Brain Training – Hello 208

There’s been a lot of emphasis recently on Brain Training, sharpening up your grey matter and keeping it in tiptop condition, so we’ve got some challenging cerebral exercises for you – what we call the Gym of the Mind.

So hitch a ride on the Brain Train and don’t get left behind!

The word train comes from the Latin tragere, to pull, and has several meanings which are all derived from this sense.

To instruct or discipline comes from the sense of ‘draw out and manipulate in order to bring to a desired form’. The railway train comes from the sense of a vehicle that pulls other carriages behind.

Train is also a retinue or procession or the trailing part of a skirt. A trainer can be a running shoe, an athletic coach or a racehorse tutor.

The world’s first fare-paying rail passengers travelled in a carriage drawn by horse, on the The Swansea and Mumbles Railway in South Wales in 1804, and since then, our English language has incorporated many expressions involving train travel.

To go off the rails is to become mad or disordered, like a train that gets derailed, as opposed to getting on the right track.  To ride the gravy train means to get paid for not doing much and comes from ‘gravy’ meaning ‘an unexpected bonus’.

All Aboard is what the train conductor used to cry out as a warning when the train was about to leave the station. When steam trains were used, full steam ahead came to mean ‘with all possible energy and enthusiasm’.  And to get up steam is to take off quickly.

In the days when the railway tracks divided a town, the poor were said to come from the wrong side of the tracks. To have a one-track mind means to be obsessed with a single idea or subject.

So why not climb aboard our Lovatts Brain Train for the ride of your life!

Happy Puzzling!