Discussion Groups / English Usage / January 2007

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2007/01/26/nbritish126.

Oh, well, if we're going to do Brit quizzes:
Miles Kington, Independent, 22 January 2007
It has suddenly occurred to me that I have one Christmas duty left
unfulfilled - I never brought you the answers to my Grand Christmas
Quiz!
So here, without further ado, are the correct solutions to last year's
Christmas Brainteaser Jamboree.

1. St Boniface, hence the name.

2. An inexplicable allergy to Gyles Brandreth.

3. "Jade", which is now rhyming Cockney slang for "hoodie".

4. Because they are physically incapable of walking backwards.

5. They are all correct, except that Lepanto is NOT French for "The
panto".

6. The love child of Benjamin Britten.

7. It is the final line of the limerick:

"There was a young man from Utrecht,

"Whose marriage prospects were wrecked

"When his girlfriend, named Ann,

Said: 'Prove you're a man !'..."

8. It is the starter that Heston Blumenthal said could never be made. It
fetched £8,000 at auction but had already become inedible by then.

9. 30% proof, 70% guesswork.

10. It is the only country in the world that has no words to its
national anthem. Therefore the anthem can never be sung, only hummed.
The sound of over 30,000 people humming it is said to scare birds up to
three miles away.

11. A miraculous potato which was the spitting image of Esther Rantzen.

12. It is the only town that is twinned with Chernobyl.

13. The proposed title of Tony Blair's memoirs.

14. A rare condition that causes people to dream in Spanish, with
English subtitles.

15. The world record for St Vitus's Dance, which has not been broken
since 1867.

16. The official name for the condition that is Lynne Truss Syndrome.

17. Holly, but not ivy.

18. Because Africans do not get black eyes.

19. A reference to the legendary Anglo/German Games of 1944.

On Christmas Day 1944 in North Africa, there was a proposal to repeat
the historic Christmas Day football match which is said to have taken
place between the Germans and English in 1917.

Someone pointed out that, had it not been for the war, there would have
been an Olympic Games in 1944, so an impromptu and unofficial three-day
Olympiad was staged in the desert instead of the football match.

Germany won more gold medals than Britain, but the British always
maintained that not many of the Germans were genuine amateurs.

20. A proposal to give Gibraltar back to the Arabs.

21. The largest private collection of hailstones in the world.

22. Edward Stone (after whom the Eddystone Lighthouse was named).

23. The theory that reincarnation goes both ways in time, and that we
can be reincarnated as something or somebody who has already lived .

24. It is a Latin phrase, used only in the Vatican, meaning "Papal gaffe
damage limitation exercise".

25. It is the only word that rhymes with "mollusc".

26. The honour was repeatedly offered to Alfred Nobel, but he always
turned it down, saying to accept a prize was to be famous for one year
but to found your own prize was to be famous for ever.

27. A squirrel that has forgotten where it hid its store of nuts.

28. A coin which is valueless in its own country but can be used in
quite expensive slot machines in other countries.

29. He claimed that any libel uttered while under hypnosis should not be
admitted as evidence. The court accepted his claim, and he was cleared.

30. The only Norse hero ejected from Valhalla for drunken behaviour