The Saturday briefing
IS THERE anything you are desperately yearning to know? Are there any pressing factual disputes you would like us to help resolve? This is the page where we shall do our best to answer any questions you throw at us, whatever the subject.
WHY do we “clink” glasses when we have a toast?
Fran Feltham, by email MUCH nonsense has been written about this being something to do with chasing out evil spirits or spilling wine into each other’s glass to show you are not poisoning them. But clinking glasses is a modern affectation, from long after such superstitions.
The real reason is a combination of two things: one is just a sign of everyone joining together, the other is to add sound to the other senses of sight, taste, smell and touch with which one can enjoy a glass of wine.
Not everyone is in favour of the practice however. One dinner guest at Prince Charles’ country home was told by an aide as the toasts approached: “We don’t clink at Highgrove.”
I UNDERSTAND that King George III and Queen Charlotte had 15 children. Is that correct? His eldest son became King George IV upon his father’s death and because the heir of King George IV, Princess Charlotte, died in childbirth at the age of 21, the crown passed to the second son William IV.
King William and Queen Adelaide had no living heirs so the crown passed to Princess Victoria, the daughter of the fourth son, Prince Edward, who had died when Victoria was eight months old.
My question is: what was the name of the third son of King George III and what became of him? I have never seen or heard any mention of this third son so hope you can answer this query for me.
Barbara Jean Moore, Calgary, Alberta, Canada MY compliments on your English history but you make one small error.
As you say, George III and Charlotte had 15 children (eight sons and seven daughters). George IV was the first son and Edward, Duke of Kent, was the fourth, but William IV was the third son, not the second. That was Frederick, Duke of York (1763-1827).
Since George IV died in 1830 the throne passed to his eldest living brother, who became William IV.
Frederick became commanderin-chief of the British forces in the Napoleonic Wars, but military disasters in 1799 led to him being mocked in the famous song The Grand Old Duke Of York.
The best fact I know about him is that in May 1789 he took part in a duel with Colonel Charles Lennox, who had insulted him. Lennox missed and Prince Frederick refused to return fire.
ON a recent journey around the M25 during heavy rain we observed what appeared to be a double rainbow, with the higher one much fainter than the other and not complete. Both of these were much closer to the ground than usual.
Is this unusual and does this
by LOOK BUT DON’T TOUCH: Prince Charles toasts – but doesn’t clink – with US President George W Bush in 2005 phenomenon have a technical name?
Terry and Lin Cox, by email WHAT you describe as a double rainbow is actually called a “double rainbow”!
In a normal rainbow sunlight is refracted (bent) as it enters the raindrop then reflected off the far side of the globule of water before being refracted again as it emerges.
For the double rainbow the process is refract-reflect-reflectrefract (in other words it bounces around once more within the raindrop).
It’s the refraction that caused the light to break down into the rainbow spectrum, bending each wavelength a different amount.
Next time you see one – they most often occur when the sun is low in the sky in the early morning or evening – take a close look and you will see that the usual order of colours is reversed in the secondary rainbow, which is caused by the extra bounce.
Also you will notice that the sky is darker between the rainbows. This is called Alexander’s Band, after Alexander of Aphrodisias who first described it in 200AD.
It is caused by much of the sunlight failing to reach that area because of all the bouncing within raindrops.
WHEN we talk about things being in the hands or lap of the gods, which gods are we referring to? Does this date back to pagan times, I wonder?
Chris Schuman, Bristol THE origin of the phrase is generally said to be a passage in Homer’s Iliad, written around 800BC.
It comes at a critical moment in the Trojan War when Automedon, the charioteer of Achilles and Patroclus, said the battle’s outcome was, “in the lap of the gods”.
Homer uses the same expression a couple of times in The Odyssey too.
Actually the Greek word used probably meant “knees” rather than “lap” and may relate to a practice common in many ancient cultures of placing gifts on the knees of seated statues of gods to curry favour with them. ON April 4, 1972, my family and I flew from London to Melbourne, Australia, and when we flew over the equator we were each given a document to celebrate it showing King Neptune of the Skies.
Was this a one-off on this particular flight? Nobody I ask has ever heard of it or seen one.
Val Brookes, by email QANTAS gave out such certificates to travellers crossing the equator from 1947 until the early 1970s.
The latest I have seen is dated April 8, 1972, so yours may be one of the last journeys on which they were distributed. IN Westerns, cowboys will sometimes buy something for “two bits” or “four bits”.
Am I correct in saying a “bit” had a value of 12.5 cents but no “one bit” coin existed?
If that’s right, why didn’t they just say “a quarter dollar” instead of “two bits”? Barrie Longstaff, Darlington, County Durham THE term “bit” was originally used in the West Indies and the Southern States of the US for a small silver coin that was an eighth of a Spanish dollar.
When that coin became obsolete the meaning was transferred to an eighth of a US dollar instead.
As you say in your question there was no coin worth one bit so in cowboy films you never hear of an odd number of bits.
The phrase “pieces of eight”, often heard in pirate films, has the same origin: a Spanish dollar, or “piece of eight” was worth eight bits.
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