Through trip
BUS stops are the new butterflies of chaos theory, discovers Stephen Jorgenson-Murray while perusing Google Maps. Looking for travel routes across Europe, he says, āI was pleasantly surprised to find that Frankfurt to Warsaw ā previously a 10-hour journey by train ā was now possible in 5, at one point running in a perfectly straight line for 700 kilometres, in just 3 minutes.ā
Sadly, this isnāt the result of a new bullet train lying under eastern Europe. A bit of investigation led Stephen to deduce that a bus stop in the Mikulczyce suburb of Zabrze, Poland, normally located at longitude 18.79Ā° west, has instead been placed at 8.79Ā° west. āBy sheer coincidence, this happened to be right next to Dornheim railway station in Germany,ā allowing for quick connections between the two countries.
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āThis tiny error has left Google Maps unable to give accurate train routes across a huge chunk of Europe,ā says Stephen. Letās just hope that the bus drivers of Mikulczyce arenāt reliant on Google for directions, lest their passengers suffer a longitudinous detour.
āA chill wind blows? The UK Foreign Office has issued a travel advisory that āalthough thereās no recent history of terrorism in the British Antarctic Territory, attacks canāt be ruled outāā
Why not?
MORE examples of retronyms, words coined by attempts to sound out an acronym, punctuate our inbox. David Roffey informs us of the Sydney suburb with an unusual name: Dee Why. āThis is definitely a retronym dating back to at least 1840,ā says David. āThough no one knows what the original DY stood for.ā
Lately, the name has mutated a stage further, he says, with the locale being referred to as DW. We look forward to revisiting the topic in 50 years, and telling readers about the strange town of Dee Dubbleyew.
Dodgy characters
MEANWHILE, Lance Hartland writes that āokayā might be the only example of a retronym being based on a mis-spelling, explaining that āOK is the abbreviation of āall correct'ā.
Catching some Zs
HOWEVER, John King provides an alternative theory. āThere is a strong body of opinion that OK is derived from the Scotsā āoch ayeā, suggesting the reverse process of using letters to imitate words.ā
John adds that, āamong acronyms made into words, perhaps the most notorious is Naziā, stemming from Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei. āNa is the German n, and tzi is modified tzett, z, taken, perhaps, in preference to the less assertive ess, s.ā
More mischaracterisation
AND Tony Griffin complains that the challenge āhas hijacked my attention off and on for several days now, and so far Iāve only been able to come up with a couple of rather pathetic near-misses: āBeemerā to describe a vehicle made by BMW, and āBeemoā, a word referring to the Bank of Montreal.ā
Oh dear
HAVING given the issue our full attention for far too many days, we can produce two further examples. Belgian cartoonist HergƩ, creator of The Adventures of Tintin, coined the pseudonym from the reversed initials of his own name: Georges Remi.
And finally, if youāre getting rather tired of all these retronyms, we have a handy one to add to your lexicon: āteal deerā, a dismissive internet slang word taken from the abbreviation of ātoo long; didnāt readā.
Power plug
IN A shocking discovery that could solve all our energy worries, David OāNeill writes that his new car battery charger is listed as being suitable for powering up the following items: saloon car, sports car, SUV, pick-up, motorcycle, launch, solar system. The last entry leaves him wondering āwhere I would plug it in, and how long it would takeā.
Planet hoppers
MEANWHILE Allan Reese spots the UKās i newspaper reporting earlier this month that āscientists at Nasa have dubbed the void around Saturn āthe big emptyā after astronauts made their first dive into the space between the planet and its rings and encountered almost no dust or debrisā.
Itās incredible that NASA was able to keep an interplanetary crewed mission quiet for so long, says Allan. Amid plans for a āgrand finaleā dive into Saturnās atmosphere, Feedback wonders how NASA plans to get the diving astronauts back.
Cosy casks
THOSE who like their beer served warm would do well to pay the Otter Brewery a visit. Adrian Wilkins is told via their website that two-thirds of the ground floor is ā contrary to the name ā built below ground. This sunken floor allows the brewery to do away with expensive climate control systems.
āUsing the Earthās core temperature,ā explains a promotional beer mat, āour underground cellar saves us 6.5 tonnes of carbon emissions every single year.ā Exactly how deep is that cellar?
Ocean cruiser
THE octopus Haliphron atlanticus is not only rare ābut appears to have a most unexpected capabilityā, says Graham Hubbard. He directs us to Ā鶹“«Ć½ās own coverage (8 April, p 19), in which it is claimed that a researcher had seen āā¦ three of them using remotely operated vehiclesā.
J is for Iodine
THE assertion made by Andy Ward in these pages ā that there are no elements represented by J ārather ignores the German version of the periodic tableā, says Alan Wells, āwhere jod (iodine) is represented by the letter Jā.
While this may help readers making words from the elemental alphabet, Feedback canāt help but feel that any words containing a J ought to be German ones, JA?
