeting, and no one understands that better than teachers. Each year, they welcome a new group of students into their classrooms and mold their minds, hearts, and spirits for an entire school year. Teachers who teach the youngest students, like kindergarten teacher Mr. Lake, see huge transformations from day one to the last day. To make sure he fosters a love of learning, Mr. Lake does some super fun things in his classroom. If you to change your name in kindergarten, he’ll grant your wish for one day. What these students come up with will crack you up. @primarilykindergarten They’re only little for so long… so why not lean into the whimsy? #elementaryteacher #primaryteacher #earlyliteracy ♬ original sound – Mr. Lake Mr. Lake’s Kindergarteners Choose Some Very Unique New Names He posted a now-viral TikTok with one student who very astutely said they wanted to change their name for the day to Jorbee. The pair had to work out the spelling, and it’s easy to see that the kindergartener’s new name really tickled Mr. Lake. As the pair discussed the spelling, the student said they wanted a “bee” at the end so they could become a bee and sting their brother. Mr. Lake never promised that the new kindergarten names would be nice, but he did promise that they would be entertaining. Of course, his followers got a huge kick out of what they saw and absolutely loved seeing this teacher letting kids be kids. “Jorbee is actually so creative,” someone wrote. Another parent claimed their kindergartner wouldn’t have chosen a new name at all. “My daughter would have chosen Noelle. Her name is Noelle. All of her dolls names are Noelle as well,” they joked. Little Jorbee might be a hair diabolical. “The sweet little voice and then the unexpected reasoning at the end,” someone shared. This story’s featured image can be found here

Nearly everyone has suffered from the dreaded flu and can agree that the hacking coughs, achy bones, and sneezing are more than just a tad miserable. The silver lining, if there can be one, is that the flu (and colds in general) brings out some old remedies that some might find rather charming. Even better, some of them may actually work. In a clip from the late 1950s on the BBC Archive Facebook page, a random assortment of men and women are asked for their personal “flu cures.” Their answers ranged from typical homespun ideas like hot tea and plenty of water to more curious alternative remedies. But many were eager to share their personal treatments and seemed sure of their effectiveness. Shot on black-and-white film, British interviewers Fyfe Robertson and Alan Whicker ask people what they do or take when they have the flu. One woman answers, “Well I take Vitamin C and lemon, barley, and whiskey.” The next man agrees that he can “defy the virus” with whiskey and tea, but adds bacon, porridge, and eggs. In fact, quite a few included whiskey in their flu routine. “I’m a great believer in whiskey,” one man proudly shares. “I’m like a Scotch man. I believe in a drop of whiskey, warm, and it sort of kills the germs.” In keeping with the alcohol angle, another Brit answers, “A jolly good hot rum punch. And a jolly good sweat, and stop in bed until it’s all over.” “Elderflower wine,” says an older woman. “If you take a good glassful tonight, and you go to bed, and you sweat it out, you know, and you’re alright in a day or two.” Not everyone used alcohol in their remedies. One woman swaps the whiskey for water: “Rinse your inside out continually with boiled water. About four or five half-pint glasses a day, boiled water.” But then things get interesting. A woman clad in an oversized sweater coat shares this trick: “Well my remedy for the flu is to get a small Spanish onion, chop it up finely, and put some brown sugar over it and a little vinegar. And then when it turns into a syrup, take a spoonful before you go to bed. It’s a very good remedy.” A man, seemingly eager to share his mother’s recipe, steps in: “Well my mother recommends an old sweaty sock with salt right round your throat. A good pullover and a good hot water bottle. Sweat it out.” Now things take a turn for the more unique. “There is a good cure in mustard and lard,” one woman says. “And you rub the two well together and get a good blend. I don’t know how to do it, but my father does.” After the interviewer asks if one should eat it or rub it on one’s chest, she clarifies: “Rub it on your chest, on the front and the back, and it’s a good cure.” Just when it seemed that possibly “mustard and lard” were the most interesting answers, the woman next to her takes the cake: “Goose grease. You can rub that on your chest. You know, after you’ve been cooking the goose, then keep the grease and run it on your chest.” This next idea is a bit complicated, but it also involves goose grease: “A large piece of brown paper and cut it to go under the arms and you warm it first, and get hot warm goose grease and then spread mustard over the brown paper first. Get warm goose grease, which most people have got in the house. You spread it over the mustard on the paper to avoid burning of the skin. And should inflammation be setting in, as the doctor says does sometimes, you boil the elderflower and give the patient a dose of elderflower water.” Understandably, the reporter pushes back: “But then do you go to bed with this brown paper? Don’t you find it a bit messy?” She answers with a resounding yes, adding, “And the goose grease avoids it from burning.” And just when it seems like someone is going back to a more popular cure, it takes a turn: “I take a nice big tumbler full of hot lemonade. Put in about three teaspoons full of rum. Two aspirin. Get into bed and cover myself well. Tie the stocking that I’ve been wearing around my feet. One of them around my throat with a safety pin, and stay in bed and sweat it out.” Finally, a younger gentleman is asked his “best way to cure the flu.” His answer is rather philosophical: “Well, just think that you haven’t got it.” He adds a few other ideas about onions and then shocks the interviewer with this final thought: “I’ve still got it now, and I’m about.” “You’ve got the flu now, have ya?” the interviewer asks. “Well in that case, I won’t keep you another minute.” Reactions Just this clip has 35,000 likes and over a thousand comments. And perhaps not super surprisingly, many Facebook users back up the remedy claims: “After all, where do people think ‘medicine’ comes from? My Hungarian grandfather would eat raw garlic if he felt under the weather. Drank tea daily with a little red wine in it. Lived to be 101.” “Whiskey and stinky socks are to men as goose grease and mustard are to women.” “How Alan Wicker (sic) kept a straight face to these people being interviewed is amazing.” Putting some of these cures to the test Onions According to the National Library of Medicine, onions do in fact contain antibacterial properties: “Onion skin possesses various health benefits due to its phenolic and antimicrobial components.” Time published an entire piece called “Medicine: The Healing Onion,” where they discuss the roots of this theory: “The onion, at one time or another, has been enthusiastically recommended as a remedy for colds in the head and worms in the intestines. For centuries, the onion’s medicinal value has been praised by witch doctors, old wives, and bartenders. Rome’s Pliny the Elder listed the onion as a cure for 28 diseases. Early New England settlers believed that the onion would prevent fits; Neapolitans of the Middle Ages thought it averted the evil eye. A 16th Century French surgeon, Ambroise Parè, used it instead of ointment to heal powder burns.” While they have more recently found that the onion itself doesn’t create health benefits, cutting the onion actually does, according to Time: “Food Chemist Edward F. Kohman has found that the active chemical agent in onions is a thioaldehyde, a close relative of the common antiseptic, formaldehyde. Chemist Kohman put raw onions through an ordinary household meat grinder, distilled the onion vapors, put them through a series of chemical tests. In a recent issue of Science, he reported finding about 1/20 of a gram of thioaldehyde in a pound of raw onions. The germ-killing thioaldehyde, Kohman said last week, probably does not exist as such in the onion. More likely, it is produced by the complicated enzyme activity that goes on in the onion when it is cut. Cooking would eliminate it completely; a boiled onion is no more good for a cold than a boiled turnip. But chewing a raw onion might help a cold (it would undoubtedly prevent the spread of colds by keeping non-onion eaters away from the cold sufferer).” Socks Healthline put the socks theory to the test: “Although no clinical research supports their claims, advocates of wearing wet socks to bed to cure a cold are convinced that the practice is effective. Here’s their explanation: When your feet begin to cool, the blood vessels in your feet contract, sending good nutrients to your tissues and organs. Then, when your feet begin to warm up, the blood vessels dilate, which releases the toxins in the tissue. The technique most recommended includes two pairs of socks: one pair of thin cotton socks and one pair of heavy wool socks.” And while they can’t claim it works completely, they note that many believe it does, which can be enough: “There’s no scientific evidence that wearing wet socks to bed will cure your cold. But there’s anecdotal evidence. One explanation for people believing that it works could be the placebo effect.” Whiskey and other alcohol Since so many mentioned whiskey (and rum), we took a look at that claim too. Sad news: this one appears to be nothing but a myth. Again, turning to Healthline, they take the claims step by step to debunk them. Some believe that because alcohol is a “disinfectant,” it should help kill viruses and bacteria: “It’s true that alcohol is a key component of hand sanitizers, which help kill germs that you may pick up when you touch contaminated surfaces. However, alcohol is only effective as a topical disinfectant. In other words, it works on the surface of your skin, but not as a disinfectant when you drink it. This means alcohol doesn’t help kill cold viruses or other germs inside your body.” In fact, though many believe it helps open up the sinuses, it’s not accurate. “Alcohol is rumored to work as a decongestant, but actually, the reverse is true,” the Healthline article noted. “Small amounts of alcohol can cause vasodilation — a widening of blood vessels — which can worsen a runny nose or congestion. Medicines with pseudoephedrine will tighten blood vessels (vasoconstrict), which is why they can help relieve congestion.” This doesn’t stop people from sharing their flu-fighting whiskey recipes. Perhaps these, too, create a placebo effect. At least they might be more fun than wet socks. The post Brits give some hilariously unique homespun flu remedies in resurfaced footage from the 1950s appeared first on Upworthy.

Ever heard of “highway hypnosis”? If you never went over it in American Driver’s Ed, it’s the phenomenon during which we tend to zone out while driving on long, repetitive stretches of highway or on routes we’ve taken a thousand times. It’s that feeling of pulling into your driveway and having very little recollection of actually getting there. Suffice it to say, going into pure autopilot mode on the road isn’t ideal. It’s not safe, and we tend to ignore important signage, like speed limits. One high-traffic area in Wisconsin just debuted a new, eye-catching speed limit The Outagamie County Recycling and Solid Waste facility in Appleton gets a lot of through-traffic. Big trucks, commercial haulers, and plenty of civilian cars make their way through the facility on any given day. Keeping a low posted speed limit helps keep everyone safe. Usually, in places like this, you’d see speed limits of 15, 10, or even 5 miles per hour. Outagamie County went in a slightly more offbeat direction: 17.3 mph. No, it’s not a typo. See for yourself: View this post on Instagram 17.3 mph: Not a typo, not a joke The sign isn’t just for laughs. It’s not a temporary fixture meant to get a few likes on social media or encourage people to stop for photo ops. Its purpose is far more important: to get people to pay attention. The unusual number causes people to do a double-take. Instead of eyes glazing over at yet another 15 mph limit, the 17.3 sticks out like a sore thumb and makes drivers’ brains perk up—and hopefully, their feet ease off the gas. Kraig Van Groll, the site’s solid waste superintendent, said the sign is working, per Supercar Blondie: “We’ve definitely seen positive engagement and behavior changes across the site. That includes residents using the site daily, people visiting on tours, and commercial users operating here regularly. If nothing else, it’s really opened the door for more conversations around overall site safety and awareness for all users of the site.” Jordan Hiller, recycling and solid waste program coordinator, told WBAY-TV that the sign has caused a bit of an “uproar” on social media—in a good way. People get a kick out of it, and it has ultimately done its job: drawing more attention to road safety around the facility. Not just Wisconsin: Odd speed limits are becoming more common While major roads and highways will probably stick with nice, round speed limits, smaller areas—shopping centers, parking lots, private facilities—are turning more and more to eye-catching numbers like Outagamie’s 17.3. A shopping center in Colorado Springs, Colorado, features an 8.2 mph speed limit: This speed limit sign I saw in a parking lot which is exactly 8.2 miles per hour. byu/SackJnyder inmildlyinteresting Another user on Reddit spotted an 18 mph speed limit: An oddly specific speed limit I came across byu/dhruchainzz inmildlyinteresting Some areas are resorting to even more unusual and eye-popping methods, with speed limits that include fractions. This one was featured on Denver local news: a parking lot with an official posted speed of 6 and 7/8 mph: Safety officials have all kinds of methods to try to keep distracted drivers focused The science of being behind the wheel is fascinating and often studied. Tons of experiments and studies were conducted on how to get drivers to slow down in certain areas before we came up with radar signs that tell drivers their speed in real time, for example. That visual feedback has been shown to be effective at reducing speeds. Roads in America are also full of speed bumps, rumble strips, and reflectors designed to break drivers’ autopilot patterns. It’s part psychology and part neuroscience; a big reason we slip into autopilot mode, or highway hypnosis, has to do with the way our brain waves work. According to Radar Sign, “Shifting a driver from a Theta ‘autopilot’ state to a Beta ‘engaged’ state requires a trigger, identified by the Reticular Activator (RA), responsible for categorizing sensory input.” Simply put, one of the best ways to keep drivers safe on the road is to present them with something unusual: an input that disrupts the expected pattern. It could be a radar sign, a strip in the road that causes your tires to gently buzz, or now, a speed limit sign so bizarre you can’t help but look twice. The post 23, 11, 17.3: Why oddly numbered speed limit signs are on the rise everywhere appeared first on Upworthy.

As the world evolves, so does the English language, which has nearly one million words, per Merriam-Webster. And they are being added all the time. (Although some words nearly go extinct.) From newly formed generational slang words created by Gen Z and Gen Alpha to technology that continues to change the world and the objects in it, there is a term that allows English to “keep up with the times”: retronyms. What is a retronym? Retronyms are a relatively new vocabulary term. The word was first used in 1980, according to Merriam-Webster. It was coined by writer William Safire, who used “retronym” for the first time in his “On Language” column in The New York Times about Frank Mankiewicz, then the president of National Public Radio. According to Merriam-Webster, a retronym is defined as “a term (such as analog watch, film camera, or snail mail) that is newly created and adopted to distinguish the original or older version, form, or example of something (such as a product) from other, more recent versions, forms, or examples.” Cameras are a great example of retronyms in use. “Remember way back when cameras used film? Back then, such devices were simply called cameras; they weren’t specifically called film cameras until they needed to be distinguished from the digital cameras that came later,” Merriam-Webster added. View this post on Instagram How retronyms are formed Linguist Adam Aleksic broke down how retronyms are created in a helpful video. “A retronym is a new name given to an old thing to help differentiate it from a recent invention,” he said. “Like the way we use ‘acoustic’ guitar to differentiate from ‘electric’ guitar, even though ‘acoustic’ guitars use to just be ‘guitars’ because there were no ‘electric’ guitars.” He offers a few more examples: “Or when you have to say ‘analog’ watch to specify that what used to actually just be a regular watch is not in fact digital. That’s why ‘World War I’ is no longer ‘The Great War.’ We had to make a retronym for it once we had a second Great War. If you put ‘whole milk’ in ‘regular coffee,’ those are both retronyms because we’ve since invented things like ‘almond milk’ and ‘decaf coffee.'” Aleksic explains that geography also has retronyms: “The ‘East Indies’ used to just be the ‘Indies’ until Columbus rediscovered the ‘West Indies.’ And ‘Baja California’ used to just be ‘California’ until the Spaniards sailed a little further north and named what we now think of as ‘California.’ The ‘Continental U.S.’ was just the ‘U.S.’ until we added a few states.” Finally, he explains another type of retronym: one that is a reduplication of an original word. “If I want the ‘regular salad’ and not the ‘tuna salad,’ I can ask you to pass the ‘salad salad’ and you’ll know what I mean,” he said. @jesszafarris On retronyms! #etymology #wordplay #wordorigins #history #educationtiktok #technology #english #language ♬ original sound – Jess Zafarris | Author Examples of retronyms The words below are a helpful list of retronyms: British English (distinguished from American English, Australian English, Indian English, etc.) Outdoor rock climbing (distinguished from indoor rock climbing) Acoustic guitar (distinguished from electric guitar) Cloth diaper (distinguished from paper diapers and disposable diapers) Manual typewriter (distinguished from electric typewriter) Scripted show (distinguished from reality show) Rotary phone (distinguished from touch-tone phones and landline phones) Combustible cigarette (distinguished from electronic cigarettes, e-cigarettes, etc.) Whole milk (distinguished from skim milk, 2% milk, etc.) Corn on the cob (distinguished from corn cut off the cob) Live music (distinguished from recorded music) Silent film (distinguished from sound films and talkies) Brick-and-mortar store (distinguished from online stores) Bar soap (distinguished from liquid soap and body wash) Old World (distinguished from New World) Analog watch (distinguished from digital watch) Film camera (distinguished from digital cameras, instant cameras, etc.) Snail mail (distinguished from email, etc.) The post From ‘acoustic guitar’ to ‘landline phone’: 18 retronyms that reveal how English evolves across eras appeared first on Upworthy.