Article index
All 125 articles on Virgin Myth, by section.
Science Myths
Section page →- The tongue map was a graph that lost its labelsAug 11, 2026
- Old window glass is not sagging, it was made that wayAug 9, 2026
- Nobody has ever found the source of the ten per cent brain claimAug 5, 2026
- Deoxygenated blood is dark red and your veins are an optical trickJul 31, 2026
- The Great Wall was declared visible from the Moon before anyone went thereJul 29, 2026
- Your bathroom drain is far too small to notice the Earth turningJul 25, 2026
- The far side of the Moon gets exactly as much sunlight as the near sideJul 23, 2026
- Earth is closest to the Sun in January, which is awkward for the usual explanationJul 19, 2026
- Split-brain surgery was real, the creative-versus-logical personality was notJul 16, 2026
- Aristotle counted five senses and nobody ever updated the listJul 12, 2026
- Diamonds are not squeezed coal, and most of them are older than plantsJul 9, 2026
- Astronauts are not weightless because gravity ran outJul 6, 2026
- Survival of the fittest was a philosopher's phrase, not Darwin'sJul 3, 2026
- The march of progress was a foldout illustration, not a family treeDec 1, 2025
- Galileo probably never dropped anything off the tower, and did not need toNov 25, 2025
- Brontosaurus was struck off for a century and then partly reinstatedNov 23, 2025
- The Big Bang was named on the radio by an astronomer who rejected itNov 18, 2025
- Everest is the highest mountain but not the tallest, and both are trueNov 16, 2025
- The apple fell, Newton watched it, and nothing hit anybody's headOct 27, 2025
- The magnetic north pole is, in magnetic terms, a south poleOct 23, 2025
- The seven-fold limit on paper is real, and a schoolgirl broke it with algebraOct 19, 2025
History Myths
Section page →- Viking helmets got their horns from a costume department in 1876Jun 27, 2026
- Napoleon was an ordinary height and the confusion was in the unitsJun 24, 2026
- Educated Europeans knew the Earth was round the whole timeJun 22, 2026
- Marie Antoinette never said let them eat cakeJun 18, 2026
- Nero could not have fiddled, and Tacitus said it was a rumourJun 16, 2026
- Ring a Ring o' Roses has nothing to do with the plagueJun 10, 2026
- Nobody was burned at Salem, and the method matteredJun 8, 2026
- Einstein did not fail mathematics, and he saw the story in printJun 4, 2026
- The iron maiden was assembled by showmen, not by medieval torturersJun 2, 2026
- The nine million witches figure came from one man's bad arithmeticMay 29, 2026
- The Boston Tea Party was a protest against cheaper teaMay 24, 2026
- Nobody knows which way the thumb pointed in a Roman arenaMay 22, 2026
- Paul Revere did not shout that the British were comingMay 18, 2026
- The Sphinx lost its nose long before Napoleon's army arrivedNov 13, 2025
- A vomitorium was a doorway, and the banqueting room never existedNov 8, 2025
- White marble is what survived, not what the sculptors wantedNov 5, 2025
- The cow did not kick the lantern, and the reporter admitted inventing itNov 3, 2025
- The Dark Ages were named by a poet complaining about Latin styleOct 31, 2025
- Cleopatra was Greek by dynasty, and the beauty was mostly Roman propagandaOct 15, 2025
- The pyramids were not built by slaves, and the workers had tombsOct 14, 2025
- The Library of Alexandria did not burn down in an afternoonOct 9, 2025
Food Myths
Section page →- Searing does not seal in juices, and the test is a set of scalesMay 16, 2026
- The alcohol does not all cook off, and the numbers are not closeMay 3, 2026
- Resting meat works, and the usual explanation for why is probably wrongApr 27, 2026
- Salt does not make water boil faster, and it slightly does the oppositeApr 25, 2026
- Oil in the pasta water floats, which is the whole problemApr 22, 2026
- Mushrooms do not soak up water like sponges, and a scale proves itApr 17, 2026
- That noise from the pan is steam, because lobsters have no voiceFeb 24, 2026
- You can wash cast iron with soap, and the rule dates from a different soapFeb 18, 2026
- Dom Pérignon spent his career trying to get the bubbles outFeb 15, 2026
- The fortune cookie is Japanese, and the paperwork survivesFeb 12, 2026
- Marinades reach a few millimetres in and then stopFeb 8, 2026
- The fridge does not ruin a tomato, but it does mute oneFeb 6, 2026
- Marco Polo did not bring pasta home, and a trade magazine invented the storyOct 6, 2025
- Bread goes stale by rearranging its starch, not by drying outOct 3, 2025
- Letting a steak come to room temperature does almost nothingSep 30, 2025
- Both sides of aluminium foil do the same thing, and the finish is a rolling artefactSep 27, 2025
- A sharpening steel does not sharpen anything, and the name is the problemSep 22, 2025
- Older eggs peel more easily, and the usual explanation is shakySep 18, 2025
- The box of baking soda in the fridge came from an advertising campaignSep 16, 2025
- The champagne coupe was in use before any of the women it is named afterSep 12, 2025
- Whether hot water freezes faster is still not properly settledSep 10, 2025
Money Myths
Section page →- Diamonds are not rare and the two months' salary rule was written by an agencyMay 12, 2026
- Renting is not throwing money away, and neither is most of a mortgage paymentApr 15, 2026
- Checking your own credit file does not damage itApr 12, 2026
- Carrying a credit card balance does not build anything except interestApr 7, 2026
- The wheel has no memory, and a famous night in Monte Carlo proved it expensivelyApr 4, 2026
- Einstein never called compound interest the eighth wonder of the worldApr 2, 2026
- Black Friday was named by traffic police, not by accountantsFeb 2, 2026
- The story about prices ending in nine is itself a mythJan 31, 2026
- Tipping does not come from an acronym, and America tried to ban itJan 26, 2026
- Nobody was queuing to jump from windows in 1929Jan 24, 2026
- Money and happiness have a messier relationship than either slogan admitsJan 19, 2026
- There is no cheapest day to book a flight, only a cheaper way to lookJan 17, 2026
- Tulip mania did not ruin the Dutch economy, and the panic came laterSep 6, 2025
- Ford did not double wages so workers could buy the carsSep 3, 2025
- Adam Smith used the invisible hand three times and meant something narrowerAug 31, 2025
- A penny saved is a penny earned is not what Franklin wroteAug 25, 2025
- Sell in May comes from a horse race, and the evidence is thinner than the sloganAug 24, 2025
- The big pack is not always the cheap pack, and shops know you assume it isAug 19, 2025
- Buy cheap, buy twice is a good story with a weak recordAug 15, 2025
- The customer is always right was a shop slogan, and the famous get-out is inventedAug 13, 2025
- The statistic about lottery winners going broke has no sourceAug 8, 2025
Language & Origins
Section page →- Rule of thumb has nothing to do with beating anyoneMay 9, 2026
- Posh does not stand for port out starboard homeMar 28, 2026
- Nobody knows where the whole nine yards came from, and that is the findingMar 26, 2026
- The snow vocabulary claim grew by repetition and has no fixed numberMar 23, 2026
- The rule against splitting infinitives was imported from Latin by mistakeMar 18, 2026
- The preposition rule was one writer's opinion in 1672Mar 16, 2026
- Sushi means the rice, and the raw fish has a different nameJan 13, 2026
- Thomas Crapper was real, and the word is older than he isJan 8, 2026
- Ye Olde was always pronounced the, and the culprit is a missing letterJan 7, 2026
- OK began as a joke about deliberately bad spellingJan 3, 2026
- The Chinese word for crisis does not contain opportunityDec 29, 2025
- That email about life in the 1500s invented every etymology in itDec 28, 2025
- The moth in the logbook was a joke about a word already in useDec 23, 2025
- The X in Xmas is a Greek letter, and the objection is younger than the spellingAug 6, 2025
- Literally has meant figuratively for centuries, and the complaint is newerAug 4, 2025
- Shakespeare invented far fewer words than the dictionary makes it lookJul 30, 2025
- Sincere does not come from without wax, and the story is a good fakeJul 27, 2025
- Gringo does not come from green go home, and the dates rule it outJul 22, 2025
- Emoji has nothing to do with emotion, and the resemblance is a coincidenceJul 20, 2025
- Nobody has ever found the orange clay that piggy banks are named afterJul 16, 2025
- The exception that proves the rule is a legal maxim, not a word gameJul 12, 2025
Everyday Misconceptions
Section page →- The lemmings did not jump, they were thrown by a film crewMay 5, 2026
- Bulls cannot see red, and it is the cloth moving that does itMar 12, 2026
- Goldfish remember for months, and nobody can find who said three secondsMar 8, 2026
- Ostriches do not bury their heads, and Pliny is to blameMar 4, 2026
- Chameleons change colour to talk, not to hideMar 2, 2026
- Dogs see blue and yellow, and one 1930s manual said otherwiseFeb 26, 2026
- Bats can see, and an eighteenth-century experiment made things worseDec 19, 2025
- A bird will not reject a chick because you touched itDec 18, 2025
- The car protects you from lightning, and the tyres have nothing to do with itDec 12, 2025
- Microwaves do not cook from the inside outDec 10, 2025
- The Bermuda Triangle was invented in a magazine in 1964Dec 7, 2025
- The five-second rule is a question about surfaces, not about secondsDec 3, 2025
- Lightning strikes the same place constantly, and the saying was never about weatherJul 11, 2025
- A camel's hump is fat, and the water it releases is roughly a washJul 6, 2025
- You do not swallow spiders in your sleep, and the debunk is also made upJul 2, 2025
- Daddy longlegs is three different animals and none of them fits the storyJul 1, 2025
- No petrol station fire has ever been traced to a mobile phoneJun 25, 2025
- Warming up the engine was necessary once, and the reason disappearedJun 23, 2025
- The claim that bees should not be able to fly came from a dinner-table sumJun 20, 2025
- Toast really does land butter side down, and the reason is the tableJun 16, 2025