Your Shirt Collar Could Choke You
Living in Europe in the 19th century meant enduring all kinds of dangerously dumb clothes like corsets and big honkin’ skirts, but those mostly affected women, so no one cared. But while those might just strangle your organs over a number of years or indirectly kill you in a fire because you stood a mere three feet from the hearth, men’s shirt collars could choke them as well as any of the serial killers that period thrillers have led us to believe were absolutely rampant in the region.
It all started with the advent of the detachable collar, which was awesome because it meant you could just wash your collar instead of the whole shirt (armpit sweat was apparently invented by hippies), but the custom was to starch them until they could crack. That meant they could easily cut off the blood flow to the neck if you leaned your head wrong.
That’s usually an easy enough problem to fix, i.e., don’t do that. But life in the 19th century was fairly miserable, which meant everyone was super drunk all the time. All too often, men would get hammered, pass out at a bad angle, and die not from alcohol poisoning but suffocation by fashion accessory. It was such a problem that the collars were known as “father killers” in Germany, either because childless men were less likely to have a wife to starch their collars or just had less reason to drink.
Pole Vaulting As Transportation
Clearing great heights and traversing large distances by the power of big sticks is squarely the realm of burly athletes in the modern era, but it didn’t become a sport until the 1770s. Before that, it was just a practical method of getting over enemy obstacles or crossing a river if the nearest bridge was too far. The river vaulting seems to have begun in the Netherlands, but eventually, people all over Europe were keeping big sticks on the banks of their local waterways to mark the places where they should really just put a bridge already. Think of it as the ancient version of jaywalking, if you had to fling yourself into the air to do it, and the street was actually a turbulent pit of aquatic doom. But hey, it’s better than walking a little farther, right?
4 Stupid Life-Threatening Dangers Old-Timey People Had To Deal With
Source: Pinoy Daily News
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