It’s always a good idea to keep reams of paper on hand wherever you may be working, whether it be your home or your office. But have you ever wondered why the standard paper size is 8.5 inches wide by 11 inches long?

In the early days of paper production, the Dutch pioneered a technique whereby workers dipped wooden paper molds into vats of pulp & water. Then, once they dried…voila! You got paper!

After some trial & error, they settled on a standard frame size of 44 inches long to accommodate the laborers’ outstretched arms. And, when you divided that by four, it resulted in a paper size of 11 inches.

The width backstory is a bit less clear, however. It could’ve been that the Dutch allowed for 17 inches on the mold to make room for watermarks (which were regularly used at the time). So, cutting those in half meant paper ended up being 8.5 inches.

But with people using typewriters, copiers, printers, etc., it didn’t make a lot of sense for there to be so many paper sizes. Paper needed to be one-size-fits-all. And paper that was 8.5 inches by 11 inches allowed for 65 to 78 characters per 6.5 inches of type (which is what you get after you subtract the 1-inch margins).

This size became more prevalent when American Presidents Herbert Hoover (in the 1920s) & Ronald Reagan (in the 1980s) each mandated those dimensions be used for all government forms.

But 14 inches is also a standardized paper length, with those extra 3 inches believed to have come from lawyers who needed more room for verbose legal documents. That’s why 14″ paper is often called “legal-size paper”. This particular sized paper has also gotten more & more popular amongst restaurants, where the additional space is helpful when listing a long list of menu items.

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When something smells bad, you’ve probably said (or hear someone say) “P.U.!” But what does that really even mean?

As funny as it might be, PU definitely does not stand for “Pretty Unpleasant”. As a matter of fact, it’s not an initialism at all. “P.U.” is most likely derived from the early 17th-century word “pew” (spelled multiple ways), which is defined in the Oxford English Dictionary as “expressing contempt, disgust, or derision.” While all the differently spelled versions are technically pronounced as one syllable, the leading theory is that people have drawn it out over two syllables (P.U.) for extra flair. Kind of like how Jim Carrey says “B-E-A-YOO-ti-ful!” (in “Bruce Almighty”) instead of “Beautiful!” Since saying pew as “P-Yoo” sounds exactly like the letters PU, it’s not a stretch to see how everyone eventually started thinking that’s how it was spelled.

Now, with that said, the pew-to-PU pipeline isn’t the only theory behind the expression. Some linguists think it might have come from the Indo-European word “pu”, which means “to rot or decay”. And then there’s the Latin verb “putere”, which means “to stink.” There are quite a few terms with ties to “putere” and other related Latin words, including, among others: pus, putrid, and the 16th-century noun putor, meaning “a bad or unpleasant smell.”

In short, the letters “PU” have been associated with stench at least as far back as ancient Rome. As for whether the expression PU came directly from there or arose in England (or somewhere else) much later, we can’t be sure. But what we can be sure of that this is where we got the Looney Toons character Pepe Le Pew.

Got a Mundane Mystery you’d like solved? Send me a message via social media (@AndyWebbRadioVoice), or shoot me an email at [email protected].

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