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Phlegm naturally drains down into the back of the throat and can be swallowed without imposing health risks. Once in the stomach, the acids and digestive system will remove the phlegm and get rid of the germs in it. In some cultures, swallowing phlegm is considered a social taboo, being described as disgusting or unhygienic. One Igbo adage, for example, uses the swallowing of phlegm as a metaphor for wrongdoing. Also, due to the social image of spitting (the alternative of swallowing) in some communities, females were shown to be more likely to swallow phlegm and less likely to report experiencing it.

Phlegm (/ˈflɛm/; Ancient Greek: φλέγμα, phlégma, "inflammation", "humour caused by heat") is mucus produced by the respiratory system, excluding that produced by the throat and nose passages. It often refers to respiratory mucus expelled by coughing, otherwise known as sputum. Phlegm, and mucus as a whole, is in essence a water-based gel consisting of glycoproteins, immunoglobulins, lipids and other substances. Its composition varies depending on climate, genetics, and state of the immune system. Its color can vary from transparent to pale or dark yellow and green, from light to dark brown, and even to dark grey depending on the contents. The body naturally produces about 1 quart (about 1 litre) of phlegm every day to capture and clear substances in the air and bacteria from the nose and throat.

Slot screw drives have a single horizontal indentation (the slot) in the fastener head and is driven by a "common blade" or flat-bladed screwdriver. This form was the first type of screw drive to be developed, and, for centuries, it was the simplest and cheapest to make because it can just be sawed or filed. Blunt or damaged tools can easily be re-ground as required in any workshop. It is unique because the slot head is straightforward to manufacture, and because it can be driven by a simple handtool. The slotted screw is commonly found in existing products and installations, along with use in simple carpentry work and in applications where minimal torque is needed.

Coin-slot drives are so-called because of the curved bottom of the recess, which facilitates driving them with a suitable coin. They are often used on items where the user is not likely to have a screwdriver when needed, such as recessed screws that attach cameras to tripod adapters, and battery compartments in some equipment such as children's toys.

A Robertson screw, also known as a square or Scrulox screw drive, is specified as ANSI Type III Square Center and has a square-shaped socket in the screw head and a square protrusion on the tool. Both the tool and the socket have a slight taper. Originally to make the manufacture of the screws practical using cold forming of the heads,: 79–81  this taper provides two other advantages which have served to popularize the drive: it makes inserting the tool easier, and tends to help keep the screw on the tool tip without the user needing to hold it there.

The hexalobular socket screw drive, often referred to by the original proprietary brand name Torx ( /ˈtɔːrks/) or by the alternative generic name star drive, uses a star-shaped recess in the fastener with six rounded points. It was designed to permit increased torque transfer from the driver to the bit compared to other drive systems. The drive was developed in 1967 by Camcar Textron. Torx is very popular in the automotive and electronics industries because of resistance to cam-out and extended bit life, as well as reduced operator fatigue by minimizing the need to bear down on the drive tool to prevent cam-out.

A thumbscrew is a type of screw drive with either a tall head and ridged or knurled sides, or a key-like flat-sided vertical head. They are intended to be tightened and loosened with the bare hand, and are usually not found in structural applications.

A pentagon screw drive uses five-sided fastener heads, and the fastener is known as a penta screw or penta bolt. It is designed to be intrinsically incompatible with many tools. Since five is an odd number, it cannot be turned by open-end or adjustable wrenches, which have parallel faces (and thus require a fastener with an even number of sides). Moreover, it cannot be turned by typical consumer-grade and professional-grade socket drivers, which possess either six or twelve points (neither of which are multiples of five). Penta nut security fasteners also are available, which can only be driven by specialized five-sided socket drivers. However, the security feature of this design can be bypassed by using some type of pliers if enough force is applied.

Due to the difficulty of turning these fasteners without specialized (and uncommon) five-point wrenches such as hydrant wrenches, they are commonly used for tamper resistance by public utilities on water meter covers, natural gas valves, electrical cabinets, and fire hydrants.

"Saturnalia is an ancient Roman festival and holiday in honour of the god Saturn, held on 17 December in the Julian calendar and later expanded with festivities until 19 December. By the 1st century BC, the celebration had been extended until 23 December, for a total of seven days of festivities. The holiday was celebrated with a sacrifice at the Temple of Saturn, in the Roman Forum, and a public banquet, followed by private gift-giving, continual partying, and a carnival atmosphere that overturned Roman social norms: gambling was permitted, and masters provided table service for their slaves as it was seen as a time of liberty for both slaves and freedmen alike. A common custom was the election of a "King of the Saturnalia", who gave orders to people, which were followed and presided over the merrymaking. The gifts exchanged were usually gag gifts or small figurines made of wax or pottery known as sigillaria. The poet Catullus called it "the best of days.""

Since 1956, the sale of meat, fish, and eggs has been banned in Rishikesh. In 2004, the Supreme Court upheld the ban on eggs. Traditional food in Rishkesh is Garhwali cuisine with common dishes including daal, gahat, and phaanu. Lentils, legumes, millet, barley, buckwheat, and vegetables are the primary ingredients. Only select spices are used. Mustard oil is the common cooking oil. Restaurant thali and street vendors selling samosas and chaat are common.

Rishikesh, also spelt as Hrishikesh, is a municipal corporation and tehsil of Dehradun district of the Indian state Uttarakhand. It is situated on the right bank of the Ganges river and is a pilgrimage town for Hindus, with ancient sages and saints meditating there in search of higher knowledge.

In February 1968, the Beatles visited Maharishi Mahesh Yogi's ashram in Rishikesh, attracted by his transcendental meditation. The Beatles composed numerous songs during their time at the ashram, many of which appear on the band's self-titled double album, also known as the "White Album". Western fans arrived seeking similar experiences, resulting in new yoga and meditation centers that fueled Rishikesh's nickname as the "Yoga Capital of the World".

Tetanus is often associated with rust, especially rusty nails. Although rust itself does not cause tetanus, objects that accumulate rust are often found outdoors or in places that harbor soil bacteria. Additionally, the rough surface of rusty metal provides crevices for dirt containing C. tetani, while a nail affords a means to puncture the skin and deliver endospores deep within the body at the site of the wound. An endospore is a non-metabolizing survival structure that begins to metabolize and cause infection once in an adequate environment. Hence, stepping on a nail (rusty or not) may result in a tetanus infection, as the low-oxygen (anaerobic) environment may exist under the skin, and the puncturing object can deliver endospores to a suitable environment for growth. It is a common misconception that rust itself is the cause; a related misconception is that a puncture from a rust-free nail is not a risk.

Tetanus (from Ancient Greek τέτανος 'tension, stretched, rigid'), also known as lockjaw, is a bacterial infection caused by Clostridium tetani and characterized by muscle spasms. In the most common type, the spasms begin in the jaw and then progress to the rest of the body. Each spasm usually lasts for a few minutes. Spasms occur frequently for three to four weeks. Some spasms may be severe enough to fracture bones. Other symptoms of tetanus may include fever, sweating, headache, trouble swallowing, high blood pressure, and a fast heart rate. The onset of symptoms is typically 3 to 21 days following infection. Recovery may take months; about 10% of cases prove to be fatal.

Snowclones are a kind of cliché in which the principal words of a phrase are changed while the structure of the phrase remains the same. These phrases are most often documented by replacing the variable words with letters (such as "X" and "Y"). This is how they are listed here. More detail can be found at the subpage for each snowclone.

See also

• Category:English cognate expressions
• Category:English reduplicated coordinated pairs

Sax faced many brushes with death. As a child, he once fell from a height of three floors, hit his head on a stone and was believed dead. At the age of three, he drank a bowl full of acidic water, mistaking it for milk, and also swallowed a pin. He received serious burns from a gunpowder explosion and once fell onto a hot stove. Several times he avoided accidental poisoning and asphyxiation from sleeping in a room where varnished furniture was drying. Another time young Sax was struck on the head by a cobblestone and fell into a river, almost dying.

His mother once said that "he's a child condemned to misfortune; he won't live". He became known locally as "the ghost-child of Dinant".

The second was developed in response to the Crimean War's Siege of Sevastopol where the French military and its allies were locked in a destructive conflict. As a potential solution to such lengthy sieges, Sax thus designed the "Saxocannon", a giant cannon whose half-ton round shots would be powerful enough to completely destroy an "average-sized city".

Antoine-Joseph "Adolphe" Sax was a Belgian inventor and musician who invented the saxophone in the early 1840s, patenting it in 1846.

Such protection uses a spaced armour approach, and is designed to induce the premature detonation or malfunction of incoming munitions.

Several similar nets also appeared in September 2023 at Russian airfields after Ukrainian drone strikes to protect against them. In March 2024, a "barbecue" installed on a Delta IV-class nuclear submarine was spotted near Gadzhiyevo.

Brian May has said that the song was not an autobiographical portrait of Mercury and that Mercury did not particularly enjoy bicycling, also noting that despite the lyric "I don't like Star Wars", Mercury was a Star Wars fan.

The song references the band's song "Fat Bottomed Girls" with the line "fat bottomed girls, they'll be riding today". "Fat Bottomed Girls" reciprocates with "Get on your bikes and ride!" The two songs were released together as a double A-sided single.

The imperial boomerang is the thesis that governments that develop repressive techniques to control colonial territories will eventually deploy those same techniques domestically against their own citizens. This concept originates with Aimé Césaire in Discourse on Colonialism (1950) where it is called the terrific boomerang to explain the origins of European fascism in the first half of the 20th century.[1][2] Hannah Arendt agreed with this usage, calling it the boomerang effect in The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951).[3][4][5] According to both writers, the methods of Adolf Hitler and the Nazi Party were not exceptional from a world-wide view because European colonial empires had been killing millions of people worldwide as part of the process of colonization for a very long time. Rather, they were exceptional in that they were applied to Europeans within Europe, rather than to colonized populations in the Global South.[6] It is sometimes called Foucault's boomerang even though Michel Foucault did not originate the term.

*The Banana Massacre (Spanish: Matanza/Masacre de las bananeras) was a massacre of workers of the United Fruit Company (now Chiquita) that occurred between December 5 and 6, 1928, in the town of Ciénaga near Santa Marta, Colombia. A strike began on November 12, 1928, when the workers ceased to work until the company would reach an agreement with them to grant them dignified working conditions. After several weeks with no agreement, in which the United Fruit Company refused to negotiate with the workers, the government of Miguel Abadía Méndez assigned Cortés Vargas as military chief in the Magdalena department and sent 700 men from the Colombian Army to quell the strikers, resulting in the massacre of 47–2000 people (the range owing to the insufficiency of detailed historical records).

The Secret Six, officially known as the Crime Prevention and Punishment Committee of the Chicago Association of Commerce (CAC), was a well-funded and powerful vigilante enterprise established by the Association (now the Chicagoland Chamber of Commerce) in February 1930. The group inspired a movie by the same name, was credited by Al Capone for his downfall, helped launch Eliot Ness and his Untouchables, and briefly served as a model for vigilante organizations across America.

This is a list of notable incidents that have experienced a Streisand effect, an unintended consequence of attempts to hide, remove, or censor information, where the effort instead backfires by increasing public awareness of the information. This list includes only instances explicitly identified by the media or other sources as examples of the Streisand effect.

Alienation of affections is a common law tort, abolished in many jurisdictions. Where it still exists, an action is brought by a spouse against a third party alleged to be responsible for damaging the marriage, most often resulting in divorce. The defendant in an alienation of affections suit is typically an adulterous spouse's lover, although family members, counselors, and therapists or clergy members who have advised a spouse to seek divorce have also been sued for alienation of affections.[1]

The tort of alienation of affections often overlaps with another "heart balm" tort: criminal conversation. Alienation of affections has most in common with the tort of tortious interference, where a third party can be held liable for interfering with the contractual relationship between two parties.

"Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo" is a grammatically correct sentence in English that is often presented as an example of how homonyms and homophones can be used to create complicated linguistic constructs through lexical ambiguity. It has been discussed in literature in various forms since 1967, when it appeared in Dmitri Borgmann's Beyond Language: Adventures in Word and Thought.

Pre-Code Hollywood was an era in the American film industry that occurred between the widespread adoption of sound in film in the late 1920s and the enforcement of the Motion Picture Production Code censorship guidelines (popularly known as the Hays Code) in 1934. Although the Hays Code was adopted in 1930, oversight was poor, and it did not become rigorously enforced until July 1, 1934, with the establishment of the Production Code Administration. Before that date, film content was restricted more by local laws, negotiations between the Studio Relations Committee (SRC) and the major studios, and popular opinion than by strict adherence to the Hays Code, which was often ignored by Hollywood filmmakers.

"James while John had had had had had had had had had had had a better effect on the teacher" is an English sentence used to demonstrate lexical ambiguity and the necessity of punctuation,[1] which serves as a substitute for the intonation,[2] stress, and pauses found in speech.[3] In human information processing research, the sentence has been used to show how readers depend on punctuation to give sentences meaning, especially in the context of scanning across lines of text.[4] The sentence is sometimes presented as a puzzle, where the solver must add the punctuation.

Anti-mask or anti-masking laws are legislative or penal initiatives prohibiting the concealment of one's face in public. Anti-mask laws vary widely between jurisdictions in their intent, scope, and penalties.

The island chain strategy is a strategic maritime containment plan first conceived by American foreign policy statesman John Foster Dulles in 1951, during the Korean War. It proposed surrounding the Soviet Union and China with naval bases in the West Pacific to project power and restrict sea access.

The "island chain" concept did not become a major theme in American foreign policy during the Cold War, but after the dissolution of the Soviet Union has remained a major focus of both American and Chinese geopolitical and military analysts to this day. For the United States, the island chain strategy is a significant part of the force projection of the U.S. military in the Far East. For the People's Republic of China (PRC), the concept is integral to its maritime security and fears of strategic encirclement by the U.S. and its allies. For both the U.S. and the PRC, the island chain strategy emphasizes the geographical and strategic importance of Taiwan.

On November 26, 2025, two members of the West Virginia National Guard who were participating in the deployment of federal law enforcement and National Guard forces were shot near the Farragut West metro station in Washington, D.C., United States, two blocks away from the White House.[3] One of the service members was killed, and a male suspect was critically wounded.[4][5

On August 11, 2025, Trump switched control of the Metropolitan Police Department of the District of Columbia (MPDC) from the city government of Washington, D.C., to the federal government, invoking section 740 of the District of Columbia Home Rule Act for the first time in history. Under a separate presidential memorandum and subsequent executive order,[6][7] Trump also deployed federal law enforcement agencies, the District of Columbia National Guard, and the National Guards of multiple states in response to what he claimed was "rampant crime" in the city, though statistics showed that the city was amidst a 30-year low in crime and that crime was decreasing in 2024–2025. However, a Washington, D.C., police commissioner was placed on leave for allegedly falsifying crime data in mid-May, and the city police union has claimed that underreporting of crime is a systemic problem.

Sparklemuffins are very small spiders that range from being four to six millimeters in length, similar to the length of a grain of rice. The males are close to four and one half millimeters long, which is smaller compared to the female who are about five and three tenths millimeters long.

Two Dallas Police officers broke into a private home without a warrant, snatched two boys, 12 & 13 years old, out of their beds, handcuffed them, drove them to a burglary scene, and then one cop, in a "game of Russian roulette as interrogation technique" supposedly gone horribly wrong, blew the cuffed and seated 12-year-old boy's brains out.

He served two and half years in prison.

Fingerprinting later confirmed the boys had nothing to do with the burglary.

The screaming hairy armadillo (Chaetophractus vellerosus) is a species of armadillo also known as the small screaming armadillo, crying armadillo or the small hairy armadillo. It is a burrowing armadillo found in the central and southern parts of South America. The adjective "screaming" derives from its habit of squealing when handled.

The Invention Secrecy Act of 1951 (Pub. L. 82–256, 66 Stat. 3, enacted February 1, 1952, codified at 35 U.S.C. ch. 17) is a United States federal law that authorizes the government to suppress disclosure of certain inventions for reasons of national security. The statute empowers selected federal agencies to decide whether a patent application poses a risk and to compel its classification under secrecy orders. In practice, secrecy orders have been imposed not only on inventions affecting military defense but also on those alleged to threaten economic stability, with critics noting that many such restrictions rest on speculative or unproven harms. The law applies broadly to all inventions in the United States for which a patent is filed or granted (35 U.S.C. § 181). Every patent application is reviewed, and thousands of inventions are manually screened each year. Any federal agency with "classifying powers" can order a restriction under the Act.

Tl;Dr The Invention Secrecy Act is a US federal law authorizing the government to suppress disclosure of certain inventions for reasons of national security. 6,543 inventions are currently suppressed.