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I bet you didnt know that

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As people here work in various jobs / professions they might know things from work or study no one here knows yet. this is what this topic is about.

what do you know that we have never heard of?

Eg: you don't need to be great at maths to be an architect

this is obvious to me but everyone says to me "i wanted to be an architect but i was bad at math,i can barely add"

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Harasrailltub

George W Bush is a Mountain Biking Fanatic , he has a mountain biking trail on his property.

Water John

I thought he was a walker?

Ipso

Water John wrote: »

I thought he was a walker?

Maybe Johnny Walker.

bonzodog2

GolferTennis guy Andy Murray survived the 1996 Dunblane school shooting

fred funk }{

bonzodog2 wrote: »

Golfer Andy Murray survived the 1996 Dunblane school shooting

Golfer?

bonzodog2

fred funk }{ wrote: »

Golfer?

OK ya got me. I'm not a sporty fan!

razorblunt

bonzodog2 wrote: »

GolferTennis guy Andy Murray survived the 1996 Dunblane school shooting

He wasn’t in school that day, neither was his brother Jamie.
I think they were on holiday.

ytpe2r5bxkn0c1

razorblunt wrote: »

He wasn’t in school that day, neither was his brother Jamie.
I think they were on holiday.

Nope!

"Andy's class had been on their way to the gym," Judy Murray told the Radio Times. "That's how close he was to what happened. They heard the noise and someone went ahead to investigate. They came back and told all the kids to go to the headmaster's study and the deputy head's study...Jamie, she said, had been in a prefab classroom when the shooting began. "He told me they thought someone was knocking on the roof with a hammer. They could hear the noise, but you'd never think of gunfire.".

[Deleted User]

These four well-known singles all have one thing in common - none have ever been released on CD / digitally.

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26239933_10159999348730089_3481245463932802014_n.jpg?_nc_cat=111&oh=ed51f948dba64bad6254c2c85a6b83c0&oe=5C5D18D7

mr chips

Professor Moriarty wrote: »

That's not true!

Anders Shy Aircraft wrote: »

The dictionary, open in front of me, says otherwise. "Plural: Knock-ons."

I'm right and the dictionary is wrong.

I bet you didn't know that. :pac:

Quazzie

mr chips wrote: »

I'm right and the dictionary is wrong.

I bet you didn't know that. :pac:

I think your name should be misters chip

harry Bailey esq

mzungu wrote: »

All that talk of Greek got me thinking about Grease.

.

Did you you know that 'going greek' is a term for anal sex and grease is a byword for lube

Reminds me of the scene in 'Last Tango in Paris' where Marlon Brando says to yer one, get the butter....

Esel

harry Bailey esq wrote: »

Did you you know that 'going greek' is a term for anal sex and grease is a byword for lube
Reminds me of the scene in 'Last Tango in Paris' where Marlon Brando says to yer one, get the butter....

Did you hear about the Greek who got a green card for the US but didn't go - because he didn't want to leave his friend's behind.

razorblunt

Anders Shy Aircraft wrote: »

Nope!

Not sure why I thought otherwise, I know folk from Dunblane, I must have misheard something along the way from them. Not that they talk often about that day obviously.

mzungu

harry Bailey esq wrote: »

Did you you know that 'going greek' is a term for anal sex and grease is a byword for lube

I did not, but if I had I would have certainly worded that sentence differently!

mzungu

Con man "Count" Victor Lustig convinced six scrap metal dealers to bid on the Eiffel Tower. Apparently he got the idea when he read an article about how the Eiffel Tower was rusting, and the financial drain of its high maintenance costs and repairs. Since the tower was only supposed to stand for 20 years, some Parisians were saying it should be taken down entirely.

Not one to miss an opportunity, Lustig devised a plan to convince the city's biggest scrap-metal dealers that he was a government director charged with the discreet task of selling off the Eiffel Tower's scrap metal. To keep up pretences, he rented limousines and gave tours of the landmark, and insinuated not only that this was very hush-hush government business, but that he could be bribed into accepting the winning bid.

One dealer was convinced, and paid Lustig $20,000 in cash plus an additional $50,000 to make sure his was the winning bid. Once he had the money, Lustig scarpered off to Austria to lay low while the story broke — but it never did since the dealer was too embarrassed to report Lustig's scam.

Lustig later returned to Paris and gave it another try, but was worried one of the scrap dealers had notified the police. He fled to the U.S. where he was ultimately caught operating another scam. In fact, as I write this I see that during his time in America he managed to scam Al Capone! Wiki entry on it below:

When the Great Depression hit, Lustig concocted a risky scam aimed towards Al Capone, knowing that he faced certain death if he was found to be betraying or sought to ruin his mark. For Lustig, the scam was not a straight-out con, but one designed around a mind game with his target that would get him to part with a small amount of cash. The scheme involved him asking Capone to let him invest $50,000 towards a crooked scam, whereupon he kept the money given to him within a safe deposit box for two months before returning it. When he did, he claimed that the deal had fallen through, but that he intended to return the money, which surprised Capone by the fact he was dealing with an honest man for the first time. At this point, Lustig stung him with a claim that the failure of the deal meant he had no money himself to support him, convincing Capone to give him $5,000 to "tide him over", as Lustig had planned.

harry Bailey esq

mzungu wrote: »

I did not, but if I had I would have certainly worded that sentence differently!

I'd like to subscribe to your newsletter
*strokes chin*

harry Bailey esq

Esel wrote: »

Did you hear about the Greek who got a green card for the US but didn't go - because he didn't want to leave his friend's behind.

Hehehehe

IvyTheTerrific

mzungu wrote: »

Con man "Count" Victor Lustig convinced six scrap metal dealers to bid on the Eiffel Tower....

I love that his name means "funny" in German.

[Deleted User]

Quazzie wrote: »

I think your name should be misters chip

I'll have two curlies-wurly and two whoppers junior for both of these Sergeants Major, please

mr chips

Ok smart alecs, it's just the logic of how English works - which admittedly is often pretty fuzzy. NB DO NOT continue reading if language geekdom is not your thing ...

The term "knock on" is what's known as an open compound. A couple of other examples could be "post office", or "court martial", but there are plenty more. If you need to use the plural form of an open compound and are unsure where to put your letter s, a good rule of thumb is to look for the noun - or where there are two nouns, to look for whichever one is key to the meaning.

There are two nouns in the phrase "post office", so which of them is the key one? Well, the phrase describes a type of office - it could be expressed as "the office of the post", but not as "the post of the office". So the key noun here is office, which means that for the plural we don't say posts office, but post offices.

On the other hand - if two soldiers appear on two different occasions before a court martial, this can be expressed by saying "Two soldiers appeared before the courts martial." Why not "court martials?" Because in this open compound, the noun is court; martial in this instance is an adjective, which is describing a type of court. Therefore, one court martial, but two courts martial.

As an aside, there are also closed compounds in English, where two words have been joined together. One example of a closed compound is the word passerby. The plural is not "passerbys", but "passersby".

However! As I said at the top, the logic of English is often pretty fuzzy. The term "court martials" has been used so often that it has by now appeared in dictionaries as an acceptable alternative form, even though technically it breaks the rules of the language. Another example of this happening is the word "literally" - until recently, (and I'll paraphrase here) this was defined as something which was genuinely, really, factually true and truly factual. However, more recent proliferation of incorrect usage such as "I literally died of embarrassment" - clearly not a genuine, real, factually true or truly factual statement - has resulted in the expansion of the dictionary definition of the word literally to include its use as an emphatic. This is because part of a dictionary's raison d'etre is to reflect current usage.

Ok then, back to rugby terms. In the open compound "knock on", which one is the noun? The answer is the word "knock". Whether it's a knock forward, a knock to the left, a knock to the right or up or down, the singular version is "knock" and the the plural of that noun is "knocks". So the plural of the open compound is indeed "knocks on". However, a dictionary definition may well include the term "knock ons" because - as with "literally" and "court martials" - its changing use has been reflected.

But it's still wrong. So there.

Fourier

mr chips wrote: »

O
On the other hand - if two soldiers appear on two different occasions before a court martial, this can be expressed by saying "Two soldiers appeared before the courts martial." Why not "court martials?" Because in this open compound, the noun is court; martial in this instance is an adjective, which is describing a type of court. Therefore, one court martial, but two courts martial.

I know that the adjective noun order is reversed in "court martial" because it is taken from French during the Norman invasion. Do all open compounds come from French?

mr chips

Interesting question - I wouldn't think so. Knock on doesn't :pac:, for a start - that's "un en-avant", which is a hyphenated compound (rather than an open compound). Life jacket, mobile phone, dinner table ... I suppose while all of these can obviously be translated, you're really asking does the linguistic format derive from French/Latin as opposed to German. I'd be more inclined to think it's due to the latter, seeing as compound words are so central to German. But I couldn't say for sure, so the honest answer is I don't know.

Interestingly, it was Irish monks who introduced the concept of spacing between words - the convention used to be that all the words of a sentence would be written together in one block, but since the holy scripts were written in Latin - a language foreign to them - they started spacing out the words to make things easier. That dates back to a good 1500 years ago, so it predates the "French" the Normans spoke - which wouldn't have been very similar to French as we know it today, more a derivation of a hybridised Latin and dialects local to northern France - not forgetting the Viking influence. Plus wasn't there a stronger influence of French on modern English tracing back to the period of the Restoration? ...

Going back to the spirit of the thread, and speaking of German ... as I said, the use of compound words is both extensive and routine in that language. For example, one of the main political parties there is abbreviated by "SDP". In English, the full version of this would translate as the Social Democratic Party of Germany, but in German the first two words are compounded, so it becomes "Sozialdemokratische Partei Deutschlands".

Compound words in German are often derived from bureaucracy and there have been a number of contenders for the longest one, as from time to time some are officially no longer used. One example of this was the term (deep breath!)

Rindfleischetikettierungsüberwachungsaufgabenübertragungsgesetz*

- which translates as "law for the delegation of monitoring of beef labelling". This was no longer needed after the testing of cattle for BSE was no longer required.
* I freely admit I couldn't remember exactly what that one was, so I had to check!

I'm struggling to remember the longest one I ever encountered when living there, but I think it was along the lines of "the cap-badge of a Danube steamship company captain", which was something like (another deep breath!)

Donaudampfschifffahrtsgesellschaftskapitänsmützenanstecknadel

Hmm - I've just remembered that numbers are also compounded in German. So it occurs to me that the longest word in German may not be possible to define, since it would be infinite as numbers are - unless I've missed a rule for breaking up the way to write really big numbers!

Chancer3001

for some reason in Irish when you put "cupla" in front of a word, meaning a couple of, or a few..... you use the singular.

So its cupla fear instead of cupla fir.

Cupla cailin instead of cupla cailini

(apologies for no fadas on this US laptop)

IvyTheTerrific

If you've ever wondered where the word "storey" comes from, it comes from the Greek word historia meaning story/history. In the middle ages, storey meant a tier of stained glass windows or sculptures on a building (usually a church). The higher a building, the more storeys it had... And eventually it just came to mean a floor of a building.

Capt'n Midnight

mr chips wrote: »

Hmm - I've just remembered that numbers are also compounded in German. So it occurs to me that the longest word in German may not be possible to define, since it would be infinite as numbers are - unless I've missed a rule for breaking up the way to write really big numbers!

The International Union of Pure and Applied Chemistry provides naming conventions that lead to very long compound words.

Which means this is one of the longest words in the English language

It starts off Methionylalanylthreonylserylarginylglycylalanylserylarginylcysteinylproly-
and ends up with -araginylglycylprolylprolylprolylleucine

The formula is for the protein Titin and has 189,819 letters.

Capt'n Midnight

mr chips wrote: »

I'm struggling to remember the longest one I ever encountered when living there, but I think it was along the lines of "the cap-badge of a Danube steamship company captain", which was something like (another deep breath!)

Donaudampfschifffahrtsgesellschaftskapitänsmützenanstecknadel

which leads to
Donaudampfschiffahrtselektrizitätenhauptbetriebswerkbauunterbeamtengesellschaft

Which means "association of subordinate officials of the head office management of the Danube steamboat electrical services"
It was the name of a club in Vienna,

The Pheasant2

NewbridgeIR wrote: »

These four well-known singles all have one thing in common - none have ever been released on CD / digitally.

Do you mean they've never been released digitally as a single? Because I have a Police CD in my car right now with Walking on the Moon on it

mzungu

The Pheasant2 wrote: »

Do you mean they've never been released digitally as a single? Because I have a Police CD in my car right now with Walking on the Moon on it

Aye, that is my reading of it. Realised on vinyl back in the day as a single but not on cd / digital. They do appear on albums and best of compilations digitally etc.

[Deleted User]

The Pheasant2 wrote: »

Do you mean they've never been released digitally as a single? Because I have a Police CD in my car right now with Walking on the Moon on it

You have a Police CD with the Reggatta De Blanc album version of Walking On The Moon on it.

mzungu wrote: »

Aye, that is my reading of it. Released on vinyl back in the day as a single but not on cd / digital. They do appear on albums and best of compilations digitally etc.

What I am getting at this: the single edits of those four songs are still unavailable on CD.

While CD singles were obviously not an option at the time of release, all four bands have released numerous compilation albums (Best Ofs, Greatest Hits, Singles collections) over the years - as well as reissues of albums that originally included these songs. In addition there have been thousands of opportunities to include these single edits on Various Artists compilations over the last 35 years. You must notice that there are new retrospective 1980s compilations released every couple of weeks.

Double Dutch is on the first Now album but when they issued it on CD for the 25th anniversary (and again for the 35th anniversary), they mistakenly used the album version.

Walking On The Moon (and Message In A Bottle) are in the same boat - Police and V/A compilations always use the longer album versions. The single versions of both tracks are both 60 seconds shorter than the LP mixes.

AntMusic likewise - the mix on Kings Of The Wild Frontier is about 25 seconds longer than the 7" and is invariably included everywhere. Once an error is made, it keeps cropping up over and over again.

The version of Once In A Lifetime that we heard on the radio back in 1980 / 81 was more than a minute shorter than the Remain In Light album take.

These aren't obscure songs. They sold by the truckload. The fact that the versions we heard on the radio still haven't made it to CD or iTunes at this point in time is staggering.