ONE TODAY

Happy Birthday to Vitamin Q! Sorry it has been quieter than normal recently. Holidays and work and so on... full trivial pursuits will resume this week.

 
QUONTINENTAL

Some interesting French, German and Spanish Q words:

1 quolibet - a gibe
2 quincaillière - an ironmongress
3 quelquefois - now and then
4 quoique - although
5 quadrillage - a pattern of squares
6 quignon - a lump of bread
7 quittance - receipt
8 quatorzième - fourteenth
9 quinzaine - a fortnight (despite meaning a set of 15!)
10 quille - a ninepin

1 quengeln - to grizzle like a baby
2 quicklebendig - full of beans
3 Quatscherei - blethers
4 Quetschkommode- box accordion
5 quietschvergnügt - merry, chirpy
6 Quanten - large hooves
7 quieken - to squeal like a mouse
8 Quirl - an egg-whisk
9 Qualle - a jellyfish
10 Quaste - a powder puff

1 quesera - dairymaid
2 quiquiriqui - cock-a-doodle-doo
3 quemado - burnt woodland
4 quiebro - jinking
5 quitanieve - a snow plough
6 quebradura - hernia
7 quitasueno - night worries
8 quijada - jawbone
9 quebrantapiedras - saxifrage
10 quincalla - fancy goods*

*Just what exactly are fancy goods?

 
BIG IN JAPAN

Pop and rock stars of past and present requiring XXL size stage outfits:

1 Barry White
2 Demis Roussos
3 Buster Bloodvessel (Bad Manners)
4 Biggie Smalls
5 Cass Elliot (Mamas and the Papas)
6 Roger Lewis (Inner Circle)
7 The Fat Boys
8 Erik Chandler (Bowling for Soup)
9 Fat Larry (Fat Larry's Band)
10 The Weather Girls
11 David Thomas (Pere Ubu)
12 Big John (Exploited, Nirvana)
13 Divine

More to come... any big suggestions? - much bigger than Meatloaf a must.

 
SIZZLING

The world's hottest hot sauce and pepper extract brands:

1 10,000,000 to 13,000,000 Scoville heat units: Caldera
2 7,100,000: The Source
3 5,500,000: Blair's 5 a.m. Reserve
4 4,000,000: Blair's 4 a.m. Reserve
5 2,000,000: Demon Ichor
6 2,000,000: Blair's 3 am
7 1,500,000: Da Bomb Final Answer
8 1,500,000: Smack My Ass and Call Me Sally ... Chets Gone Mad
9 1,500,000: Pyro Diablo
10 1,000,000: Mad Dog's Revenge
11 1,000,000: Cool Million
12 1,000,000: Gold Cap
13 900,000: Blair's 2 am
14 800,000: Satan's Blood
15 750,000: Unbearable
16 750,000: Habanera 750
17 700,000: Smack My Ass and Call Me Sally ... The Slap Heard Around the World*
18 550,000: Blair's Mega Death
19 500,000: Pure Cap
20 400,000: Hard Time Humble Sauce
21 357,000: 357 Mad Dog Hot Sauce
22 300,000: Dave's Private Reserve
23 283,000 Possible Side Effects
24 250,000: Bobaraosa's Vicious Viper
25 250,000: Dave's Ultimate Insanity Sauce

*The hottest condiment in existence. The ones above it are sold as food additives or pepper extracts, for use in food preparation only. Caldera has enough power to produce heat in over 1 million gallons of salad oil. Tabasco has 2,140 Scoville units.

Source: here

 
SORE THUMBS part 3 - The 70s

Once again, which Number One hit songs contain these unusual words? I've added some clues... 80s and 90s will follow anon. All answers at the end of the August 02 archive.

1 Borneo* (musical masochism)
2 Ancoats* (at easel)
3 bugle (distant drums)
4 daffodils* (and the soppy rest of it)
5 khaki* (show out Kingston style)
6 smog (yellow bird)
7 mules (croaky hard-man)
8 Chaplin* (senior citizen)
9 corkscrew (ie elfin ringlets)
10 Pagliacci (weepy)
11 Telex*# (start the week)
12 slugs*# (jailhouse rock)

*Sorry, quite a few of these may not have been worldwide hits.
#Oddly, both these songs also contain the unusual word 'bullhorn' (US slang for a loudhailer)!

 
WASHED UP

The Wash is a large bay on the East coast of England. These are the sands, sometimes submerged, which form part of it:

1 Peter Black Sand
2 Seal Sand
3 Bulldog Sand
4 Breast Sand
5 Old South
6 Mare Tail
7 Gat Sand
8 Toft Sand
9 Roger Sand
10 Black Buoy Sand
11 Butterwick Low
12 Friskney Flats
13 Wainfleet Sand

 
VITAMIN IQ

An alternative IQ test. Calculate your Vitamin IQ by reading the following fifty words. If you can comfortably say what a word means (eg, it's a city in Mexico, it's the name of a composer, it's a horror film), and the answer agrees with you, award yourself a point. The answers are at the end of the July 03 Vitamin Q archive. An average VIQ is 22. What's yours?

1 Aconcagua
2 Robotnik
3 flanger
4 Sinophobe
5 Tuscaloosa
6 magenta
7 orchidectomy
8 libero
9 Dunga
10 frottage
11 capybara
12 Nanak
13 snafu
14 Mame
15 scrimshaw
16 spelunking
17 yahtzee
18 twofer
19 ocarina
20 Audubon
21 perfecto
22 Tribeca
23 Japheth
24 izzard
25 loosestrife
26 Banquo
27 Stax
28 loess
29 Micah
30 Bharat
31 Pantagruel
32 Razzies
33 Topol
34 merguez
35 Loki
36 curium
37 Megadeth
38 puftaloon
39 globster
40 siskin
41 Perpetua
42 gleet
43 Braque
44 feta
45 Szeged
46 jackalope
47 lumbago
48 dragee
49 Fremantle
50 moshpit

Source: RcL

 
FULL UP

Some archaic words for gluttons:

bellygod / cormorant / glopper / gorbelly / grangousier / greedigut / gundygut / guttler / lurcher / mouncher / panguts / tenterbelly / yaffler

(from The Insomniac's Dictionary' 1986)

The Opies (in the lustrous 'Lore and Language of Schoolchildren') add these which were used in mid-last-century Britain:

gutsy / dustbin / hollow legs / hog / face-packer / glutton / gobble-guts / Gobble Gobble Gertie / gorgey / greedy glutton / greedy-devil / greedy grabs / greedy-hog / greedy-muffin / greedy-pig / guts / guts-ache / gutsy sod / gutter / guzzler / guzzle-guts / hungry guts / Hungry Horace / piggy / pig-hog / piganog / pig-bin / rumble tummy...

...and add these nicknames for the overweight:

ton of flesh / bacon bonce / slobber chops / back end of a bus / barrage balloon / barrel-belly / barrow-guts / big-belly-bump / Billy Bunter the Second / blood tub / bouncer / Buster / chubby / chunky / Crystal Jellybottom / diddle diddle dumpling / Falstaff / fat belly / fat duck / Fatty Harbuckle / flab / football / glutton / grub-tub / guts / hammy bones / jelly-belly / jelly-wobble / Jumbo / lumpy / lump of lardy / piggy / pillar-box / podge / porker / porridge / pud / plum-pudding / pudding-pie / rubber-guts / sausage / slob / slug / steam-roller / swell-hide / tank / human tank / ten-ton / tubs / tubby / Two-Ton Tessy / Bessy Bunter / Tubbelina / Fatima

..to which I can add, lard-arse, gannet, porker, plumper, locust, trencherman...and more to come no doubt.

Source: as listed

 
KHALSA BUSINESS

The five symbols of the Sikh religion:

1 kirpan (a dagger)
2 kara (an iron wristband)
3 kesh (uncut hair)
4 kacha (short trousers)
5 kunga (a comb worn in the hair)

These symbols, the 5Ks, have been been styled by the London based poet Daljit Nagra as the five Bs: 'blade, bangle, barnet, boxers and brush'.

 
FIGHTING TALK

14 taunts used during playground fights in 1950s London:

1 bash him one!
2 bash the daylights out of him!
3 bat him on the nob!
4 biff him on the boko!
5 bruise him!
6 clock him!
7 dong him on the dome!
8 get him in the guts!
9 give 'im a crafty clip in the ear 'ole!
10 go on, lam into him!
11 mash him!
12 slosh him on the dial!
13 sock him on the kisser!
14 get in and kill him!

Source: The Lore and Language of Schoolchildren (Opie & Opie 1959)

 
A LIST

My suggestion for a compilation CD of songs with one-word titles beginning with A:

1 America (Simon & Garfunkel)
2 Airwaves (Thomas Dolby)
3 Almost (OMD)
4 Afraid (Nico)
5 Alison (Elvis Costello)
6 Almaz (Randy Crawford)
7 Allelujah (Fairground Attraction)
8 Aquarius (Boards of Canada)
9 Avenue (Saint Etienne)
10 Andmoreagain (Love)
11 Anyone (Yazoo)
12 Arkle (It's Jo and Danny)
13 Andalucia (Gordon Grahame)
14 And (Microdisney)
15 Angie (The Rolling Stones)
16 Armour (The Passage)
17 Avalon (Roxy Music)
18 Atmosphere (Joy Division)
19 Asleep (The Smiths)

Source: RcL

 
FAME

The 25 most famous celebrities in 2003, according to the Forbes list:

1 Jennifer Aniston
2 Eminem
3 Tiger Woods
4 Steven Spielberg
5 Jennifer Lopez
6 Paul McCartney
7 Ben Affleck
8 Oprah Winfrey
9 Tom Hanks
10 The Rolling Stones
11 Will Smith
12 The Osbournes
13 Michael Jordan
14 Mike Myers
15 J K Rowling
16 Nicole Kidman
17 George Lucas
18 Eddie Murphy
19 Michael Schumacher
20 Jim Carrey
21 Julia Roberts
22 Shaquille O'Neal
23 Tom Clancy
24 David Letterman
25 Matthew Perry

Source: www.forbes.com : judged on a mix of wealth and media coverage

 
I HAVE NO GUN BUT I CAN SPIT

Ten bad-mannered creatures which spit:

1 Some walruses spit jets of water into sand banks to loosen clams and other shellfish.
2 Spitting cobras don't wait to bite, instead sending a spray of strong venom at their enemy.
3 Llamas spit at each other to enforce territorial boundaries.
4 Dromedaries do this too, but mostly to claim rights on food.
5 The giraffe has paste-like saliva which it uses to spit on thorns, easing chewing and digestion.
6 Many cats will spit as part of their limited but generally successful arsenal to frighten dogs and other predators. Animals such as ferrets will also act this way.
7 The archer fish overcomes the mathematics of perspective and shoots a stream of water at insects above the surface.
8 The spitting spider, from the south-west USA, coats its prey with poisonous spittle to overpower it.
9 Flamingos eat by supping mouthfuls of water, combing out the food and spitting out the residue.
10 The white-nest swift, or grey-rumped swiftlet, uses only its own saliva with which to hold its nests together. These are the highly prized nests used in authentic bird's-nest soup. Its cousin, the swallow, by nature, does not spit.

Source: various

 
TOWN CRIERS

20 UK place names which are also personal names:

1 Dudley
2 Keith
3 Barry
4 Douglas
5 Shirley
6 Moira
7 Maud
8 Trevor
9 Arnold
10 Beverley
11 Clint
12 Sandy
13 Craig
14 Barney
15 Cliff
16 Gordon
17 Martin
18 Leslie
19 Ashley
20 Charles

Source: sent in by Neil Henry. Thanks.

 
NEST PLEASE

The world's rarest birds:

1 Marianas mallard
2 Kaual O'o
3 Chatham Island black robin
4 Mauritius parakeet
5 Japanese crested ibis
6 Mauritius kestrel
7 Ivory-billed woodpecker
8 Imperial woodpecker
9 Madagascar sea eagle
10 Aldabra brush warbler
11 California condor
12 Puerto Rican parrot
13 Lord Howe island wood rail
14 New Zealand black stilt
15 Kakapo
16 Seychelles magpie robin
17 Rodrigues brush warbler
18 Okinawa woodpecker
19 White-breasted silvereye
20 Mauritius pigeon
21 Chatham Island oystercatcher
22 Seychelles black paradise flycatcher
23 Chatham Island plover
24 Noisy scrub-bird
25 Hawaiian crow
26 Atitlan grebe
27 Kabylian nuthatch
28 Whooping crane
29 Rodrigues fody
30 St Lucia parrot
31 Hooded grebe
32 Seychelles imperial eagle
33 Imperial parrot
34 Cahow
35 Short-tailed albatross

All estimated to have between two and two hundred remaining specimens in the wild.

Source: International Council for Bird Protection

 
MORE SORE THUMBS Part 1 - the 60s

I'm compiling a list of 'unusual words in the lyrics of Number 1 hit songs'. You can find the first part here, with new clues, and the 1960s part below, with the song-title answers for both at the end of the August 02 archive. These are tough, so I've added clues in brackets. So which 60s No 1s include the words...

1 socks (CLUE: holy socks?)
2 merry-go-round* (no socks!)
3 lulu (beach babe)
4 playmate* (on a horse)
5 Clyde (Middle Eastern reggae)
6 snitch (Mersey bribing)
7 seasick (with all those virgins)
8 paraffin* (death of a Scouse chemist)
9 farmyard (cock rock?)
10 embassy (Euro chic)
11 acorns (talking bagism)
12 tavern (getting nostalgic)

Well done if you get five or more. The * ones may not be so familiar outside the UK. Look out for 70s, 80s and 90s soon.

 
Hello and welcome to Vitamin Q, a jarful of tongue-zinging paratactical sherbet...

Just to remind you: this sort-of-a-blog belongs to Roddy Lumsden, a puzzle writer and poet from Scotland now living in Bristol in England. I post trivia lists, curiosities and fragments which please me as a lover of the inconsequential. They tend to reflect my interests which include pop, nature, words, Scotland, TV, food, folklore and literature. I post a few items most weeks, so do bookmark* and return. There's a huge archive to the left too.

*If you forget to do this, and want to get back here, just type Vitamin Q or vitaminq into Google - you'll find me.

 
FIFTEEN TO ONE AND ALL

Fifteen-letter words in fairly common use:

1 straightforward
2 appropriateness
3 electromagnetic
4 rationalisation
5 dessertspoonful
6 undistinguished
7 entrepreneurial
8 decontamination
9 individualistic
10 professionalism
11 distinguishable
12 unsophisticated
13 notwithstanding
14 unsubstantiated
15 misapprehension
16 comprehensively
17 dissatisfaction
18 experimentation
19 gastroenteritis
20 unwholesomeness
21 confidentiality
22 physiotherapist
23 contemperaneous
24 condescendingly
25 disrespectfully
26 resourcefulness
27 heterosexuality
28 intellectualise

Source: various

 
52 SIP UP

For starters, here are 52 soups of the world:

1 Bahamas - conch chowder
2 Nigeria - egusi soup
3 Romania - bors de berbec (sour mutton broth)
4 France - crème Normande
5 Venezuela - chipe criollo (spiced chicken)
6 Egypt - milookhia (green herb soup)
7 Spain - gazpacho (chilled tomato)
8 Libya - shourba bil hout (haddock and tomato)
9 Slovakia - drstova polevka (tripe)
10 USA - filet gumbo (spicy meat / fish and okra)
11 Thailand - tom yam goong (spicy prawn broth)
12 Trinidad - breadfruit soup
13 Ireland - yellow broth
14 Morocco - harira (lamb and lentils)
15 China - tang mein (noodles)
16 Russia - borshch (beetroot)
17 Hawaii - Portuguese bean soup
18 Indonesia - sayur oelih
19 Italy - stracciatelle (egg broth)
20 Argentina - sopa de Puerta Madryn (mussels and wine)
21 Cameroon - ndole soup
22 India - mullagathanni (spicy meat soup)
23 New Zealand - toheroa soup (shellfish)
24 Mexico - corn and poblano soup
25 Germany - Frankfurter Linsensuppe
26 Greece - avgolémono (egg and lemon)
27 Georgia - kharcho (beef soup)
28 England - brown windsor (beef and vegetables)
29 Jamaica - mannish water (goat head soup)
30 Czech Republic - fish soup with dumplings
31 Vietnam - mang tay cua (asparagus and crabmeat)
32 Japan - tsumire-jiru (sardine ball broth)
33 The Philippines - sinigang (sour broth)
34 Turkey - mussel and harissa soup
35 Ukraine - krupnik (barley broth)
36 Haiti - soupe joumou (squash)
37 Ghana - spiced okra soup
38 Korea - yuk gae jung (spicy beef and ferns)
39 Austria - Biersuppe
40 Slovenia - chick pea and smoked sausage soup
41 Iran - aash-e anaar (meat and pomegranate)
42 Brazil - canja (chicken)
43 Lebanon - chilled cucumber and prawn
44 Switzerland - Kuttelsuppe (tripe and vegetables)
45 Portugal - caldo verde (cabbage and potato)
46 Jordan - labenaya (spinach and yoghurt)
47 Bulgaria - tarator (chilled yoghurt and cucumber)
48 Burundi - elephant soup
49 Hungary - halászlé (fish and peppers)
50 Scotland - cullen skink (cream of smoked haddock)
51 Cuba - guiso de garbanzos (chick peas)
52 Singapore - bak ku the (pork rib tea soup)

Source: various

 
INFAMY! INFAMY!

The 10 actors who starred in the most 'Carry On...!' films:

1 Kenneth Williams - 25
2 Joan Sims - 24
3 Charles Hawtrey - 23
4 Sid James - 19
5 Kenneth Connor - 17
6 Peter Butterworth - 16
7 Hattie Jacques - 14
8 Bernard Bresslaw - 14
9 Jim Dale - 11
10 Peter Gilmore* - 11

*Less known than the others, Gilmore often played the straight man, eg dashing young doctor.

Bubbling under: Patsy Rowlands, Barbara Windsor (both 9), Jack Douglas (8), Terry Scott (7)

 
THAT'S EASY FOR YOU TO SAY

A dozen tongue-twisters translated from their original languages:

1 Robespierre, the initiator of the Terror, considered it a horrible mistake to sprinkle verdigris on a rare brown green lizard (Italian)
2 The Useful Lady of the West was 44 years old at the time of her death (Mandarin)
3 Susan locked the chicks' cage (Tagalog)
4 Alli banged the beaver with a folder (Finnish)
5 An adult boxer is washing trousers (Norwegian)
6 Put the sour vegetables in the pocket of the policeman (Arabic)
7 The polecat rolled down and ruptured his larynx (Xhosa)*
8 Twenty dwarfs were demonstrating handstands, ten in the closet, ten on the sandy beach (German)
9 Rain, rain, the frog doesn't have any ears (Czech)
10 My aunt offered my uncle some pickle in a silver spoon (Punjabi)
11 Watermelon jam competition (Afrikaans)
12 The emperor was combing his wife (Polish)

This (Iqaqa laziqikaqika kwaze kwaqhawaka uqhoqhoqha) is often said to be the hardest to say of all.

Source: sent in to www.uebersetzung.at