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							. This word comes from the Greek word meaning "Ten Thousand". However,
even the old greeks used that word to mean "countless", or "a very great,
but indefinite number", and that's what it means in English. What's the
word?

2. This word originated from the low german / dutch word for "fool" or
"simpleton", and has been around in various forms since the 15th century.
In America, the word came to be applied to carnival freaks around the
1950s. Around the late 1970s and later, it began to be used to describe
highly skilled people who had excellent technical skills, but no social
skills at all. OK, easy enough now. What's the word?

3. This word was coined by the Macedonian Greeks who colonized and ruled
Egypt after Alexander the Great conquered it. It meant "the writing of
the priests", to distinguish it from "the writing of the people"
(demotic), the script used by the common people. Again a sitter. What's
it?

4. Sigmund Freud, in his 1915 work "Three Essays on Sexuality", described
five stages in personality development.


* The first stage - "Oral" is where a baby derives maximum pleasure from
being breast fed. * [the second phase is the answer] * The last three
phases are the "phallic", "latency" and "genital" phases.

Freud believed that neurotic and repressed personalities stay stuck in
the second phase, without going on to reach the final (and "healthy")
genital phase. Characteristics of such a personality is that he is
exccessively neat, fussy, and tends to split hairs / be extremely picky
etc. The name he gave this second phase has passed into common American
slang to describe such persons. What?

5. The ARPANET funded Project MAC (which led to the development of
MULTICS - which in turn inspired Unix) was led by Prof Fernando J Corbato
on the IBM 7094 computer in 1963. Prof Corbato first devised the concept
(now widely used in server operating systems) of "a continuously running
process that stays in the background". He named it after "an imaginary
agent which worked tirelessly in the background to sort molecules of
different speeds", theorized by 19th century physicist James Clerk
Maxwell. What's the word?

6. In medieval England, this was a form of tax from which normally nobody
was exempt. Anybody who managed to escape from paying it was said to have
gone ____ ____. Now the phrase means "to completely avoid the
consequences of / escape punishment for your actions".

7. Back in the days of the wild west, "gringo" (white) cowboys who went
south of the border to Mexico often got arrested there for being drunk
and disorderly, if not for other reasons. So, they were tried in court
and thrown in jail. The mexican spanish word for "judgement" / "court
house" is "Juzgado". Mispronunciation (or rather, drunken slurring) of
this spanish word by the arrested cowboys led to a rather common American
slang meaning Jail. What is this word? [ps: Those inclined to crack this
question from the first principles can try the spanish pronunciation of
Juzgado, perhaps after sinking a few shots of tequila ]


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Answers to Quiz #188

1. Myriad (from the greek Myrioi)

2. Geek (old german Geck / Gecke)

3. Hieroglyphic (or more accurately, Heiratic - the written form of this
script. Hieroglyphic was the version of the script carved on pyramid
walls

4. "Anal Retentive". During toilet training, the child notices that his
parents become very happy when he "does his business". So, he derives
pleasure from deliberately retaining his feces instead of passing it out,
teasing his parents.

5. Daemon. Even more interesting - this grew out of an earlier project by
Prof Corbato to develop a timesharing system on the IBM 7090, because the
president of IBM, who raced yachts, immediately wanted a program
calculating the handicaps of various yachts in a race to be run. This led
to the computer's operator having to stop midway a very long and complex
program, and start again from scratch after the president's yacht race
calculations had been run. With daemons, the important job would just be
pushed to the "background" and told to continue execution, while the
yacht race program would execute in the "foreground".

6. Scot Free. The "Scot" - from old norse "Skattr" / icelandic "Skot",
meant "treasure, contribution". Hence also the old term "to pay scot and
sot"

7. Hoosegow. 'Juzgado' is pronounced like "hooz-gao", the last two
syllables being slurred into the diphthong "ao".


 The History and rules of which sport are described in a book by
Kenilworthy Whisp?
quidditch

."These days, it seems like any idiot with a laptop can write a
management book and earn a million dollars. I'm trying to do the same"
are the starting lines of which book?
dilbert principle --scott adams


 In the olden days, whenever there was a mutiny in a ship, the
sailors
 > used to intimate the captain of the ship by a letter. The people who
 > were party to the mutiny used to sign the letter. However they did
not
 > sign their names one by one serially instead they used to write
their
 > names in a circle so that incase the mutiny was salked, the leader
 > would not be identified. This gave rise to a famous two word phrase.
 > What?
 > -Round Robin.

In the earlier days, a hole was cut in the turf. This hole played a
major
part in the rules of early cricket, as the batman had to place his bat
in
this hole on completion of a 'notch'or run. In order to get the batsman
out
the wicketkeeper had to put the ball in the hole before the batsman
could
reach it with his bat. This however led to serious hand injuries and
was
eventually superseded by the batsman having to touch a stick held by
the
umpire. This gave rise to what in modern day cricket?-the popping
crease