Tyne Bridges
MONDAY 17 DECEMBER 2007
KEV’S LITTLE PUZZLE
‘Eleven plus two = twelve plus one’ is, on the face of it, a fairly obvious statement. Except, as Kev took mischievous pleasure in pointing out, there’s something special about it. I know you think I’m joking when I tell you that I puzzled over this one for hours. In fact, I still hadn’t solved it when I went on-air ‘live’ this morning at 0600 and said so. Needless to say, the phones almost burst into flames as several friendly smart-alecks called to tell me how easy and obvious it was. In case the blindingly self-evident eludes you as well as me, the answer is....eleven plus two is an anagram of twelve plus one. See - obvious innit?
PRINTING THE BLOG
Hildie’s story is a salutary reminder that not every instruction given to a computer has the result you wanted or foresaw. She wanted to print off 3 copies of the acknowledgement I made of her contribution, so simply pressed ‘print’ three times and went to make a cup of coffee. As fate - and the user-unfriendly gremlins of computery - would have it, she had actually instructed her computer to print off the entire blog from day one - three times. The entire room was flooded in paper. Bad luck, Hildie. I’m still not sure how best to print off a part of the blog - except, perhaps, to ‘cut and paste’ into a word-processing document and print from there. If you know, please help!
CHRISTMAS
Thanks again for your Christmas cards. I’m sorry I can’t return the favour to everyone but please believe me that your good wishes mean a very great deal to me indeed.
There will be a Nightshift as usual each night through the Christmas and New Year season. I will not be presenting the programme on the morning of Christmas Day because I’ll be on-air ‘live’ that day between 1000 and 1400. I do hope you can join me for at least part of the programme; I’ll try to make Christmas Day as special for you as it will be for me.
My only night off (as such) over the holiday will be on New Year’s morning, when Nick Roberts will be presenting a special ‘live’ celebration Nightshift.
Please remember my ‘appeals’ for the holiday season. Send me as much useless information as you can find. You could be really nasty if you liked; how about interspersing your trivia with facts you’ve made up and challenging me to identify the red herring? Remember, too, that your favourite quotations and aphorisms would be more than welcome.
Finally, if you have any Christmas greeting you’d like me to broadcast - either on the Nightshift or on my special Christmas Day programme, get in touch as soon as you can.
TRIPADVISOR.COM
This paragraph contains a four-letter ‘Anglo-Saxon’ word that is considered ‘rude’ by some people. You have been warned.
Tripadvisor.com is the name of last night’s Nighshift website. What interests me is that it’s mis-spelled. Advisor should be adviser - it’s a simple ‘agent-word’, like ‘drive/driver’, ‘walk/walker’, ‘present/presenter’. What’s odd is that advisor looks right and adviser looks wrong. Peculiar.
There’s a weird little group of English words whose spellings - indeed, the very words themselves - are based on ‘mistakes’. To our Saxon ancestors, peas was a singular word; one peas, two peases (or pease). The Normans, however, understood peas to be a plural (naturally) and thus was born the non-existent word pea.
The most charming example of Norman misunderstanding, though, is the name of a lovely little bird - the wheatear. You may think it got its name from some likeness to an ear of wheat waving in the wind - but it didn’t. To the Saxons, it was a ‘white-arse’ - indeed, it has got a light-coloured rump. Because white-arse ends with an ‘s’ sound, the Normans once again heard this as a plural-sounding word and assumed that there must therefore be a singular; thus white-arse...white-ar......wheatear -the nearest word they could find that made sense!
CONTACT ME
Post comments on this blog or contact me in any one (or more) of these ways....
ian.robinson@bbc.co.uk
text 07786 200954 (while the programme is on-air)
call (between about 0545 and 0630 Monday to Friday) 0191 232 6565
Ian Robinson, The Nightshift, BBC Radio Newcastle, Spital Tongues, Newcastle-upon-Tyne NE99 1RN
NOTE
Please bear in mind that the views expressed in this blog are my own and NOT the views of the BBC.
KEV’S LITTLE PUZZLE
‘Eleven plus two = twelve plus one’ is, on the face of it, a fairly obvious statement. Except, as Kev took mischievous pleasure in pointing out, there’s something special about it. I know you think I’m joking when I tell you that I puzzled over this one for hours. In fact, I still hadn’t solved it when I went on-air ‘live’ this morning at 0600 and said so. Needless to say, the phones almost burst into flames as several friendly smart-alecks called to tell me how easy and obvious it was. In case the blindingly self-evident eludes you as well as me, the answer is....eleven plus two is an anagram of twelve plus one. See - obvious innit?
PRINTING THE BLOG
Hildie’s story is a salutary reminder that not every instruction given to a computer has the result you wanted or foresaw. She wanted to print off 3 copies of the acknowledgement I made of her contribution, so simply pressed ‘print’ three times and went to make a cup of coffee. As fate - and the user-unfriendly gremlins of computery - would have it, she had actually instructed her computer to print off the entire blog from day one - three times. The entire room was flooded in paper. Bad luck, Hildie. I’m still not sure how best to print off a part of the blog - except, perhaps, to ‘cut and paste’ into a word-processing document and print from there. If you know, please help!
CHRISTMAS
Thanks again for your Christmas cards. I’m sorry I can’t return the favour to everyone but please believe me that your good wishes mean a very great deal to me indeed.
There will be a Nightshift as usual each night through the Christmas and New Year season. I will not be presenting the programme on the morning of Christmas Day because I’ll be on-air ‘live’ that day between 1000 and 1400. I do hope you can join me for at least part of the programme; I’ll try to make Christmas Day as special for you as it will be for me.
My only night off (as such) over the holiday will be on New Year’s morning, when Nick Roberts will be presenting a special ‘live’ celebration Nightshift.
Please remember my ‘appeals’ for the holiday season. Send me as much useless information as you can find. You could be really nasty if you liked; how about interspersing your trivia with facts you’ve made up and challenging me to identify the red herring? Remember, too, that your favourite quotations and aphorisms would be more than welcome.
Finally, if you have any Christmas greeting you’d like me to broadcast - either on the Nightshift or on my special Christmas Day programme, get in touch as soon as you can.
TRIPADVISOR.COM
This paragraph contains a four-letter ‘Anglo-Saxon’ word that is considered ‘rude’ by some people. You have been warned.
Tripadvisor.com is the name of last night’s Nighshift website. What interests me is that it’s mis-spelled. Advisor should be adviser - it’s a simple ‘agent-word’, like ‘drive/driver’, ‘walk/walker’, ‘present/presenter’. What’s odd is that advisor looks right and adviser looks wrong. Peculiar.
There’s a weird little group of English words whose spellings - indeed, the very words themselves - are based on ‘mistakes’. To our Saxon ancestors, peas was a singular word; one peas, two peases (or pease). The Normans, however, understood peas to be a plural (naturally) and thus was born the non-existent word pea.
The most charming example of Norman misunderstanding, though, is the name of a lovely little bird - the wheatear. You may think it got its name from some likeness to an ear of wheat waving in the wind - but it didn’t. To the Saxons, it was a ‘white-arse’ - indeed, it has got a light-coloured rump. Because white-arse ends with an ‘s’ sound, the Normans once again heard this as a plural-sounding word and assumed that there must therefore be a singular; thus white-arse...white-ar......wheatear -the nearest word they could find that made sense!
CONTACT ME
Post comments on this blog or contact me in any one (or more) of these ways....
ian.robinson@bbc.co.uk
text 07786 200954 (while the programme is on-air)
call (between about 0545 and 0630 Monday to Friday) 0191 232 6565
Ian Robinson, The Nightshift, BBC Radio Newcastle, Spital Tongues, Newcastle-upon-Tyne NE99 1RN
NOTE
Please bear in mind that the views expressed in this blog are my own and NOT the views of the BBC.
3 comments:
To print one day's blog
At the top of the page to the right hand side of the blog is a green dialogue box nemed 'Blog Archive'. Click on the day's blog that you want to print. It will replace all the past blogs on the left hand side of the page.
You can then print out this single blog as normal
hi ian thought id try to redress the balance from last nights men quote,.. it was all in good humour....
quote... give women an inch they become a ruler... see..
quote...if we open an argument between present and past we find we have lost the future...
winston churchill
Thanks Kev - I hope Hildie reads this!
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