U.S. Secretary of State

Claim: As a teenager, U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell learned to speak Yiddish while working in a Jewish-owned baby equipment store in New York.

Status: True.

Example: [Collected on the Internet, 2001]

Unlike today's vista of decrepit buildings, dilapidated housing and rusting junked cars, the South Bronx in 1950 was the home of a large and thriving community, one that was predominantly Jewish. Today a mere remnant of this once-vibrant community survives, but in the 1950's the Bronx offered synagogues, mikvahs, kosher bakeries, and kosher butchers — all the comforts one would expect from a traditional Jewish community.

The baby boom of the post-war years happily resulted in many new young parents. As a matter of course, the South Bronx had its own baby equipment store. Sickser's was located on the corner of Westchester and Fox, and specialized in "everything for the baby," as its slogan ran. The inventory began with cribs, baby carriages, playpens, high chairs, changing tables, and toys.

Mr. Sickser, assisted by his son-in-law Lou Kirshner, ran a profitable business out of the needs of the rapidly-expanding child population. The language of the store was primarily Yiddish, but Sickser's was a place where not only Jewish families but also many non-Jewish ones could acquire the necessary paraphernalia for their newly-arrived bundles of joy.

Business was particularly busy one spring day, so much so that Mr. Sickser and his son-in-law could not handle the unexpected throng of customers. Desperate for help, Mr. Sickser ran out of the store and stopped the first youth he spotted on the street.

"Young man," he panted, "how would you like to make a little extra money? I need some help in the store. You want to work a little?"

The tall, lanky African-American boy flashed a toothy smile back. "Yes, sir, I'd like some work."

"Well then, let's get started." The boy followed his new employer into the store.

Mr. Sickser was immediately impressed with the boy's good manners and demeanor. As the days went by and he came again and again to lend his help, Mr. Sickser became increasingly impressed with the youth's diligence, punctuality and readiness to learn. Eventually Mr. Sickser made him a regular employee at the store. It was gratifying to find an employee with an almost soldier-like willingness to perform even the most menial of tasks, and to perform them well.

From the age of 13 until his sophomore year in college, the young man put in from 12-15 hours a week, at 50 to 75 cents an hour. Mostly, he performed general labor: assembling merchandise, unloading trucks and preparing items for shipments. He seemed, in his quiet way, to appreciate not only the steady employment but the friendly atmosphere Mr. Sickser's store offered. Mr. Sickser learned in time about their helper's Jamaican origins, and he in turn picked up a good deal of Yiddish. In time young Colin was able to converse fairly well with his employers, and more importantly, with a number of the Jewish customers whose English was not fluent.

At the age of 17, the young man, while still working part-time at Sickser's, began his first semester at City College of New York. He fit in just fine with his, for the most part Jewish, classmates — hardly surprising, considering that he already knew their ways and their language. But the heavy studying in the engineering and later geology courses he chose proved quite challenging. Colin would later recall that Sickser's offered the one stable point in his life those days.

After signing up for an ROTC program and serving two tours of duty in Vietnam, the young man quickly rose to the top ranks of the U.S. military. In 1989, under President George Bush, Colin Powell was sworn in as the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

In 1993, two years after he guided the American victory over Iraq in the Gulf War, Colin Powell visited the Holy Land. Upon meeting Israel's Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir in Jerusalem, he greeted the Israeli with the words Men kent reden Yiddish — "We can speak Yiddish."

As Shamir, stunned, tried to pull himself together, Colin Powell -- now U.S. Secretary of State — continued chatting in his second-favorite language. He had never forgotten his early days in the Bronx.1

Origins: The piece quoted above is an excerpt from the book The Monsey-Kiryat Sefer Express by Zev Roth and is generally accurate in its details: Colin L. Powell was born to Jamaican immigrants living in Harlem in 1937; the family later moved to a largely Jewish neighborhood in the Bronx, where Powell picked up some proficiency in Yiddish from his neighbors and through working at Sickser's baby equipment store in his teenage years. After graduating from City College of New York, Powell entered the military, eventually rising to the rank of 4-star general, serving as Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff during Operation Desert Storm, and being appointed to the cabinet position of U.S. Secretary of State under President George W. Bush.

If there is any nit to be picked here, it's that this piece leaves many readers with an exaggerated impression of Powell's fluency in Yiddish. Most other sources — including Powell himself — speak of him (nowadays, at least) as having a passing knowledge of the language at best. For example, the New York Daily News noted in a 2000 article about Gen. Powell that he had picked up a "smattering" of Yiddish in his teenage years:
Fourteen-year-old Colin Powell slipped off his jacket and went right to work. He kept working at Sickser's through his teens, earning 75 cents an hour and picking up a smattering of Yiddish with which he often surprised people after he became the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.2
A few months after Powell was named the 12th Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff in October 1989, a New York Newsday article described him as capable of "sprinkling" his conversation with Yiddish when addressing Jewish officials:
As a boy whose friends and employers at the furniture store were Jewish, Powell picked up a smattering of Yiddish. Vice Adm. John A. Baldwin, an Annapolis graduate who worked closely with Powell a decade ago when they were Pentagon aides, recalls that he was kiddingly nicknamed "the black Jew." When it seemed to suit the moment in dealing with Jewish civilian officials at the Pentagon, Baldwin said, Powell sprinkled his language with Yiddish.3
In 1995, after an 88-year-old New Jersey man created a fake interview with Gen. Powell as if it were conducted entirely in Yiddish and posted it to a Yiddish-English mailing list, fooling many within the Yiddish-speaking community into believing that Powell was fluent in Yiddish, Powell's spokesperson confirmed that he knew a "little" of the language:
A spokesman for Mr. Powell said he hadn't heard about the spoof but confirmed that Gen. Powell does speak a little Yiddish.4
Powell himself was quoted as saying much the same thing during an American Israel Public Affairs Committee conference in 2001:
When Colin Powell took to the stage at the American Israel Public Affairs Committee conference in Washington last month, he made it clear that he believed he was among friends. He had even been rumoured to be fluent in Yiddish. "Well, yes, I do understand a bissel" (i.e., "a little"), he said to laughter.5
Regardless, even if Powell knows but a few words of Yiddish, it's one more admirable facet of a man who has led a varied and distinguished life in the service of his country.

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Diet Coke - Diet Pepsi

Claim: Diet Coke and/or Diet Pepsi contain more calories than claimed, but their manufacturers get away with the deception by paying a yearly fine.

Status: False.

Examples:

[Collected on the Internet, 2003]

There was an old rumour that stated that a particular diet soda company (Coke I believe) paid a fine to print their cans as stating that the soda had 'just one calorie'. According to the rumour, companies who knowingly printed misinformation on the nutritional facts of their product would have to pay a fine. The company in question figured it could make more money by convincing people the product only had 1 calorie than it would cost to pay the fine, meaning a higher profit margin for them.

[Collected on the Internet, 2002]

I heard a rumor today that Diet Coke actually contains 40 calories, and the Coca-Cola company pays a huge fine to the FDA every year to keep "0 calories" on the can. Have you heard anything of this?

[Collected on the Internet, 2004]

Comment: Is it true that Pepsi One is really not one calorie and that Pepsi Co. pays a fine every year for false advertising (because the calorie count is a lot higher than that)?

Origins: How long this particular belief has been around is anyone's guess, but we have recorded sightings of it dating back to 1990. We've encountered claims of Diet Coke, Diet Pepsi, or Pepsi One (which are listed as containing zero, zero, and one calories per 12-oz. can, respectively) actually containing 25, 50, 70, or 90 calories, in each case with the parent company's paying an annual fine to continue falsely listing the beverage's caloric content. (A can of non-diet cola typically contains about 100 calories.) The rumor associates most strongly with Diet Coke (which is known as Coca-Cola Light outside the U.S., Canada, Australia, and Great Britain).

In the U.S., laws governing the disclosure of nutritional and caloric content of ingestibles prevent the rumor from being true. The Federal Trade Commission serves as the watchdog in this area — under the Federal Trade Commission Act, it is empowered to "prevent persons, partnerships, or corporations" from using "unfair methods of competition in or affecting commerce, and unfair or deceptive acts or practices in or affecting commerce." At various times in its history it has fined corporations for their having made false or misleading nutritional claims about their products. Such fines are a reaction to what has already taken place; they are not grants of immunity against continued breaking of the rules. Consumers have legal remedy available to them against corporations that have deceived them through certain provisions of the Lanham Act. Many other countries have similar safeguards in place.

Common sense should also serve to rule out what the whispers say about an annual payoff. For health reasons, many potential consumers of diet drinks have to carefully monitor what they ingest. Were the rumor true, diabetics with a love of Diet Coke, for instance, would experience glucose levels spiralling out of control — imagine the lawsuits resulting from that!

This false belief enjoys a measure of popularity because of what it says about common perception of large companies and of the government agencies tasked with shielding consumers from harm: that one will bamboozle its customers for the sake of financial profit, the other will sell out those it is mandated to protect, and neither is to be trusted. Such misgivings also find voice in other rumors, such as the one about bananas imported from Costa Rica being infected with a flesh-eating bacteria.

If there is the tiniest bit of truth to this rumor, it's that even though sodas such as Diet Coke and Diet Pepsi are advertised as having zero calories, they do have some caloric content from ingredients such as artificial sweeteners, citric acid, and caramel coloring. However, the number of calories per can is still less than one, and FDA regulations allow any food product that contains fewer than five calories per serving to be advertised as calorie-free.

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English language

... end with '-gry.

Claim: Three common words in the English language end with '-gry.'

Status: False.

Example:

A RIDDLE THAT'LL KILL YOUR BRAIN!

This is going to make you so MAD!

There are three words in the English language that end in 'gry'. One is 'angry' and the other is 'hungry.' Everyone knows what the third one means, and what it stands for. Everyone uses them every day and, if you listened very carefully, I've given you the third word.

What is it?

Origins: This puzzler may indeed "KILL YOUR BRAIN!" and "make you so MAD!" — it certainly has left plenty of victims racking their brains and scratching their heads in decades past. If you don't already know the answer to this one, let us help you preserve your sanity and whatever gray matter you may have left by telling you . . . there is no answer. Other than 'hungry' and 'angry,' there is no English word ending with the letters 'gry' which the average native speaker of English would recognize, much less "use every day" (and certainly none which a teller of this riddle could claim to have "already given you").

All other words ending in 'gry' which one might find in even the most comprehensive English dictionary are either archaic terms or obsolete variant spellings, such as:

* aggry: variegated glass beads of ancient manufacture, mentioned by various 19th-century writers as having been found buried in parts of Africa.

* begry: an obsolete 15th-century spelling of the word 'beggary' (i.e., extreme poverty).

* conyngry: an obsolete 17th-century spelling of the even more obsolete word 'conynger' (like 'cunningaire' and 'conygarth,' a term meaning 'rabbit warren').

* gry: a unit of measurement proposed by English philosopher John Locke in his 1690 "Essay Concerning Human Understanding."

* higry-pigry: a corruption (along with 'hickery-pickery' and 'hicra picra') of the Greek 'hiera picra' (approximately 'sacred bitters'), a term for many medicines in the Greek pharmacopoeia, particularly a purgative drug composed of aloes and canella bark.

* iggry: an early 20th century British army slang borrowing from the Arabic 'ijri, meaning 'Hurry up!"

* meagry: a rare and obsolete early 17th-century variant meaning 'meager-looking.'

* menagry: obsolete 18th-century alternate spelling of 'menagerie.'

* nangry: a rare and obsolete 17th-century variant of 'angry.'

* podagry: a 17th-century variant spelling of 'podagra,' a medical lexicon term for 'gout.'

* puggry: a 19th-century alternate spelling of 'puggaree' or 'puggree,' derived from the Hindi 'pagri,' a word for a light turban or head covering worn in India.

* skugry: a 16th-century variant spelling of 'scuggery,' meaning 'concealment' or 'secrecy.'

So, what's the point to this puzzler if it has no answer? Some people maintain that is the point: the question was deliberately conceived as an irritating brain-teaser with no correct answer. The roundabout phrasing of the question suggests otherwise, however — more likely it was designed as a trick question rather than a trivia question, perhaps one whose wording has been corrupted over time or whose gimmick was only apparent when the question was delivered orally.

The most common guess is that this riddle is indeed a trick question, but the point of the trick has been lost through the rearrangement of the riddle's wording as it has been passed along through the years. Consider an alternate version of this puzzler:
Think of words ending in -GRY. Angry and hungry are two of them. There are only three words in the English language. What is the third word? The word is something that everyone uses every day. If you have listened carefully, I have already told you what it is.
This version supports the theory that the first two sentences are red herrings; the catch is that the teller is literally asking you to identify the third word of the phrase "the English language" — there are only three words in the phrase "the English language," the third word ("language") describes something that one uses every day, and "language" is indeed a word which the teller has "already told you." This explanation also supports the contention that this riddle was meant to be presented orally, because a properly punctuated written version would make the gimmick too obvious:
Think of words ending in -GRY. "Angry" and "hungry" are two of them. There are only three words in "the English language." What is the third word? The word is something that everyone uses every day. If you have listened carefully, I have already told you what it is.
Another hypothesis is that the current form of the riddle is a corruption of a yet another version, one which must also be delivered orally for its gimmick to make sense:
There are at least three words in the English language that end in g or y. One of them is "hungry" and another is "angry." There is a third word, a short one, which you probably say every day. If you listened carefully to everything I say, you just heard me say it. What is it?
The catch here is that by offering the examples of "hungry" and "angry," the teller misleads the listener into thinking he's asking for a word ending in "GRY" when he's really asking for a word ending in "G or Y." The correct answer in this case is "say," a short word ending in "y" which the teller had pronounced three times in the course of presenting the riddle.

Some people think this puzzler's ability to continue stumping so many people over the years makes it one of the greatest riddles ever. We disagry.

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Being an only child

Claim: Being an only child (or an only son) automatically exempts you from military service.

Status: False.

Example: [Collected on the Internet, 2001]

As an only son, I have heard a few times before that there is an "only son clause" law with the military. Meaning that since I am an only son, I cannot be drafted for war. Is this true?

Origins: The belief that being the only child (or the only male child) in a family exempts one from compulsory military service is a widespread but erroneous belief, a misunderstanding of Select Service rules enacted after World War II.

Popular fact-based World War II films such as The Fighting Sullivans and Saving Private Ryan have dramatized cases where several brothers from the same family were all killed in action. The Fighting Sullivans recounts the true story of the Sullivan brothers, all five of whom died when the ship to which they were assigned, the USS Juneau, was sunk by a Japanese torpedo during the Battle of Guadalcanal on 13 November 1942. Saving Private Ryan tells a fictionalized story based on the real experience of Sgt. Fritz Niland of the 101st Airborne, who was removed from a combat zone in France and sent home by the Army after all three of his brothers were killed in action during the same week in June 1944.

In 1948, in order to safeguard the only remaining sons of families that had lost other children during World War II, the United States passed a law that exempted sole surviving sons from the draft. This exemption applied only when one or more children (sons or daughters) from the family had already died or been killed during military service. In 1964 this law was modified to extend the exemption to sons who were the only surviving male offspring of fathers who had died as a result of military service, and at the same time the exemption was altered to apply only to peacetime drafts. This law was modified again in 1971 to extend the exemption to any son (not necessarily the only surviving son) whose father or brother (or sister) had died in military service.

So, to clear up the misunderstandings, note that:

* You are not exempt from military service simply because you are an only child or an only son. You are exempt only if one of your siblings or parents (mothers are now included as well) has died as a result of military service.

* You do not have to be a sole remaining son to meet this requirement - the exemption applies to all remaining sons from qualified families.

* This exemption is not in effect during wartime.

(Although all American men are required to register with the Selective Service upon turning 18, the U.S. does not currently have a peacetime draft, having converted to an all-volunteer military in 1973. Whether a draft held while U.S. forces were engaged in military action but war had not officially been declared - as in the current situation - would be considered a "peacetime" draft or a "wartime" draft is debatable; our query to the Selective Service received only the circular answer that since no draft is in effect at this time, we are considered to be at peace.)

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Fact or Fiction

Now this you wont see everyday...read on...

Claim: A policeman promised a waitress half the winnings from his lottery ticket. All the numbers came up, and he kept his word by sharing the jackpot with her.

Status: True.

Origins: Not just the fanciful plot of the Nicolas Cage movie It Could Happen To You, this did happen to one lucky Yonkers plate-slinger back in 1984.

Phyllis Penzo was a waitress at Sal's Pizzeria in Yonkers, New York, for twenty-four years. During that long tenure, she saw nice customers, difficult customers, generous tippers, and skinflints. But Robert Cunningham, a police detective from nearby Dobbs Ferry, was in a class by himself. Cunningham gave Penzo a tip of $142,857.50 a year for twenty years.

Cunningham, a thirty-year police veteran, was a regular diner at Sal's, where he liked to order linguine with clam sauce and maintain a steady flow of banter with Penzo, other employees, and regular customers. True to his lighthearted style, Cunningham was making a sort of joke on Friday evening, March 30, 1984, when he offered his favorite waitress an unusual tip: a half-interest in a lottery ticket. Each picked three of the six numbers; Cunningham walked across the street and bought their ticket.

Penzo laughed, then forgot the incident until the next night, when the detective walked into Sal's Pizzeria after work with the winning ticket triumphantly clutched in his hand. It was worth six million dollars: three million for each of them. Cunningham, who ordinarily might have left a couple of dollars on the restaurant table, had no regrets about splitting the prize. After all, he says, Penzo helped pick the winning numbers.

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Fact or Fiction - HIV-positive

Claim: When the Red Cross conducted a volunteer blood drive at a local high school recently, they uncovered a shocking truth: 20% of the student donors were HIV-positive.

Status: False.

Example: [Collected by Royko, 1992]

A volunteer blood drive was held at the Conant High School. It was for senior students only. Blood was given by 317 seniors. The blood has since been tested, and 61 tested positive for the HIV virus.

Origins: The rumor of a large number of HIV-positive high school kids having being discovered through the Red Cross' rejection of their blood has been with us since at least 1987, and it has moved around the country at will, attaching itself to whichever high school just hosted a blood drive.

Though its venue changes, the story remains the same — some horrific number of fresh-faced youngsters are discovered to be living under a death sentence. The infected percentage of the student body varies from 10 to 82 depending on who is doing the telling, with 12% (1 in 8) and 20% (1 in 5) the clear front runners.

For example (the legend is certainly not limited to these communities), the rumor has raced through Chicago (1992, 20% of the students in one particular high school), Los Angeles (1992, 12%), Dubuque (1996, "dozens of students"), Kansas City (1996, 15%), Orlando (1992, "dozens"), Seattle (1992, 15%), St. Petersburg (1991, 20%), Orange County, CA (1987, 14%), Sonoma County, CA (82%, 2001).

What's the real story here? The American Red Cross began testing blood for HIV in 1985. By 1996 there had been 28 donors confirmed as HIV-positive, out of 1.65 million blood donations nationwide. Only one of those infected was a high school student. End of story.

The use of specific numbers in the claim lends the dire tidings more authority, yet they are still hogwash. For instance, with regard to the rumor we quote as our example (Conant High School, blood drawn from 317 seniors, 61 tested positive for HIV), we know the real numbers for that school's blood drive: 125 students and 37 faculty members gave blood, and not one of them was HIV-positive.

In 1992 in the small Texas town of Bogata, a health worker's announcement that she knew of six cases of AIDS at the small (197 students) Rivercrest High School appeared to confirm the rumor. Dona Atkins (then Dona Spence), a case manager at Ark-Tex Council of Governments, a regional planning agency, said each of the teens came to her for counselling. She never named names or produced the teens but always stood by her story. On the other hand, no confirmation of what she asserted ever emerged, no infected teenagers came forward, none subsequently sickened and died, and the Texas Department of Health reported that its investigation could find no basis for her claims. Moreover, she'd been caught telling untruths before, stating she'd served as an Army nurse for 17 years, including in Vietnam, yet military records showed she wasn't a registered nurse in Texas or California and had two short stints in the military, neither of which were in Vietnam. She would have had a motive for telling a false story; her husband had contracted AIDS from a blood transfusion, and his illness and subsequent demise in 1989 had moved her to speak to teenagers and the community about AIDS prevention. It is not unknown for those who feel their important messages aren't being heard clearly enough to personalize the dangers they warn against by inventing especially tragic victims whose stories they can use to drive home the validity of their admonishments.

The heightened sense of awareness among teenagers that AIDS is a real possibility in their lives probably lies at the bottom of this rumor. It is known that HIV is discovered through blood tests, and that the Red Cross runs such tests on all the blood donations it collects. Teen fear plus a blood drive makes this rumor a natural to sweep through a school once the Bloodmobile has driven off down the street.

Fears are also likely fed by the sight of school chums being told they can't donate blood. Though potential donors are turned away if they are not feeling well, have slightly elevated temperatures, demonstrate low red cell counts, have recently weathered fevers or colds, have gotten tattoos in the last year, or if it has not been the required 56 days since they last gave blood, none of those explanations are likely to occur to the students who notice that buddies who went to give blood afterwards lack the telltale bandages on their arms. The rumor of the turn-downs being due to AIDS is a tantalizing scenario likely to be spread by impressionable high schoolers. Yet, though superficially plausible, the rationale behind such a whisper is seriously flawed — were someone unknowingly contaminated, said infection wouldn't be discovered until the donated blood was examined back at the lab because there is no way on site to tell whether a person tests positive for HIV.

It's possible parents and teachers do their bit to keep this rumor up and running — the use of scare tactics to dissuade young people from engaging in risky behaviors is nothing new. A story of a nearby high school's blood drive turning up so many HIV-positive kids would serve to drive home the message that there's nothing safe about teen sex.

Barbara "safe as (charnel) houses" Mikkelson

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