Toff – ‘a rich or upper class person’.
University dress includes an academic cap, or mortarboard, with a black tassel. At Oxford and Cambridge from around the 1600s the titled young undergraduates began to wear gold tassels, known as tufts, as a mark of their superior status.
As often happens with language, the word’s usage [more…]
Philip & Leoni Jenner purchased Port Mall Newsagency in Port Adelaide over 15 years ago. In that time they have transformed the business into a modern newsagency with a diverse product range. Their children, Simon, Kate, Ashley and Cindy,as well as daughter-in-law Lucy have all worked in the business around their school and university [more…]
Readers often tell me that when they can’t solve a crossword clue, they sleep on it and hey presto! In the morning the answer suddenly springs out at them.
Writer John Steinbeck discusses this phenomenon “It is a common experience that a problem difficult at night is resolved in the morning after the committee of [more…]
This article appeared in Woman’s Day 14/3/2012:
Get the Kids Cross-Training
We’ve all heard doing the Woman’s Day crossword may help ward of dementia, but did you know the crusical age to engage your brain is between six and 40?
Researchers at the University of California surveyed 65 adults with an average age of 76 and found [more…]
Hula hoops, beehive hairdos, pet rocks, lava lamps and the Brady Bunch all had their day in the spotlight but were they all just passing fancies?
This relatively recent expression comes from American advertising posters of the 1930s. It became popular with ice cream companies who saw a flavour-of-the-month as a great marketing idea.
Often the [more…]
Although Shakespeare wrote his plays about 400 years ago, in some ways the world he wrote about has hardly dated. For instance, the plants he referred to in his plays are the same ones we’re familiar with today.
In his Midsummer Night’s Dream, Oberon tells Puck to squeeze the juice of a flower onto the [more…]
If you send someone to Coventry, you ignore them or ostracise them from your group. It is form of a playground bullying and also used to punish strike-breakers.
Why Coventry?
During the English Civil Wars of the 1640s, Cromwell sent Royalist soldiers to be imprisoned in this cathedral city in Warwickshire, England. They were shunned by [more…]
Stows away in the shop
Let’s start with clue 169dn in the Stinker, which was a little ambiguous. ‘Stores’ suggests a few different answers including two that fitted the spaces on our grid; the noun SHOPS, places you buy things, or the verb STOWS, stashes away. We accepted both answers.
One of the world’s endangered animals [more…]
Flying through the clues
We were faced with a bit of a dilemma in the Bigcash. The usual English spelling for ‘Small handbill’ is FLYER but quite a few entries had FLIER. This is more common in American English, but as it is a variant spelling and does appear in some dictionaries, we had to [more…]
