Q 01/05

'Saved by the bell' comes from which sport, rather than the coffin bell-pulls people often credit?

A) Fencing

B) Boxing

C) Cycling

D) Rowing

Answer · why

B) Boxing

Boxing spares a floored fighter when the bell ends the round before the referee counts him out; the tale of bells fitted to coffins for the buried-ali...

Q 02/05

Which measuring idiom is falsely said to come from a law letting husbands beat wives with a thin stick?

A) Foot the bill

B) Inch by inch

C) Go the extra mile

D) Rule of thumb

Answer · why

D) Rule of thumb

Rule of thumb has no such law behind it: the phrase first appears in a 1685 sermon, and a thumb's breadth simply served as a rough inch in the cloth t...

Q 03/05

'Pandora's box' is a mistranslation: in Hesiod's Greek, what kind of container did Pandora actually open?

A) A chest

B) A jar

C) A basket

D) A cage

Answer · why

B) A jar

A jar, a big storage pithos, is what Hesiod wrote; the 16th-century scholar Erasmus rendered it as the Latin pyxis, a box, and the error stuck.

Q 04/05

Which metal, used to turn fur into felt, poisoned 19th-century hat-makers and gave us 'mad as a hatter'?

A) Lead

B) Arsenic

C) Mercury

D) Cadmium

Answer · why

C) Mercury

Mercury compounds in felt-making caused erethism, with tremors, slurred speech and hallucinations so common in Danbury, Connecticut that locals called...

Q 05/05

'Humble pie' began as 'umble pie', a dish servants made from which ingredient while the lord ate venison?

A) Stale crusts

B) Pig trotters

C) Deer offal

D) Sheep's head

Answer · why

C) Deer offal

Deer offal, the heart, liver and lungs once called umbles, filled the pie; 'humble' crept in by folk etymology, and by the 1800s the phrase meant a hu...