Portal:Literature/Did you know/Week 52

... that "Sapere aude!" ("Dare to know!") is a Latin phrase famously used by Kant at the end of the first paragraph of his 1784 essay, "Beantwortung der Frage: Was ist Aufklärung?" (pictured)?

... that Altruria was a short-lived commune in Sonoma County, California based on Christian socialist principles and inspired by William Dean Howells's 1894 Utopian novel, A Traveler from Altruria?

... that David Guterson's novel Snow Falling on Cedars is set in 1954 in the fictional San Piedro Island off the Washington coast in the Pacific Northwest, and that it is about Japanese American internment during World War II?

... that Grendel is a monster defeated barehandedly by Beowulf when the latter succeeds in ripping his arm off in a brawl, causing him to bleed to death in his gloomy cave home?

... that "Colorless green ideas sleep furiously" is a sentence composed by Noam Chomsky in 1957 as an example of a sentence whose grammar is correct but whose meaning is nonsensical?

... that, in British English, a ticket tout is someone who engages in ticket resale?

... that George Bernard Shaw, H. G. Wells, Sidney and Beatrice Webb, Annie Besant, Graham Wallas, Hubert Bland, Edith Nesbit, Sydney Olivier, and Emmeline Pankhurst were all Fabians?

...that members of the Philo Literary Society at Canonsburg Academy would cover the windows with their cloaks to prevent onlookers, because secret societies were assumed to be tied to freemasonry or witchcraft?