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Chrise

I dont like this word for "women" either, though some slang I dont mind.

Most of them aren't rivers - in fact rivers don't even flow through them. They are flooded peat-diggings.

Chrise

Yes thanks. I thought it a poor clue on several counts.

Grunger

I agree but it was nice to see 1A after it was discussed in depth here last year. Rosalind will be pleased no doubt.

i haven't seen rosalind here for a while - i hope that she is ok

Chrise

Yes lets hope so.

...also reported

Paul

"cater to..." in the Times bridge column today. Clearly wrong.

Well noticed, grunger, re 'cater to'. I'd forgive Andrew Robson almost anything , though. Previously Orson said Thackeray used it - I'm not forgiving William Makepeace. 😏

A couple of gems from this week:
'...lay of the land...' (BBC news reporter)

and today on BBC 5 Live
'...Chris Sutton and Robbie Savage could have wrote that...'

Just heard on the BBC news: "48.8 degrees in Sicily - that's almost halfway to boiling point".

Boiling point in centigrade is 100 deg so 48.8 is nearly half that but it's a meaningless statement as it all depends on what scale you use. It's like saying if it was 10 deg yesterday and 20 today then it's twice as hot now.

Consider: 50 in centigrade is equal to 122 deg Fahrenheit but boiling point in Fahrenheit is 212 deg, not 244. So not halfway to boiling any more.

It's worse than that, orson. The only sensible scale for temperature is the Kelvin (absolute) scale, so 48.8C is 321.8, and boiling is 373 - so the first isn't not remotely half of the second.

When my students were doing projects on rates of reaction, it was always difficult to persuade them that 40C wasn't twice as hot as 20C.