Wordwizard

Yes, after he had beatled off to practise in a cavern.

Good job you didn't call it Gringlish, Hans Joerg -- as everyone knows, that's the English spoken by gringos.

Good question! If the bat played a flute, it would feature in Die Flötistenmaus.

Bob, I feel you are overlooking that wealthy flute-player James Galway who flauts his instrumental prowess.

Bob, Mary Janes are a kind of closed-toed, round-nosed sandal that schoolgirls in pre-sneaker days used to wear until they reached pre-pubescence. It is typical for dolls that are marketed to younger children to be initially wearing Mary Janes. Now, as for spectator pumps, I have never seen those. N...

There is one aspect of this that I find puzzling. If a sniper could target you by the match you used for lighting your cigarette, he must surely also have been able to track your glowing cigarette end?

This seems to me to be yet another demonstration -- if any were needed -- that smoking kills.

Does she then release a self-bleached whale?

Your problem is down to a simple but common spelling error; the word is 'elegiac', not 'elegaic'.

The Cassell Dictionary of Slang states 'etymology unknown' for this word, although it does comment that "Eric Partridge suggests a link to Fanny Hill, the heroine of John Cleland's Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure (1749)." As a name, Fanny is a diminutive of Frances, whose meaning is 'Frankish, French...

You thought it would fade with the parsage of time?

Yes, it's that too, but that is a separate (though not entirely unrelated) sense of the word.

I have an uncle with some experience of by-parse operations.

Er... WoZ, the banana is a herb, not a grass, and belongs to a family of its own (Musaceae) that is different from the grasses (Graminaceae).

I don't think there's any mystery about the origin of this expression, Robert. As Ken has already stated, 'bejabbers', 'bejebees' and 'bejesus' all derive from 'By Jesus!' and are what is known as 'minced [i.e. mealy-mouthed or euphemised] oaths'. These arose at a time when many people regarded it a...

My Chambers 20th C Dictionary gives 'dystopian' as the adjectival form of 'dystopia' (which it defines as 'a place thought of as the opposite to Utopia, i.e. where everything is as bad as possible'). My Websters New Universal Unabridged also has 'dystopian'. So it appears that Whitehead used the med...