Nowadays, many households don’t have the time or energy to cook those old-fashioned dishes. We can buy any Christmas goodies in the supermarket all ready to eat. The tree is often an artificial one, to make life easier. Yet it’s not easier, because we spend so much time shopping, for various treats and for presents.

It’s a sign of the times, it’s happening everywhere and it’s no good moaning about the good old days, I know. But wouldn’t it be fun to have an old-time Christmas once again? One tradition I remember is everyone in the family taking a turn stirring the mixture, for the cake.

Another one was decorating the tree together and on Christmas Day, playing board games, or doing the holiday crossword in the paper, everyone calling out clues.

We also went to Midnight Mass on Christmas Eve, something we haven’t done for many years now. It was exciting as a child to be allowed to stay up so late. But if my parents were hoping it would make us sleep in the next morning, they were sorely disappointed.

Of course life wasn’t perfect in those days, especially when one of the tree lights didn’t work and tempers got a little frayed, or when Uncle Bob had too much to drink and knocked over the Scrabble board. Or the Christmas tree.

However you spend your Christmas, I wish you all a well-deserved break, and hope you find some of the magic of the season still exists in your household.

From everyone here at Lovatts, we wish you a…

Happy Christmas!

One of the joys of living in this day and age is that we don’t have to wear restrictive clothing any more. Gone are the corsets for women, while the collar and tie for men are rarely worn outside of business hours. When I was growing up, my father wore a collar and tie every day, even on holidays!

The word collar comes from the Latin collum meaning ‘neck’ and refers to the band attached to a shirt or dress that wraps around the neck. Or it may be a detachable band, like the clerical collar.

Collars were probably first used thousands of years ago, to domesticate animals and to subjugate slaves, but the shirt collar originated from the ruffle created by the drawstring at the neck of the chemise, an undershirt which was worn to save having to launder the outer clothes frequently.

Many different forms evolved, eg the Elizabethan ruff favoured by men and women such as Queen Elizabeth.

Later, many of the collars, such as the Eton collar, were high, stiff and buttoned, and very uncomfortable. The writerHG Wells, in his 1902 book Kipps, commented on stand-up collars that ‘they made the neck quite sore and left a red mark under the ears’.

Sailors were luckier, because the sailor collar is more comfortable with a deep V-neck in front and square at the back. The mandarin collar is a small upright collar based on the traditional Manchu garment while the Peter Pan collar is small and round-cornered.

The clerical collar, a white band of plastic or cotton, has evolved from vestments worn by priests of the early Christian church. Sometimes the collar is in the form of a vestigial tab, a square cutout in the shirt collar, often known as a Roman collar.

Collars were often used to symbolise rank and wealth, as you see from this verse of Robert Burns:
“His locked, lettered, braw brass collar
Shewed him the gentleman and scholar.”
In this case, ‘he’ was a dog, and collars have been used on dogs since at least the days of the Egyptian empire, when the dog was highly regarded and purebred dogs wore jewelled collars. In Britain, shepherd dogs wore spiked collars to protect them from wolves.

The colour of the collar is used as a political term to indicate the sort of work the wearer does. Blue-collar workers perform manual labour, white-collar workers usually work in offices and green-collar workers are in environmentally friendly jobs. Black collars are for miners and oil workers, and gold collars are supposedly worn by doctors, lawyers and other highly skilled professionals. There’s even the frayed-collar workers, the working poor on a minimum wage.

So don’t get hot under the collar if you get collared by somebody – maybe for having lipstick on your collar (the title of Dennis Potter’s famous musical TV mini-series).

Happy Puzzling!

Wife once meant woman, such as in midwife or fishwife, and only came to mean married woman in relatively recent times. Lady comes from Old English hlafdige meaning mistress of a household or wife of a lord, but it literally means one who kneads bread, from hlaf – loaf and dige maker of dough.

Maiden meant young girl or spinster (old maid) and comes from the German mädchen meaning girl. The abbreviation maid which was used in names such as Maid Marian, now generally means a hotel cleaner. Maid of honour originally meant unmarried lady of noble birth who attends a queen or princess but eventually came to mean chief bridesmaid.

Bride comes from the Gothic word root brubs which meant daughter-in-law, because of the ancient custom of a married woman going to live with her husband’s family. The only newly-wed female in a household would be the new daughter-in-law. It may even be related to the word root bru which gives us brew, or make broth, because this was the job of the daughter-in-law. Aren’t you glad that some customs have changed?

We don’t often hear the word uxorious, which means being excessively fond of your wife. But there’s also a word for the murder of your wife – uxoricide.

Happy puzzling!

Another proverb goes If you’re lucky enough to be Irish, then you’re lucky enough. This comes from the fact that Irish people are considered luckier than others. When you look at history and the way that Ireland has been invaded for centuries you wonder about luck but perhaps the fact that the Irish have triumphed over adversity so well is why they’re considered lucky. When Irish immigrants arrived in America, some struck gold while working on the goldfields which was put down to luck rather than hard work, by other envious miners.

Luck is a popular theme for proverbs. A proverb is a short, memorable statement that contains advice, prediction or a warning. Proverbs convey words of wisdom and had to be easy to remember as they were originally handed down orally from one generation to the next. Proverbs can be inspirational, motivational and wise, although don’t blame me if they don’t ring true – they’re often wishful thinking instead. You might like to keep the following in mind next time you submit your crossword entries.

A person does not seek luck, luck seeks the person (Turkish proverb)
He that dares not venture must not complain of ill luck (Danish proverb)
Luck is like having a rice dumpling fly into your mouth (Japanese proverb)
Better an ounce of luck than a pound of gold (Yiddish proverb)

If you’re the superstitious type, you could try hanging a horseshoe above your door, crossing your fingers or picking up a penny. Although if you’re tempted to wear a rabbit’s foot to bring you luck, remember it didn’t work for the rabbit.

If Lady Luck still hasn’t visited, throw a pinch of salt over your shoulder or knock on wood. Don’t walk under a ladder, break a mirror or let a black cat cross your path, and you never know your luck, you might hit the jackpot.

Happy Puzzling!

Have you ever wondered why some people get over an argument quickly while others remain in a bad mood for days? According to the Journal of Biological Psychiatry, scientists at Harvard University have discovered that the qualities required to bounce back after a fight are controlled in the very front of the brain (known as the prefrontal cortex) right below the forehead.

On exam­ination, they found that those whose prefrontal cortex was the most active were the ones most likely to forgive and forget. They were also less likely to replay the argument over and over in their heads or to seek solace in alcohol.

How do you activate your prefrontal cortex?
Amazingly enough, the scientists suggest that putting your mind to crosswords, sudoku or other puzzles can actually incline you to kiss and make up.

So while chocolates and flowers are the traditional ways for couples to make up after a row, maybe doing a crossword together would produce a better result and promote harmony.
The prefrontal cortex is also responsible for mediating conflicting thoughts, making choices between right and wrong and predicting future events. It is the area that controls qualities such as general intelligence and personality.

It’s also widely believed that the size and number of connections in the prefrontal cortex relate directly to the ability to perceive and feel things, as the prefrontal cortex in humans occupies a far larger percentage of the brain than any other animal. The theory goes that as the brain has tripled in size over 5 million years of human evolution, the prefrontal cortex has increased in size sixfold.

As a puzzler, you are constantly activating your prefrontal cortex, and this may well be reflected in the way you react to the world around you. So keep puzzling, you’re doing yourself a big favour!

Happy Puzzling!

“Am going to cross the Pacific on a wooden raft to support a theory that the South Sea islands were peopled from Peru. Will you come? Reply at once.’’

This was the invitation that Thor Heyerdahl, leader of the Kon-Tiki expedition, sent to Norwegian resistance fighter Knut Haugland. Haugland was to organise and sustain radio communications during the long drift across the Pacific Ocean from South America to the Polynesian Islands, a journey to prove Heyerdahl’s theory that Polynesia was not first settled by sailors from Indonesia, but by South American Indians crossing the oceans on primitive sea craft, following the winds and currents.

The six-man crew left Callao, Peru on the 28th April 1947 on a raft called the Kon-Tiki, built using balsa logs bound together with hemp ropes. The raft was named after the Inca sun god, Viracocha who was believed to have created the sun and the moon on Lake Titicaca. According to Inca legend, Viracocha walked on the waves of the ocean across the Pacific towards the setting sun, promising to return one day.

The crew sailed the raft for 101 days before striking a reef at Raroia in the Tuamotu Islands on the 7th August 1947. During the journey they drank water stored in bamboo tubes and ate coconuts, sweet potatoes, fruit and the fish they caught. A tiny 6 watt transmitter and makeshift antennas raised by kites or weather balloons kept the crew in touch with the world. They even managed to wish King Haakon a happy 75th birthday!
This expedition also allowed Heyerdahl to conquer his fear of water, developed as a child after he fell through ice in Norway and nearly drowned.

After leading an extraordinary life, Heyerdahl died in April 2002 at the age of 87. Knut Haugland was the last surviving member of the crew, losing his battle with cancer on Christmas day 2009.
Although Heyerdahl did prove that the ancient Peruvians could have reached Polynesia via the ocean, his theory never gained acceptance by anthropologists.

So next time you come across one of our crossword clues such as ‘Thor Heyerdahl’s raft’ (3-4), ‘Kon-Tiki’s captain, … Heyerdahl’, ‘Explorer, Thor …’ or ‘Norwegian raft expedition leader, … Heyerdahl’, you’ll know about this brave man and his daring adventure.

Happy puzzling!

As the world around us grows and changes, so do the languages we use. Technological advances, scientific discoveries, environmental awareness, politics and the world of fashion and pop culture are constant sources for our ever-increasing vocabulary.

As we gain new knowledge, new terms and concepts are created. Some become accepted and enter our language after being used by the public over time; others don’t survive long enough. The term for a recently coined word or phrase is a neologism. The word comes from the Greek neo (new) and logos (word).
Just as neologisms enter our language, old words take on new meaning or context and others leave our language. The definition in the Collins Dictionary for the word document now includes ‘a piece of text stored in a computer as a file for manipulation by document processing software’, and the word traffic now also means ‘the aggregate volume of messages transmitted though a communications system in a given period’.

Words that are no longer commonly used are called archaisms. Some examples of words that have been lost in time are blive (right away), huderon (a lazy person), ostrobogulous (unusual or interesting), rhathymia (light-heartedness) and skibility (the power of knowing).

The use of archaic words or expressions is called gadzookery, from the exclamation gadzooks! This is most likely a shortening of ‘God’s hooks’, referring to the nails of the crucifixion.

So, blive! blive! Don’t be a huderon and with your skibility, mayst thou enjoy our ostrobogulous clues with rhathymia.

Happy puzzling!

Since the ancient times of the Greeks, owls have been perceived as being wise.

Athena, The Greek goddess of wisdom is often depicted with an owl perched on her head or on one of her shoulders, symbolising knowledge and scholarship. Athena and her ‘Little Owl’ appear on opposite sides of ancient Athenian coinage. The Latin name for Little Owl, Athene noctua translates to ‘Athena’s Night’ or ‘Athena of the Night’.

In Hindu Mythology, the Goddess of Wealth, Lakshmi has an owl as her vehicle. In Bengal she is worshipped on the brightest night of the year. It is believed that on this night she, along with the great white owl, descends to Earth and takes away the darkness of poverty, stagnation, anger and laziness from our lives.  In early Indian folklore, owls represent wisdom and helpfulness and have powers of prophecy.

Owls are also popular figures in literature. They pop up in Shakespeare’s works as well as in Aesop’s fables where animals go to wise old owls for advice. A.A. Milne’s owl in Winnie-the-Pooh has ‘the gift of brains’ and offers advice, anecdotes and opinions to the residents of the 100 Acre Wood. In J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter series, the wizards each own an owl for carrying messages, packages and brooms.

The nursery rhyme ‘A Wise Old Owl’ refers to the traditional image of owls as the symbol of wisdom:

A wise old owl lived
in an oak
The more he saw
the less he spoke
The less he spoke
the more he heard.
Why can’t we all be
like that wise old bird?

Today, a person who appears wise or serious is said to be owlish or have owl-like characteristics. Owls are popular logos for institutions of learning and are included in the crest of arms of many universities. An owl is the unofficial mascot of the high-IQ society Mensa. Collective nouns for owls include ‘a parliament of owls’ or ‘a wisdom of owls’.
The truth is, research shows that a bird’s intellect is tied to how big its brain is compared to its body, which means owls in their own right aren’t particularly clever.

In fact, a goose has a larger brain than an owl, although I can’t imagine ‘as wise as a goose’ catching on.
Can you?

Happy puzzling!

Does your name come with a description?  History has given forenames many a soubriquet which makes us curious about their origins.

Some are easy to work out. Doubting Thomas came from the dubious apostle who did not believe that Jesus had arisen from the dead until he saw him with this own eyes. Plain Jane probably comes from Charlotte Bronte’s classic novel Jane Eyre, in which Jane attends a school that enforces plainness among its students.

When the revolving server became popular, it was known as a Lazy Susan, Susan being a generic name for a servant, while Simple Simon, meaning a gullible person, comes from the popular nursery rhyme.

Peeping Tom, meaning a voyeur, comes from the legend of Lady Godiva. To persuade her husband the Earl of Mercia to abolish the crippling taxes of the people of Coventry, she rode naked through the streets of town, first ordering everyone to stay indoors and shut their windows. Only Tom the tailor disobeyed – he looked at her and was struck blind (but the Earl of Mercia DID abolish the taxes).

A Smart Alec is a person considered irritating by their know-all attitude, and possibly comes from a resourceful 19th century thief called Alex Hoag who outsmarted himself in the end and got caught. A similar character is a Clever Dick, also irritatingly knowledgeable, and possibly comes from Dick Whittington, a British folk hero, although Dick was a common name so it could have been any number of people.

Australian boxer Larry Foley never lost a fight and retired at 32, collecting a purse of £1,000 for his final fight, so no wonder we say Happy as Larry.

Old Nick, another name for the devil, possibly came from the name Nickel, a perfidious mountain demon in German folklore.

Some say that Jolly Roger, the pirate flag, comes from the French words jolie rouge meaning ‘pretty red’ but in the Elizabethan era, Roger was a slang term for vagrants. There’s another theory that Jolly Roger is a corruption of the name of a Tamil pirate Ali Raja.

Big Bertha was the nickname given to a heavy mortar-like howitzer used by Germany during WWI. It was named after the owner of the Krupp industrial empire Bertha Krupp.

There are many other names, whose origins are lost in the mists of time, such as Proper Charlie – a fool and a Sloppy Joe, a loose-fitting pullover. A recent arrival is called a Johnny-Come-Lately and an excessively timid person is known as a Nervous Nellie.

Happy Puzzling!

“You are as welcome as the flowers in May” is a much-quoted line from a play by Irish playwright Charles Macklin, and it’s true that May is associated with the blossoming of flowers, and the much-longed-for warmth of summer.

In ancient times, the beginning of May, which we now call May Day, marked the coming of summer and the end of the long harsh nights of winter. It was a time of great celebration, such as the festival of Beltane which was held by the Celtic people. The name Beltane comes from the old Irish Beltene meaning ‘bright fire’ and nowadays the Irish for the month of May is Bealtaine. Bonfires were lit on hilltops at this time and herds of livestock were driven out to the summer pastures or mountains.

In Germanic countries they had Walpurgis Night and in other parts of Europe they held the festival of Flora, the Roman goddess of flowers.

The English month of May is named after the Roman goddess Maia and many English villages celebrated May Day by dancing around a maypole on May Day, until Cromwell’s reign put a stop to it. However with the restoration of the monarchy, the custom was resumed and was more popular than ever. The Maypole Dance was originally a dance celebrating the fertility associated with spring, both in nature and in human procreation. Youngsters would dance around the maypole, each holding a ribbon attached to the top of the maypole so that the ribbons became interwoven into patterns.

Villagers would go out early and collect greenery and flowers to decorate their homes and make garlands for the young girls to wear. One of the girls would be crowned as the May Queen.

 “But I must gather knots of flowers, and buds and garlands gay,
For I’m to be Queen o’ the May, mother, I’m to be Queen o’ the May.”

So wrote Tennyson in his poem The May Queen. The traditional Morris dancing would often be performed on this day as well.

In some parts of Britain, these activities still go on, especially on the May Bank Holiday, which will fall on Monday 3rd May this year. In St Andrews, Scotland, students gather on the beach and at first light on May Day run into the North Sea, which I imagine would be icy cold! Bravo to the brave Scots.

There are many legends associated with May. Young girls would wake up early on the first day of May to go outside and wash their faces with the dew, which would ensure a clear complexion for the whole year. There is an old saying “Marry in May and you’ll live to rue the day” – oh dear, James and I were married in May.

May Day is the distress call in an emergency and was originated in 1923 by Frederick Mockford, a senior radio officer at Croydon Airport in London. Mockford was asked to think of a word that would indicate distress and would easily be understood by all pilots and ground staff in an emergency. Since much of the traffic at the time was between Croydon and Le Bourget Airport in Paris, he proposed the word mayday from the French m’aider.

“Venez m’aider” means “(you) come help me.”

May you enjoy the joys of May!

Happy Puzzling!