How many of you knew that the term sideburns, those wonderful tufts of hair that cuddle the side of a dapper mans face,  was born from a military origin? Well, kind of at least. See they were named for the guy above.

Union Civil War General Ambrose  Burnside. A man of unquestionable talented facial hair. The problem was that he did have what one would call military talent. He was not a great general and a lot of soldiers died because of that. Prior to the 1864 Battle of the Crater outside of Peteresburg Virginia his style of facial hair was already known as having “burnsides”, a popular style at the time of the war. After the battle though, just one in a long series of catastrophes by his hand, they started calling the whiskers sideburns in honor of the general, who always got things “the wrong way around”.