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

Hopefully, even with Smellorama, the smelly parts of this thread are sufficiently long ago in time and space to spare us all.

If I may borrow Pheroneus's soap box for a moment.....
The new forms of spelling are probably utilitarian for people with very small vocabularies and equally small brains to store them in. I feel sure that there is a causal relationship between cerebral banality and mobile telephones. I hypothesise that habitual mobile telephone users are exposed to trivia and nonsense at a far higher dose than is safe. The harmful radiation from the mobile telephone is largely in the form of sound waves carrying the pathetic bleatings of gormless individuals who would rather fritter their lives in idle chatter than think or read, or both, in blessed silence. Text messages are potentially much less irritating but tend to be used excessively by obsessive trivialists.

ware R U i am hair w8ing 4 a buz. Shakespeare, eat your heart out.

In my defence, in mitigation, I would like to share with you the fact that I, and not Mrs P, was responsible for the purchase of plain white blinds for the bathroom which I was told were 'chintz' cotton by the interior lady. Definitely.

She lied.

"Chintz" derives from a hindustani word for 'variegated' as applied to floral pattern cloths brought over from India in the seventeenth century. It is now used for any floral pattern especially on cloth but not necessarily so.

I am sure you have all read my entry on Clarice Cliff, but those who haven't need to know that I (actually Mrs P) have an interest in and knowledge of chinaware. I am therefore astonished to discover that there is a whole genre of collectible chinaware referred to as 'Chintz'. I mean, I have seen the stuff (Transferred floral patterns) but never ever heard the name chintz to describe it. And yet, out there on the www are thousands upon thousands of references to chintz collectors, referring to the chinaware.

I am chastened and humbled. Please accept my resignation for so misinforming the thread.

roses can be real pricks,but this is a thorny topic.

Like the old saying on motherhood "If this was a job you could resign from, you'd have been sacked long since"
Re-sign (sign on again) immediately

Pheroneous, i f you leave the thread, you'll end up going to... going to... - how can I put this without mentioning what you have decreed unmentionable? - ... going to the small furry four-legged animals that traditionally chase cats.

Adversity, convention, opposition, storm, jug, evidence, aircraft, gale.

X-men?

Adversity, convention, opposition, storm, jug, evidence, aircraft, gale

Well, there's an aircraft called a hurricane, which is also a type of gale and a storm.
The hurricane fought in the battle of Britain alongside the spitfire. The name spitfire name was also used by the (now defunct) car manufacturer Triumph and it is a common phrase to "Triumph over adversity".
You can defy convention, and this is opposition...erm, oh I give up!

i've heard triumph is makeing a comeback ,with their moterbikes.i dont know if they had any connection with the car or not.how about the MG?still being made?alway wanted a sprite.i think it was '74 when mg was no longer imported in the states,something about safty requirements.a friend has the address of a place that will sell you a complete morris minor in kit form.still do not know what a kaboodle is.

I thought Triumph made bras. Or typewriters.

Today's new entry

http://www.h2g2.com/A470954

about nonsense poetry does not go into the origin of the word gibberish, but uses it quite frequently. Any explanations here?

To be talking in gibbers, to be gibbering. Is it one of those onomatapaeic words?

I believe you can still get Triumph motorbikes new (you certainly could a couple of years ago in the UK - I remember a work colleague buying one - very nice too). No relation to Triumph cars, who bought out Standard to form Standard Triumph in the 50s, and were subsumed along with the BMC group (Austin, Morris, Riley, Wolseley and MG), Jaguar and Rover to form British Leyland in the 1960s.

So MG and Triumph, formerly rivals, were part of the same group. And they were still rivals. One of many reasons why British Leyland was such an unmitigated disaster. MG is still in existence making the MGF, but it's not the original company - still in the same factory, though. The Triumph name as a sports car maker died out with the TR7 in the 1970s, and the last MGBs (what most British purists would call the last 'proper' MG) rolled off the line (I think) in about 1978 - open to correction, or if you need to know I can find out for definite easily.

You can still obtain all the necessary parts to build a 'brand new' MGB from scratch, but there is a good supply of restored examples.

I don't think anybody in the UK is actually still building Morris Minors from scratch, but there is a plentiful supply in all conditions from pile of bits to better than new. You can get a really sound example for under £1000 and virtually all the parts you might require are readily available. There are a number of 'kits' to bring them up to date if that's what you want - disc brakes, 5 speed gearboxes etc.

I drive a 1970 original Minor as my everyday car - it does the job for me. I could go on for ages, haven't even mentioned my Hillman Minx, but I don't want to bore. I'm sure one of the sports car experts will come on and put me right anyway...

Thread snapped there,didn't it?
Jibber-jabber was an old onamatopeaic verb -how monkeys were supposed to talk(They've now become members of the chattering classes)Alternate spelling for stuttering nonsense survived.Gibberish is thus the language;same sort of ending as English,Spanish,Turkish. Could just as well be Gibberese, but isn't.
Not quite sure how to tie it into cars; do people gibber with road rage?
Perhaps we need to have a side discussion on why Ford Prefect was such a good name for the h2g2 character. There must be many readers nowadays who've never seen one?
Hope this counts as an example of c*bbl*rs, if not gibberish

I wondered why I had monkeys at the back of my mind every time I heard the word gibberish. Do you think that is how Gibraltar got its name?

I hope Percy is not going to leave us in suspense.

TC, perhaps 'gibbon' is a more likely explanation. And surely the language of gibbons must be gibberish.

(And before any would-be pedants wade in, I know full well that gibbons are apes, not monkeys. But that wouldn't prevent TC from *thinking* monkey when the word gibberish is mentioned, because gibberish makes her think of gibbons, at which point she cleverly remembers that gibbons aren't monkeys, et voila - the word has popped into her head. QED.)

Gibbons aren't great apes though. The gorilla - now there is a great ape.

This brings me to local curse which is always true of the person saying it as well as the recipient: "You great ape".

Personally I don't believe there is a connection... so there

**Returning from the little house where the small be-tailed furry animals live**

I am not sure where the dividing line between 'Great' and 'Lousy' Apes lies, but suspect that Gibbons are born to greatness, certainly as historians. But then all apes are pretty lousy, to judge from their grooming antics.

They all have faces - explicitly or by inference, for instance 'in the teeth of a gale'.