Random Fact: Do all marsupials have pouches? In most marsupials, only the females have a pouch. However, males of the water opossum and the extinct tasmanian tiger (or thylacine) also have a pouch. The males of both the thylacine and water opposum used/use their pouch to keep their genitalia from getting entangled in vegetation.
Random Fact: What is a "flapper." Flappers were a "new breed" of young Western women in the 1920s who wore short skirts, bobbed their hair, listened to jazz, and flaunted their disdain for what was then considered acceptable behavior.
Flappers were seen as brash for wearing excessive makeup, drinking alcohol, smoking cigarettes in public, driving automobiles, treating sex in a casual manner, and otherwise flouting social and sexual norms.
[1] As automobiles became more available, flappers gained freedom of movement and privacy.
[2]
Flappers are icons of the
Roaring Twenties, a period of postwar social and political turbulence and increased transatlantic cultural exchange, as well as of the export of American jazz culture to Europe. More conservative people, who belonged mostly to older generations, reacted with claims that the flappers' dresses were "near nakedness" and that flappers were "flippant", "reckless", and unintelligent.
While primarily associated with the United States, this "modern girl"
archetype was a worldwide phenomenon that had other names depending on the country, such as
joven moderna in Argentina
[3] or
garçonne in France, although the American term "flapper" was the most widespread internationally.
[4]
The slang term "flapper" may derive from an earlier use in northern England to mean "teenage girl", referring to one whose hair is not yet put up and whose plaited pigtail "flapped" on her back,
[5] or from an older word meaning "prostitute".
[6] The slang word "flap" was used for a young prostitute as early as 1631.
[7] By the 1890s, the word "flapper" was used in some localities as slang both for a very young prostitute,
[8][
page needed]
[9] and, in a more general and less derogatory sense, of any lively mid-teenage girl.
[10]
Violet Romer in a flapper dress c. 1915
The standard non-slang usage appeared in print as early as 1903 in England and 1904 in the United States, when novelist Desmond Coke used it in his college story of Oxford life,
Sandford of Merton: "There's a stunning flapper".
[11] In 1907, English actor
George Graves explained it to Americans as theatrical slang for acrobatic young female stage performers.
[12] The flapper was also known as a dancer, who danced like a bird—flapping her arms while doing the
Charleston move. This move became quite a competitive dance during this era.
[13]
SOURCE:
Flapper - Wikipedia - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flapper
www.scientificamerican.com
