as it’s Dewi Sant (Saint David’s Day to those poor unfortunates who don’t speak God’s Own Tongue) here are a bunch of interesting sheep-related facts
1. The furthest distance a sheep has flown unaided is 639 miles.
2. Elviz Presley was from Pontypridd (pron: Pont-ee-preeeth).
3. The fibrous exterior of a sheep is called bearding.
4. Sheep are called ruminants because they take a long time to think things over.
5. Sheep sleep in nests they make in trees.
6. When faced with a ‘water emergency’ a sheep will inflate its swim bladder and float to safety.
7. Sheep poo is the raw ingredient of a type of paper.
All of these facts and more(*) are available at this worthy Welsh website.
(*) Well… when I say more we need to add a note of slight caution here – especially as six out of seven of these facts are actually… not facts at all. Fabricated. Completely made up. Oh yes. Except for number 4.
Happy St David’s Day!
🙂
B.
I once had an English teacher who was very worried by our awful French accents. (He said mine was mostly Russian. I told him not to be a fool. He said it would be exactly like me to go and grab a Russian accent out of nowhere, having no reason to have it, than to simply learn the British one I had been taught at school for years. I told him my English teacher for the past three years was from New York. That settled it. Mainly because the other students where getting annoyed.)
So he was making us pronounce weird sentences until we got them right.
One of them was: “sheep in ships eating cheap chips”.
It’s quite OK at half my usual speed of speech, actually. But I still like “she sells seashells on the seashore” way better.
Damn, I thought sheep were dreadful gossips until you now tell me they are called ruminants because of their slow thought processes! Another foundation stone in my existence is cruelly unearthed as an untruth…
Funny post, Brennig! 🙂
Since I wrote that Sheep Facts quiz may I point out that in fact all answers above are incorrect except for number 7., because in fact we do make paper out of the fibres we recover from sheep dung. but sheep are called ruminants for a rather different reason . . .
Hope you don’t mind me bleating about this one . . .!