h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

1. Which 1939 short story features the repeated use of the phrase "pocketa-pocketa-pocketa"?
2. What fruit was once called the mad-apple?
3. Which twentieth-century songwriter's name sounds like a hawker of books, newspapers, or religious tracts?
4. Was it Pompeii who recorded Bastille, or did Bastille record Pompeii?
5. Which musical instrument is the most ancient: flute, harp, or trumpet?
6. Nero fiddled while Rome burned, if we can believe Seutonius who was born after the event. But the fiddle hadn't been invented yet. Did the bowing of strings begin in the 5th, 7th, or 9th century CE?

I reckon no 5 is flute. The Egypytians had harps and trumpets in 3000 BC but there are Chinese flutes much older than that.

Right there. There are flutes from tens of thousands BCE.

I'll guess 4. Bastille recorded Pompeii. I'm aware of a recent rock band Bastille, and Pompeii sounds a better title than Bastille. (Although Rush recorded Bastille Day)

Right that man too.

I've only just become aware of Pompeii (a song in which the word Pompeii never occurs; it goes "And the walls kept tumbling down in the city that we love" which rather suggests Jericho to me) because I was commissioned to transcribe it and teach the harmonies to a big (50+) ukulele group http://www.facebook.com/dublinukulelecollective

Clues?

The fruit is not very fruity--usually treated as a vegetable, though its American name suggests animal products.

The short story (one of the most anthologised American stories) has been made into a film twice.

I'd take a guess that the fruit is a tomato. It's been called some odd things by different people. It was considered poisonous by many. I think the Italian term "pomodoro" means golden apple, but that makes no sense. I think it's also been called a love apple. Love is mad, so there.

I think the fruit is an Avocado, which is sometimes called an Alligator Pear in America. I did research the fruit a while back but I don't remember it being called mad apple. In Nahuatl it is called a word which also means testicle. Aguacatl?

Yep... and guacamole (very*) loosely translates as "testicle sauce".

Yummy, yummy testicle sauce.





*according to Snopes, it doesn't really, but that's just because of how many steps there were between translating the original words from the Nahuatl language, through Spanish mispronunciations to get to avocado and guacamole. In the literal sense, it doesn't translate. But in the sense of my inner 15 year old, it absolutely does translate to testicle sauce.

http://www.snopes.com/guacamole-means-testicle-sauce/

Fancy having the cojones to call it that!

The first thing that occurred to me for "mad-apple" was an orange. Because for no better reason than the German for orange (when they're not calling it an orange) is China-Apfel. And the Dutch is sinaasappel (not sure of spelling there, but you find it on cartons of orange juice)

It could also be a pineapple. Pining is mad.

It could also be a potato. Didn't they first think you had to eat the fruit of the potato plant? Which may have had unfortunate side-effects. *thinking out loud* But the "Apple" word, such as in pomme de terre or (Dutch again) Aardappel (again no idea about spelling) comes from the bit which grows in the earth. Nonetheless, I think I may be on to something here.

As for the last question on bowing, I would put it quite late - 9th century. But that's an uneducated guess and these questions are all set to deceive us.

*thinking aloud again* But even if it was the 5th Century, how would Seutonius have known of the concept, if he was a Roman and can't have been around later than the 3rd Century.

I don't think Nero fiddled while Rome burned. That's an anachronism. I think he did Sudoku.

The word avocado does not come from the Nahuatl word for testicle, but the word guacamole does.

The fruit is more a vegetable and its American name suggests animal products:

Aubergine (known in the US as egg plant)

As for No 5 being the flute - I should have known that from an exhibition I visited of musical instruments through the ages - way back to the Stone Age. The very first ones were bones and shells which were blown through to imitate bird sounds.

http://www.rem-mannheim.de/museen-in-mannheim/museum-bassermannhaus-fuer-musik-und-kunst/willkommen-in-c4/musikwelten/

The blurb is not available in English.

I'd have thought the trumpet would have similarly prehistoric as the flute - in the sense of a caveman blowing through a horn.

My English got mangled there, but you know what I meant.

Gnomon, you've got that reversed about avocado and guacamole. From the Snopes article above.

~~~~~
Avocados are actually native to Mexico and Central America, which is why they bear a name (ahuacatl) that derives from Nahuatl, a language spoken by the indigenous Nahua people of Mexico and El Salvador.

The word ahuacatl in Nahuatl was indeed at one point used to mean "the fruit of the avocado tree" and, more slangily, "testicle," presumably because of the fruit's shape; according to Nahuatl scholar Magnus Pharao Hansen, the word in the context of "testicle" carried a double meaning much like the word "ball" (or, more to the point, "nut") does in English.

Spanish conquerors had a difficult time with the glottals and fricatives of local languages such as Nahuatl, and so over time the names of native flora and fauna became simplified: coyotl became coyote, mizquitl turned into mesquite, and ahuacatl became aguacate but lost its double meaning in the process (and became more of a double entendre).

Molli is in fact Nahuatl for "sauce," which in a linguistic coincidence sounds much like the Spanish infinitive moler (meaning "to grind"). However, it's not totally accurate to say that "guacamole" means "testicle sauce," because in becoming the Spanish word aguacate (further distorted to avocado in English), the original Nahuatl for "avocado" word lost its second, more vulgate meaning (i.e., testicle).

This may seem to be splitting hairs, but the fact remains that even if pre-Columbian Nahua peoples might have ever had occasion to utter the phrase "testicle sauce," they would likely not have called it "guacamole"; instead, they would have used some variant of the more common words cuitlapanaatetl or atetl (testes; rocks) and molli or chillacuecholli (sauce). The word "guacamole" is part of Nahuatl as auacamulli, and there's no evidence, past or present, to suggest it was ever used to mean anything but avocados.
*(accented vowels removed because they don't play well with h2g2)
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Here's some more information about how we got to "avocado" from "ahuacatl" from an NPR story.

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On May 15, 1915, in the posh new Hotel Alexandria in Los Angeles, a cadre of California farmers gathered to decide the fate of a new crop.

The ahuacate, a pebbly-skinned, pear-shaped fruit, had been a staple food in Mexico, and Central and South America since 500 B.C. In the 16th century, Spanish conquistadors fell in love with the fruit after observing its prized status among the Aztecs.

Until the early 1900s, the ahuacate had never been grown commercially in the United States. By 1914, however, hotels in Los Angeles and San Francisco were ordering as many of the fruits as they could and paying as much as $12 for a dozen.

But the farmers faced a marketing problem. First, ahuacate was too hard for Americans to pronounce. Worse, it was the Aztec word for testicle, named for its shape and reputation as an aphrodisiac. Then there was the other unappealing name: "alligator pear."

The farmers came up with a new name: avocado. They informed dictionary publishers of the change — and that the plural was spelled "avocados," not "avocadoes" — and named their own group the California Avocado Association.

The approach worked. Today, California accounts for nearly 90 percent of all avocados grown in the United States.
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From: http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=5563805