Questions and Answers

Who is Bic Pen Tameter?

What fraction appears on the right-hand side in the poem?

Fill in the blanks: "This is the major leagues, kid," said Tom __.

"For some reason I only call people "dude" on line," said Tom __.

Two blanks, two sheep.

Write a sentence of up to 140 characters (including punctuation and spaces) in which no letter is used the same number of times as any other letter. The closer you can get to 140 characters the better, though the best entries may come up a couple of characters short.

Time limit: 48 hours from now.

This is a post by David Picton:

-----
I came across an old thread on this newsgroup. A puzzle question had been set: name 3 verbs - besides "lie" - for which the past tense is the same as the present tense of another verb. Two lists emerged - a "common verbs" list and an "uncommon verbs" list (with literary /archaic verbs or forms). The following verbs were identified for the common verbs list:

bear bore
bind bound
fall fell
lie lay
rend rent
see saw

To which I would add:

spit spat (to spat = argue)

For the uncommon verbs/forms:

bide bode
bite bit (to bit = furnish a horse with a bit)
spin span

To which I can add the following:

speak spoke (to spoke = furnish with spokes)
crow crew (crew = crowed still common in UK, for cry of cockerel)
shear shore (shore = sheared still favoured in Australia/NZ, archaic elsewhere)
-----

A responder added "wind wound" to the common-verbs list.

There's a Cormo for every addition. The only additional examples the Panel knows of are on the uncommon-verbs list.

The fly flew. What genus was it?

On what planet are Tex, Pal, and Acity aristocratic surnames?

Upper lip, side of top of head, upper lip, side of top of head, throat, side of top of head, upper lip. What is being moved to these positions?

Who is the one of bogus jams?

A rail town that changed its name when it became a post and rail town is infamous for what happened within rails hung without the town. What happened without the rails gave the language a new "within" word and helped get the man who had them hung hanged.

What is the word?

Who has stood between Gene Autry and Andy Williams for over thirty years, and where?

They're down under, not up over, and they've got four kinds of love. Who are they and how do they do it (with details, please)?

Why might you not want to play cards with the person represented by these three pictures?
http://alt-usage-english.org/sdc2010/pics/q13.html

What do these four quotations have in common? The answer should be the name of a bawn associated with 1 Peter 2:17.

Suffering is one very long moment. We cannot divide it by seasons. We can only record its moods, and chronicle their return.

The tears of the world are a constant quality. For each one who begins to weep, somewhere else another stops.

And the moracle of the story is: He that is sained doesn't let the trows get to him.

Joy to find in every station something still to do or bear.

One month, they celebrated Melina Mercouri by painting their legs. The next, they celebrated themselves by erecting three ambiguous golden glyphs. The official story is that the glyphs are pictograms but they look more like letters from one or more of several different alphabets. One or more of the glyphs might be the wrong way up and one or more of them might be a number. All very mysterious.
Construct a word or number from the three glyphs and explain its significance. You can mix alphabets.

What is the subject of this expurgated sentence?

__ 1969 _______ _______ ____ 1,083,000 _____ _________ 869,000 ____, 199,000 ______, _____, ____ ___ _____ __________ ________, ___ 15,000 ____________ ________.

"Where are the snows of yesteryear?" sang Francois _______. (adverb, 7 letters)

Who made this?
http://alt-usage-english.org/sdc2010/../sdc2010/pics/4946815727_13ae896ee7_z.jpg

He was briefly a tin magnate, though a tin magnet would have been little stranger than some of the ideas he floated. His cousin once promoted a song that later promoted a shampoo that's now promoted as being even more natural than back then because it now includes a cationic polygalactomannan derived from a plant whose Assyrian name will always be at the top of the long list of his heroically insane failures.

Who was he?

At http://alt-usage-english.org/sdc2010/../sdc2010/pics/illegal_fugue.pdf you will see the beginning of an 18th-century composition, and at http://alt-usage-english.org/sdc2010/pics/illegal_fugue.mid you can hear it. One note has been changed, creating a violation of the laws of counterpoint at the time. Identify the wrong note and explain why it's wrong.

What's bad about "Mos' High Cabbie Demon" that's good about "gape at bug jaw"?

The first has been played by many actresses, including one who may have been the most famous of her time. The second has been a centerfold and was supplanted in her most famous role by someone who made it more famous. The third was famous for silencing cats and breaking codes. 

Name them all.

Here's a YouTube playlist of eight music clips. What's the theme?

http://www.youtube.com/view_play_list?p=63A3D17DD21E9E62

What's the next movie title in this sequence?

"The Scalphunters"
"Rough Night in Jericho"
"Little Fauss and Big Halsy"
"Barbarella"
"He and She"
"The Animal"
"School for Sex"
"The Wild Females"

There's a musical instrument which, if we give credence to one man who plays it, can evoke a barefoot country boy or an impossibly beautiful woman. The Hall of Fame for this instrument is located in a city that received its name from a humble thorn bush.

Name the instrument and the city.

This maze begins with a television series in which the title contains an ordinary English word turned into a fictitious proper name by means of a slight change in spelling. A scholar borrowed that title for a book about the world of scholarship, restored the misspelled word to its normal form and added a letter to give another English word. That scholar used similar wordplay in the title of a previous work, deliberately misspelling an English word in order to evoke allusions to an illness etymologically associated with a certain part of the human body. The traditional English name for that organ appears in the title of a raunchy rock song which is a speech-defect play on the name of a famous English novel. The heavy metal band that released the song has a name that looks like an acronym, but the band members insist that the letters do not stand for anything, although there have been ingenious suggestions, for instance that the A might stand for Aryan or Anal. Anyway, in the early 1990s the band put out a video with a title that was, once again, a play on the name of a famous English novel from the previous century, replacing the proper name in the title with the name of a certain part of the human body. That's a Greek word, and the interesting thing is that a Latin cognate of that word refers to an adjacent organ, as well as being the name of an implement. By an interesting semantic development, that Latin implement has yielded an English word referring to an empty-headed person. The same sequence of letters in the English word is the ICAO code for one country's main international airport. In a slightly different spelling, that country has given its name to a hardwood tree. The name of the botanist who is immortalized in the specific part of the scientific name of that tree can be found in the French Wikipedia. There you will also learn that the botanist was a member of a Roman Catholic congregation founded by a priest who was born an aristocrat but died a pauper. The riches-to-rags story of that priest has been told by an author whose surname is also the name of a city which, in a sense, brings us back to where we started.

Name that city and the language to which the wordplaying scholar is married.

Replace the code numbers with the correct words in the following passage:

"I’m getting on. You wouldn’t believe people once paid to see me at the 46, or that I had my name in 10. Spare us a 29 so’s I can make a 86 the off-licence. Stingy bastard!"

Ofsted is the Office for Standards in Education, Children's Services and Skills. Which celebrity would it be in a horrible future?

Which word has been removed from this cartoon strip?

http://alt-usage-english.org/sdc2010/../sdc2010/pics/25jbafa.jpg

This list is missing only the last item. Please add the referent. For extra credit, add it in a form that fits with the others on the list. Substantiation is required for the extra credit and may be added in a later post.

hill farm
strong man's son
fox
angler (in a whirlpool)
fortified town
courageous power
army guard

http://alt-usage-english.org/sdc2010/../sdc2010/pics/30bjtc6.png

What is the central area?

Shakespeare coined many words and phrases that are still an everyday part of our language. His translators have had the same impact on other languages. One word still used in Swedish, meaning "a sound thrashing", was coined by Carl August Hagberg in his translation of the complete plays of Shakespeare 1847-1851.

The word in Swedish is "rammelbuljong". This is a compound in which the "rammel-" comes from the verb "ramla" ("to fall noisily") and "buljong" is "broth, bouillon". Semantically it is a parallel to the German "Pruegelsuppe" (literally "hiding-soup") and many other terms, in various languages, that compare a good beating to a serving of food. One scholar has suggested that the Swedish word was also coined in imitation of the sound of English "rumbullion" in the sense of "tumult, uproar".

The word "rumbullion", however, is later than Shakespeare. What is the term in Shakespeare's original?

A man spelled like a hat touches his hat and tells a newly hatless bad speller who is trying to put on a new hat to touch the hats of a hatter-humbugging bad-hat who has hung his hat up for good - and that's that!

What was the bus driver's name?

A recent AUE post by Evan Kirshenbaum:

===

the Omrud <[email protected]> writes:
> On 16/08/2010 17:12, Evan Kirshenbaum wrote:
>
>> We don't have that on our mailboxes (other than perhaps the ones
>> outside of post offices), but there are two slots inside the post
>> office.  My understanding is that by default everything goes to San
>> Francisco for sorting and routing by zip code, but local mail (for
>> this particular zip code) saves the step of transporting it to San
>> Francisco and back and so gets delivered faster.  At least
>> theoretically.
>                            ^
>                            ^
>                            ^
> Oh, I say, well done on the great cleft in your paragraph.   Not easy
> to do, that.

For full marks it has to read coherently if parsed in columns, though,
so this one fails.

Name the architects and supply the missing word.
http://alt-usage-english.org/sdc2010/../sdc2010/pics/archiq.jpg

Some words have been split into two groups.

Group 1: cad, cab, cash, cud, cog, coat, cosh, cause, core, coal, cough, cock, come, cove, cope, cosy, case, corn, comb, care

Group 2: car, code, cod, cat, cadge, cup, cool, cast, coarse, count, cuss, cone, cave, cake, calm, coop, curl, cape

Find another word for group 1 and another word for group 2.

"Mma" is to "mevrouw" as "Ramotswe" is to "Waterlo[?]".Supply the missing letter in "Waterlo[?]" and explain.

Which is to say that the letter that is missing must be supplied and an explanation must be supplied also. Yes. Supplied is what the missing letter must be. And not just the missing letter. No. Both the letter and the explanation are missing, in that they are both not there, and they must both be supplied. This is what I am saying. The letter is missing, as I have said, and it must not be missing, and the explanation is missing, as I have also said, and that must not be missing either. These things must both be supplied.

You are very wise, Mma.

Three members of two categories. Rudyard Kipling wrote a poem in praise of them. Jack Orion swore by them. Two of them fell out of a certain use in English, and the third was never used that way.
What's the use?

Where might you see such a sign?
 
http://alt-usage-english.org/sdc2010/../sdc2010/pics/2rbzat1.jpg
 

Where's this? Who took the photo? 
http://alt-usage-english.org/sdc2010/../sdc2010/pics/72d7va.png

Where do you suppose one might start to look for a viol teacher at the highest possible level?

(No sheep for guessing who contributed this question.)

How often do I go on holiday to Mallorca and where do I stay when I get there?

The pictures are all clues to which city?

http://alt-usage-english.org/sdc2010/../sdc2010/pics/34jbvxu.jpg

"Come on, how did you translate 'alazoneia'?" Tom _____. (verb)

"Keeping Up Appearances"
"Eight Arms to Hold You"
Stefan Raab & Michael Moore
Chris Cagle
The Gunge Tank

What's the link?

What's she pointing at?

http://alt-usage-english.org/sdc2010/../sdc2010/pics/257g09y.jpg
 

What links the following?

fuck, break, relax, work, snooze, sword

(To the best of the Panel's knowledge, this is the first time the word 'snooze' has appeared in an SDC question.)

Where do cows go "baa"?

"I've read all the French books I could find about Rennes-le-Chateau," Tom ____. (verb, 4 letters)

What's the connection?

http://alt-usage-english.org/sdc2010/../sdc2010/pics/21kjedy.jpg

http://alt-usage-english.org/sdc2010/../sdc2010/pics/9awi9z.jpg

http://alt-usage-english.org/sdc2010/../sdc2010/pics/r9e7op.jpg

"I suggest we divide power equally between the Guales and the Malaitans," said Tom ___________ly.

1: http://alt-usage-english.org/sdc2010/../sdc2010/pics/oaxl54.jpg

2: http://alt-usage-english.org/sdc2010/../sdc2010/pics/o0xd2e.jpg

3: http://alt-usage-english.org/sdc2010/../sdc2010/pics/htwlec.jpg

Place A sounds like an English verb (1).

Place B is due north of Place A. It can be spelled like an English noun (2) but it is pronounced like the politically incorrect name for an ethnic group. A fictional leader of this ethnic group tried to castrate the politically incorrect English hero of a novel whose author wrote the definitive history of the bandits that Place A celebrates annually.

Place C is the same distance due west of Place B that Place B is due north of Place A. The first part of its name is spelled like an English adjective (3) but pronounced like an English noun (4); the second part is spelled like an English word that can be either a noun or a verb (5).

Place D is the same distance due west of Place C that Place C is due west of Place B. Place D sounds like an English comparative (6) but is actually a local noun.

Place E is the same distance due south of Place D that Place D is due west of Place C. It is the source of a river that is both spelled and pronounced like an English noun (7). A second author of politically incorrect fiction visited this river as a young man and in old age liked to be known by the name of a settlement near its source.

Place F is due east of Place E and due south of Place C. It is the birthplace of someone whose namesake and contemporary wrote a poem that is sung at a 'Place B' (2) in Place A. His name sounds like an English noun (8). The first few words of his namesake's poem haven't been convincingly translated. Two famous lexicographers believed that they refer to two implausible gods. An expert on fallacies popularized an almost equally fallacious interpretation. The first part of the first word of the poem sounds like two unrelated English nouns (9 and 10); its second part sounds like an English noun that is central to an unlucky question in this year's SDC.

Travelling due east from Place F takes you back to Place A and completes the rectangle.

Place G is a tower at the centre of this rectangle. Its name is spelled like an English adjective (12) plus an English noun (13).

A Touabaire for the first person to get all thirteen words right.

A Cormo for the person who constructs the most entertaining tale using all thirteen words.

When we discussed Pinyin, people mentioned Catalan and Maltese as possible inspirations for the use of "x" to mean a sound resembling /S/ (English "sh"). Portuguese and Old Spanish are other possibilities. Provide evidence of the use of "x" for /S/ in yet another European language.

http://alt-usage-english.org/sdc2010/pics/28zr75.htm

Which competition didn't this win this year?

http://alt-usage-english.org/sdc2010/../sdc2010/pics/2cg0zv5.jpg

What's the cameraman up to?

http://alt-usage-english.org/sdc2010/pics/10p3u3.htm

There's quite a grand building I sometimes walk past here on the way to the central library. Over the lefthand entrance, chiseled in the stone, it says "CITY ANALYST". Over the righthand entrance it says "CITY _____". It's a 14-letter word. What is it?

What do the following have (precisely) in common?

"When they're tired, children's brains go haywire."
"No news is good news."
"All your pet needs!"

Find another example from the internet.

O precious bane
Tormenting joy
Dividing chain
Exacting toy