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The All New All New Groundspeak UK Pub Quiz


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Posted

FWIW, I asked a work colleague about this. He confirmed Elephant Island but not South Georgia. That said, he related how Shackleton had mistreated the expedition shipwright, Harry McNish, after McNish had questioned some of Shackleton's dodgier decisions, including dragging the lifeboats across the ice earlier. In the end, those who survived owed their lives to the skill and efforts of McNish -- yet he was excluded from those awarded a Medal even though he was probably the real hero of the expedition. If it were not for him, the modifications he made to the boats and equipment, and his continued repair efforts, the entire expedition would surely have perished.

Posted

Thank you for the ding - the expedition story was covered in a TV documentary whose name we are unable to remember but it is the sort of thing we like!

 

Staying with Antarctica for the next question, the Shackleton led expedition was attempting to be the first to cross the continent via the South pole - who led the expedition that eventually succeeded?

Posted (edited)

Thank you for the ding - the expedition story was covered in a TV documentary whose name we are unable to remember but it is the sort of thing we like!

 

Staying with Antarctica for the next question, the Shackleton led expedition was attempting to be the first to cross the continent via the South pole - who led the expedition that eventually succeeded?

 

Amundsen. I seem to recall that his expedition succeeded in part through the very un British action of ... eating the ponies.

(Cue value lasagne joke)

Edited by hal-an-tow
Posted

Thank you for the ding - the expedition story was covered in a TV documentary whose name we are unable to remember but it is the sort of thing we like!

 

Staying with Antarctica for the next question, the Shackleton led expedition was attempting to be the first to cross the continent via the South pole - who led the expedition that eventually succeeded?

 

Amundsen. I seem to recall that his expedition succeeded in part through the very un British action of ... eating the ponies.

(Cue value lasagne joke)

 

Now I've ventured an answer, I looked Amundsen up, and turns out it's even less British than I thought : what they killed and ate along the way was the dogs. They fed them to both the remaining dogs and the expedition members.

Posted

Not Amundsen or Frank Wild

 

We didn't think this question would go on as long as it has, sorry!

 

Here are a couple of hints - the expedition was led by V----- F---- and took place during the International Geophysical year 1957/58

Posted

Not Amundsen or Frank Wild

 

We didn't think this question would go on as long as it has, sorry!

 

Here are a couple of hints - the expedition was led by V----- F---- and took place during the International Geophysical year 1957/58

Just going on the initials the name Vivian Fuchs (spelling may well be wrong there !)pops into my mind.

Posted (edited)

Ernest Shackleton.

 

Because I am new to this, Me N u can post the next question if i'm correct

 

I don't know about the hint, but I asked my dad, (who is a teacher of expeditions') about it, and he said it was Ernest

Edited by curlingfan11
Posted

DING goes to hal-an-tow!

 

Vivian Fuchs was the leader of the 1st expedition to cross Antarctica and incidentally it was also the first to reach the South pole overland since Scott's expedition in 1912!

 

Ernest Shackleton's expedition attempted the crossing but obviously didn't succeed.

 

Edmund Hilary was apparently involved in Fuchs' expedition but in the support team - had to look that up.

Posted

Thanks for the ding - it just goes to show the random things lurking in the brain, I knew the name, and sort of thought it belonged to some kind of explorer.

 

Right-o, total change of subject matter for the next question, something else from the dusty corners of my memory:

How were newts and nicknames made bigger, while adders and aprons both shrank?

Posted (edited)

I have a feeling this might be something about typography and that in the early days, scribes wrote the letter 'n' more compactly and the letter 'a' much wider. In modern type, both letters are approximately the same width and so any word beginning with 'n' may be said to have lengthened and any word beginning with 'a' to have shrunk. -- Just a complete guess with nothing other than gut feeling to back it up!...

Edited by Pajaholic
Posted

I think adders used to be called nadders, and "a nadder" became "an adder". Conversely "an ickname" became "a nickname". The same presumably occurred with ewts and naprons.

 

You got the general idea, so the ding goes to Optimist on the run :D

 

The amphibian was originally 'an ewt' which was run together and sort of re-divided to become 'a newt'

Ditto for 'an ickname', whilst 'a nadder' lost the 'n' from 'nadder' to the a, making 'an adder' . As you guessed napron/apron did the same trick.

That pretty much exhausts my knowledge of linguistics though, and I never could find out why flammable and inflammable mean the same thing. That one still bothers me. Isn't English strange !

Posted (edited)

Inflammable itself is one. Originally, it meant easily set on fire but then the "in" was taken to denote the opposite and so "flammable" came into being. There are many others. For example, "fast" which means both "held in place" and "moving or capable of moving quickly" is one. Recently, colloquial use of words like "bad" to have negative or positive connotation will probably end up in the OED sooner or later!

 

Edited to add another (encountered at work today while validating a work instruction): "Replace". In this case, the original instruction was to "replace an O-ring", which could mean either to fit a new item or to re-use the original. (I edited the instruction to tell the maintainer to "renew the O-ring") ...

Edited by Pajaholic
Posted

FWIW, this came up on a writer's forum some time ago when someone reminded American subscribers that the "octothorpe" is not the GB currency symbol, and asked that they please stop calling it "the pound sign"! The hash symbol is properly called the octothorpe.

Posted

FWIW, this came up on a writer's forum some time ago when someone reminded American subscribers that the "octothorpe" is not the GB currency symbol, and asked that they please stop calling it "the pound sign"! The hash symbol is properly called the octothorpe.

 

DING! Over to you again Lol

Posted

One time motor bike racer, bomber pilot, demolition expert, raconteur and after dinner speaker from Cheshire.

 

Who am I describing?

 

Derek Bates?

I was really looking for his "stage name" by which he is more commonly known.

Posted

One time motor bike racer, bomber pilot, demolition expert, raconteur and after dinner speaker from Cheshire.

 

Who am I describing?

 

Derek Bates?

I was really looking for his "stage name" by which he is more commonly known.

 

Blaster Bates?

Posted

One time motor bike racer, bomber pilot, demolition expert, raconteur and after dinner speaker from Cheshire.

 

Who am I describing?

 

Derek Bates?

I was really looking for his "stage name" by which he is more commonly known.

 

Blaster Bates?

 

Ding for that :)

 

Not wanting to be funny or anything, but you do realise you're not supposed to use google (or any other search engine) for this quiz don't you?

If you knew the answer then I apologise wholeheartedly, but I though it odd that a schoolkid from Canada would have heard of Blaster Bates, let alone recognised him from the description.....

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