A zebra? You’re having a giraffe!
QUESTION any living relatives?Does the
giraffe have
The Giraffidae are a family of ruminant artiodactyl (even-toed) mammals that share a common ancestor with deer and bovids. The only remaining members of this once-diverse family are the giraffe (Giraffa camelopardalis) and the okapi (Okapia johnstoni).
Okapis are endangered mammals that are native to the northern Democratic Republic of Congo. They are about the size of a pony and live on the leaves, fruits and fungi of the forest understory.
Their brown or red-brown fronts resemble that of a horse, but their back and legs sport zebra-like stripes.
Giraffes are herd animals while okapi are loners, but there are similarities: they have the same sort of long ears (okapis can rotate theirs independently) and their hooves are two-toed.
Because of their black-and-white-striped hindquarters, okapis are often mistakenly linked to the zebra family.
These bold markings camouflage them when they are hiding in the partial sunlight filtering through the dense rainforest, and also help the young identify their parents.
Caroline Stuart, Perth.
QUESTION Did James Joyce coin any neologisms that are in popular use?
JOyCe (1882-1941) exhibited a playful and endlessly creative use of words. yet, unlike with Shakespeare and Milton, only a handful of these are in common use.
‘Botch’ has been variously used in english since the 16th century to mean to cobble together or ‘repair hastily’. Joyce reworked it into a noun, ‘botch-up’, in Ulysses to refer to the ‘botch-up of a concert’ — namely, a total mess.
Quarks are elementary particles; the building blocks of matter. U.S. physicist Murray Gell-Mann called them quorks until he came across this line in Finnegans Wake: ‘Three quarks for Muster Mark!’
Noting that quarks cluster in threes to form subatomic particles called baryons, Gell-Mann renamed the quork the quark and credited Joyce with the name.
Some less common Joyceisms include Chiseller — a nickname for a young child in Ulysses — derived from the colloquial use of chisel, meaning ‘to fleece money from someone’, and Monoideal, something ‘expressing or conveying only one idea’.
There are various Joyceisms which we should use, such as peloothered, ‘very drunk’; ringroundabout, ‘completely surround something’; scribbledehobble, ‘rough notebook’; and yogibogeybox, ‘the paraphernalia a spiritualist carries around with them’.
Don Martin, Harrogate, N. Yorks.
QUESTION Has any UK pop star had a hit abroad by re-recording a song in a foreign language?
FURTheR to the earlier answer, in 1981
elton John released an album called The Fox, which included the single Nobody Wins. he recorded a version renamed J’veux D’la Tendresse for the French market, and it reached No 6.
he then recorded a duet with France Gall, a French singer, called Les Aveux. The B-side, Donner Pour Donner, a mix
of english and French, made No2 in the French charts.
Mike Varey, Westhill, Aberdeenshire.
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