Victory of Le Petit Caporal
QUESTION
Who are the tallest and shortest international Rugby Union players of all time?
AT JUST 5ft 4in (1.62m), the formidable French scrum-half Jacques Fouroux was the smallest international rugby union player. He spent much of his career with his home-town club FC Auch and played 27 matches for France in the 1970s, 23 as captain.
Not only was the terrier-like Fouroux hard to tackle, but he was an expert reader of the game who was able to exploit tactical possibilities arising in any area of the pitch.
He was bossy, demanding and driven, which was reflected in his nickname, Le Petit Caporal (the Little Corporal), the same one given to Napoleon by his troops.
Fouroux captained France throughout the Five Nations campaigns of 1976 and 1977. In 1976, they came second, losing to a brilliant Wales team.
In 1977, France won the Grand Slam for only the second time. It used the same team throughout the championship, something no Grand Slam side had done before. Fouroux went on to become an equally formidable coach, winning four Five Nations championships and reaching the final of the inaugural World Cup competition in 1987, where France were beaten 29-9 by New Zealand. He died of a heart attack in 2005, aged just 58.
At his funeral, the town of Auch came to a standstill.
The tallest international was Scotland’s Richie Metcalfe, a towering 7ft (2.13m) lock. He won 13 Scotland caps between 2000 and 2001, and played for the Newcastle Falcons in the English Premiership-winning season of 1997-98, as well as the Northampton Saints.
Unfortunately, he was dropped to the bench for Northampton’s glorious Heineken Cup final win in 2000, having played every match to that point.
Mike Quentin, Bath, Somerset.
QUESTION
The terms bartering and haggling are often confused. Which other words are used incorrectly?
TO BARTER is to exchange goods for other goods rather than money. It’s thought to be derived from the Old French barater meaning to trick or deceive.
Haggle means to negotiate a price. In the 16th century, it meant to cut unevenly or mangle in cutting. A haggler was a clumsy workman. Haggle was probably derived from the Old English haggen, meaning to chop – interestingly, the same root as haggis – from the idea of chopping away at the price. Since there is no definitive body governing the rules of the English language, matters of style and grammar have always been debatable and meanings may shift over time, sometimes through popular misuse. Common words that are routinely misused include:
Adverse means detrimental, not averse or disinclined;
Appraise means to ascertain the value of, not to apprise or to inform;
Bemused means bewildered, not amused;
Disinterested means unbiased, not uninterested;
Fortuitous means coincidental or unplanned, not fortunate;
Hone means to sharpen, not to home in on or to converge upon;
Literally means in actual fact, not figuratively. If you say, ‘That guitar solo literally blew my head off’, your head should not be attached to your body;
Meretricious means tawdry or offensively insincere, not meritorious, which means deserving reward or praise;
Nonplussed means stunned or bewildered, not bored or unimpressed.
Mandy Smith, Norwich, Norfolk. A PREVALENT solecism is the use of decimate when devastate is what’s actually meant.
To decimate something is to reduce it by a tenth, as in the Roman Empire and Nazi practice of quelling a rebellious population by killing every tenth person.
Another gaffe is the misuse of the word enormity. This is a grievous sin or moral outrage, and has nothing to do with size.
T. Phillips, London E10. PROBABLY the most confused two words are lay and lie. Lay is a transitive verb, i.e. it takes a direct object: to lay an egg or lay the table. But you often hear it used intransitively, such as, ‘I’m going to lay down’ or, ‘You can lay on the sofa’. Unfortunately, the confusion is not helped by the fact that the past tense of lie is lay!
Rick Taylor, Witney, Oxfordshire. I FIND the misuse of affect and effect to be most annoying. One affects the outcome, and to do that one must have brought something into effect.
Dudley Howard, Farnborough, Hampshire.
QUESTION
Is plastic used in plastic surgery?
THE word plastic originally meant pliable and easily moulded, derived from the Latin plasticus, meaning ‘of moulding’, and the Greek plastikos, meaning to form or to mould.
As plastic surgery involves remodelling of the features, this is how the term came about. Plastic also refers to synthetic materials created by the polymerisation of simple molecules.
At some stage in their creation they are easily mouldable or plastic. Medical-grade plastic derived from polyethylene, usually under the trade name Medpor, is used in plastic surgery, particularly nose jobs, ear surgery, eye rim reconstruction and skull operations.
Silicone gel – a thick, sticky fluid that closely mimics the feel of human fat – is used in breast and buttock implants.
Carrie Foulds, Stroud, Glos.
QUESTION
Apart from ovens, what other uses does microwave technology have?
FURTHER to the previous answer about the role of microwaves in radar, a key characteristic of this technology is that it can’t detect an object smaller than its wavelength. Such potential targets will be lost between the peaks.
The rapid development during World War II of cavity magnetrons that could generate microwaves whose wavelengths were measured in centimetres rather than metres was thus a major step forward. It allowed German night fighters to detect British bombers and Allied aircraft to spot the periscopes of German submarines.
Centimetric radars led to millimetric devices, a technology that is used in airport body scanners.
Chris Rogers, Middlesex.
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