A Penny For Your Thoughts
Which of the following countries: Algeria, Bahrain, Iraq, Jordan, Kuwait, Libya, Serbia or Tunisia has the dinar as its currency?
The answer is all of them.
The dinar sometimes crops up in our crosswords, and may be clued as Middle East currency. It comes from the Roman coin denarius which means 10 asses. Not the donkey but the bronze coin known as an as, used by the ancient Romans. It later became a copper coin. When we had pounds, shillings and pence, and they were depicted as £S D, the d for penny was short for denarius.
The Bible refers to the denarius as a day’s wage for a common labourer.
Sticky By George!
Swiss engineer George de Mestral was walking his dogs in the hills of Commugny in Switzerland in 1941 when he made a discovery and then an invention that has become widely used in our everyday lives. He noticed that burrs from burdock (a thistle) clung to his clothes and to the dogs’ fur and examined them close-up. He found that many small hooks were catching onto the weave of his clothes and set about inventing a synthetic hook-and-eye material.
He named it velours croché , hooked velvet, which eventually was shortened to velcro.
Nuts or Knots
The old children’s song “Here we go gathering nuts in May” is a mystery because nuts are not ready to be picked until autumn. The most likely explanation is that is should be “knots of May” ie bunches of May flowers.
Expressions Of Interest
Back-channel signal: a noise, gesture or word used to show you’re paying attention to a speaker.
Cupertino effect: your spell checker’s habit of suggesting inappropriate words to replace misspelled words. The term comes from the spelling of cooperation which was often changed to Cupertino if the hyphen was left out. Cupertino is the suburban city in California that is home to the worldwide headquarters of Apple, Inc.
Garden-path sentence: a temporarily confusing sentence that leads the reader to a mistaken interpretation as the sentence is being processed. “She had a boyfriend with a wooden leg, but broke it off. “To be led down the garden path’ is to deceive or trick someone.
Historical present: the use of a verb phrase in the present tense to refer to an event that took place in the past. This is often used at the beginning of a joke, for example “A grasshopper walks into a bar.
Riddles
A staircase
What never asks questions but requires frequent answers?
A doorbell
What can you catch but not throw?
A cold
What is always coming but never arrives?
Tomorrow
What goes up but never comes down?
Your age
