Remember when you used to bring an apple to the teacher?  Probably not, but in the American mind, this was always a big thing, right?  The classic image of a teacher’s desk with papers and pens and inboxes and outboxes, and a shiny red apple up front for all to see.  There was the apple-polisher stereotype, that one kid who was so intent on impressing the teacher that he or she was the one who always brought that apple.  The ones who didn’t were the kids who threw spitballs and dunked the pigtails of the little girls who sat in front of them into their inkwells. During my brief career as a teacher, I can tell you that spitballs are still a thing, though inkwells are not.  And giving apples to the teacher isn’t a thing, either.   Not that I’d have minded a student bringing me an apple; it just never happened to me.  I never saw it happen when I was a student, either, back in 19(ahem).   Yet we still link apples and teachers in our minds—good...

Wherever fine candies are sold across Europe and Canada, you can easily find little drops of chocolate coated with brightly colored candy shells, produced in eight different colors, that were introduced by the British H. I. Rowntree Company in 1937.  These popular candies are called Smarties, and are made by the Swiss food conglomerate Nestlé today.   You can’t find Smarties in the United States—not the chocolate kind, anyway.   The Smarties found in America are small tablet candies produced in New Jersey by the Smarties Candy Company.  (They’re called Rockets in Canada, to make sure you don’t confuse them with the chocolate candies.) If you want something like Smarties in the United States, you have to seek out M&Ms, which have been manufactured by Mars Incorporated since 1941, launched that year as a shameless ripoff of the British confection.  M&Ms only had five colors: red, yellow, green, violet, and brown.   M&Ms were one of Mars’s mos...