Go read Athansius Contra Mundum "Thing that you wouldn't expect"

Snippet below. Complete post here.

During my hiatus, I at times contemplated things that seem contrary to our understanding, or what we normally think about on various subjects.
For example:

We associate Italian food with tomatoes. Bruscheta, tomato sauce on pasta, pizza, canneloni! But tomatoes came from the new world, and consequently Italian food had no tomatoes in it until about 1650 and many great Italian saints never even saw one.

Spelling in the English language is not consistant throughout history, or in the current time. When Dan Quayle spelled potato with an "e", as was once the accepted spelling, the media flipped and ran with headlines that Dan Quayle couldn't spell even though he used a perfectly acceptable spelling. Conversely on the liberal side, John Kerry was mocked endlessly by conservative radio hosts for pronouncing Ghengis Kahn as "Jenghis Kahn" during his Vietnam war testimony. In reality Jenghis was an accepted pronunciation and spelling that is found in most old history books, even up to the 1960's. One also finds that Iraq was once spelled more phonetically correct where English is concerned as "Irak".