Answers to the Quiz

According to Google, no-one at all even bothered to look at the quiz I set the other day. However I happen to know that at least one person did; I may discuss her answers — right, wrong, bizarrely ingenious — in a later post. Meanwhile here are the ‘official’ answers:

1)      Which English word has six consecutive consonants?
The word I had in mind was ‘Latchstring’, but Jane came up with ‘Catchphrase’, which will do nicely.

2)      Write a proper English sentence containing the word ‘and’ five consecutive times.
When writing the caption to that picture of Adam and Eve, make sure you leave enough space between Adam and and and and and Eve.

3)      What is the difference between 2 cubic feet and a 2 foot cube?
6 cubic feet.

4)      What is one foot by one foot by one foot and covered in short curly hairs?
A Pubic Foot.

5)      Why does water go down the plug-hole clockwise in the Northern Hemisphere and anti-clockwise in the Southern Hemisphere?
Because it doesn’t. Try a few sinks and wash-basins and see.

6)      What is a hemisphere?
Half a sphere.

7)      Why don’t Polar Bears eat Penguins?
Because their paws are too clumsy to get the silver paper off.

8)      If the chemist cannot dispense with glasses, should he dispense with glasses?
Well there could be several answers to this trick question, according to the senses of ‘Glasses’ (Spectacles, glass containers) and ‘Dispense (with)’ (Manage without, mix and supply medicines).

9)      In what well-known opera does a stone statue come to dinner?
Mozart’s ‘Don Giovanni’. And even if you think you hate opera, do find and watch Joseph Losey’s magnificent film of this one.

10)  How much is that doggie in the window?
Priceless. It is wrong to buy and sell our fellow-creatures.

 

Here seems as good a place as any to mention with pleasure that one other person has said that he liked something in the blog: the other day I had a long e-mail in Greek from one George Christodoulakis (His name, incidentally, means ‘Little servant of Christ’) whom I didn’t know: he is a student of literary translation, and was asking me about the translation from Greek to English of dialect and ‘uneducated’ speech, and of sailor’s slang, the last of which I happen to know a bit about. In a PS he said that he liked what I had said in earlier posts about the strange discord in Wagner’s ‘Tristan und Isolde’. Thank you, Yiorgos; yours was the only evidence that anyone at all was interested in such things.