The Know-It-All - Q, R

Q

Quaker - Originally, members of the Society of Friends were called "Quakers" as an insult. People made fun of them for trembling at the word of God. The Friends keenly adopted the intended insult and now the term carries no negative connotation. Brilliant! They stole the slam and turned it around. I love it!

R

raspberry - Here's the deal, a fruit is technically anything with seeds, so a tomato is a fruit. And try this on for size: a strawberry is not really a berry. Neither is a blackberry or a raspberry. They are Aggregate fruits. So, what's a berry? I'll tell you what a berry is, a banana is a berry. That's right, so's an orange and a pumpkin. A berry requires a single ovary with lots of seeds. In summary, a tomato is a fruit, a raspberry is not a berry, but a banana is. So there.

Reed, Walter - You've probably heard this name a lot recently on the news because of the Army Medical Center that's named after him. What I learned was that Walter Reed solved the yellow fever mystery during the Spanish-American war. Reed proved that the disease was being spread by insects, not by infected bedsheets and uniforms as was suspected.

However, two names you've probably never heard are James Carroll and Jesse Lazear. These two brave scientists accompanied Reed to Cuba and volunteered to be bitten by infected mosquitoes for the cause. Carroll suffered, but survived; Lazear died. They helped prove Reeds' hypothesis to be true and in the process saved hundreds, even thousands of lives.

riot - It only takes three boisterous people to legally qualify as a riot. Let's be careful out there people. Break it up, nothing to see here.