‘Round the Square: False.
Round the Square
September 6, 2025

‘Round the Square: False.

NOPE: George Washington didn’t have wooden teeth. Did you learn that in school?

Over the years, lots of things people learned in school have since been proven wrong. Reader’s Digest featured a list, including the truth about America’s first president’s dentures.

They were made of ivory, gold and lead, along with real teeth, “probably from cows and horses and definitely from people,” RD.com listed.

Here’s another: A toilet doesn’t flush the opposite way in the Southern hemisphere. There’s not enough water in a toilet bowl for the Coriolis effect to impact it. Hurricanes and cyclones spin clockwise below the equator, and counterclockwise in the Northern hemisphere.

Napoleon Bonaparte was 5 feet, 7 inches tall — that’s not really short. He had been depicted in cartoons in England as a “small, petty, childish person,” but wasn’t physically short. The error is thought to be from the difference in measurements between French and British units. The British units put the man at 5 feet, 2 inches.

A fact that wasn’t taught in school — Australia’s tectonic plate is moving so quickly that between 1994 and 2016, it moved almost five feet. In about 250 million years — when just Willie Nelson and Keith Richards are left on Earth — the continents might all merge into a single land mass again.

There is a manuscript that has never been read. About 600 years ago in Central Europe, the Voynich Manuscript was written. Scholars still have no idea what the pages say or even what language it is. It’s the only known example of the language. Artificial intelligence recently suggested the words are written in Hebrew in code, but only 80% of the words were matched to the language and even then, it produced incoherent sentences.

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