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

The rule is that whatever useless fact you decide to enrich the rest of us with should follow on from the previous post, even if the connection is tenuous. This I'm told will be a challenge.

The word "challenge" comes from the ancient Punjabi "cha", meaning "tea", and "lanjj", meaning "creating hot beverage by boiling up the leaves of the most convenient bush".

RF

p.s. No it doesn't.

Lots of people like challenges. For example Winston Churchill - I bet he liked a challenge.

Anyway, Churchill was descended from Native Americans on his mother's side of the family.

Oh no, cocked that up by being to slow. Erm, Churchill liked bushes. He was descended from Indians, but not Punjabi ones, American ones.

Tut tut

The word challenge derives from an initiation rite practised by Saxon warriors. To prove their manhood and toughness, they had to stand in the embers of the camp fire through a night of the full moon.

The result was usually charred legs, which got shortened and blurred together over time into 'charr-egs' and eventually anglicised into 'challenge'.

The lkast time personally I suffered from charred legs, was when setting fire to my legs by covering them in petrol, in order to annoy someone I didn't like. It didn't work and it hurt, but it did melt the soles of my army surplous boots, and fused the flapping bits back onto the rest of the boots. This happened in 1992 mind, otherwise I guess we'd have been arrested for being trousersists.

If you wanted to annoy someone you didn't like, wouldn't it work better if you set fire to their legs instead of your own?

That thought occurred to me too

the last person to melt my sole was Lisa Graves 1974 dancing to Kung Fu Fighting!!
Useless fact being no-one ever says "ha" in kung fu (apart from in the song, obviously!!)

Challenge actually comes from the picts up north - a lenge is an old word for a hill in gaelic, and to climb the lenge was a big challenge. Climblenge became calenge and later challenge. This is from the time when they were shorter than we are now, only about 3 foot 6 because of eating nothing but grass.

Useless fact is, I made up the bumf above, and I know no kung fu.

I've never eaten grass, but I didn't inhail.

True, challenge is rumoured to have a Scots origin.

You may all have seen the film of lemmings throwing themselves to their deaths over cliffs. This was a common way for ancient Scots to hunt woolly mammoths. As a test of manhood, young Scotsmen would also throw themselves off high ledges, but would twist when jumping and grab hold of the ledge with their teeth on the way down.

This was described as to 'chew the ledge'. In Scots dialect, 'chew' is pronounced 'chaw' so they would thus 'chaw the ledge', which became shortened to 'chawledge' and then 'challenge'.

It is a practice still carried out to this day by the lower social orders. Here are two proponents of the ancient ritual of 'chaw-ledge'

http://i144.photobucket.com/albums/r166/swl_album/swl_album2/chawlenge.jpg

"Scot, with its variants Scotch, Scottish, etc., may have been an Irish term of scorn (Scuit, pronounced shite); its ulterior origin is unknown." [Shipley]

(and it's true)

Scotch whisky is among the best in the world.

Really? What, right up there with Japanese whisky?

The 1st recorded export of whisky from Scotland to Ireland was in 1590.

Mark Twain's book The Mysterious Stranger takes place in Austria in 1590.

Mysterious Strangers existed well before 1590 but weren't properly identified until Mr. Twain's informative docu-novel...

The phrase "never the twain shall meet" was used by Rudyard Kipling, in his Barrack-room ballads, 1892:

"Oh, East is East, and West is West, and never the twain shall meet."

There, Kipling is lamenting the gulf of understanding between the British and the inhabitants of the Indian subcontinent, after a fruitless conversation with his motor insurance call centre.

I'd never heard of Mr. Twain's informative docu-novel until I typed "1590" into a search engine half an hour ago. Austria in 1590 isn't Mark Twain's normal subject area, is it?