If a man lives to be thirty years old he will walk twenty-one thousand nine hundred miles. The three-miles-a-day man will cover thirty-two thousand eight hundred and fifty. The man who believes in a daily constitutional of five miles will walk fifty-four thousand seven hundred and fifty miles. The circumference of the earth is twenty-four thousand eight hundred and ninety-nine miles. If a man walks two miles a day he will find, after he has walked for thirty years, he would still have some distance to walk in order to complete the circuit of the globe.
Walking three miles a day he will go around the world once and have a neat margin besides. The five-miles-a-day man will walk around twice and have a few thousand-odd miles to his credit.
At forty this man will have made three trips, and at sixty his pedometer will indicate one hundred and nine thousand five hundred miles, which means that he will have walked around the earth four times and he will still have about two thousand miles to the good on the fifth trip.
MISNOMERS WHICH ARE COMMONLY USED.
WRONG IDEAS CONVEYED IN NAMES.
Some Are Unblushing Contradictions,
While Others Might be Classed With
the Milder White Lie.
Custom and usage have made the misapplication of some words so familiar that they have lost their original meaning and now signify quite the opposite. The word “slave,” for instance, is a striking example of this fact. The Slavi were a tribe which once dwelt on the banks of the Dneiper and derived their name from “slav,” which means noble or illustrious. In the later days of the Roman Empire vast numbers of them spread over Europe in the condition of captive servants, and the name of the tribe came to mean the lowest state of servitude—the very antithesis of its original sense.
Some of our commonest expressions are misnomers which seem to be absolutely unaccountable, yet we shall probably go on using them to the end of time.