If it’s news to me, it must be news to you!
Ramp it up
An enterprising grandmother is making life easier for may people by constructing wheelchair ramps out of Lego bricks and installing them in the German town of Hanau.
Buried treasure
A ring that was lost in America 47 years ago has been found buried in a Finnish forest.
Playing for time
A woman has undergone brain surgery while playing the violin to ensure surgeons did not damage the part which controls the fine movement of her hands.
Flop-flip
I once wrote about one of the grammatical rules we follow without realising it and here is another – ablaut-reduplication.
English has an ancient law: in words like ‘chit chat’, ‘zigzag’, and ‘seesaw’, we always put the part with an i (as in ‘pit’) or e (as in ‘be’) first. We instinctively know this rule of ‘ablaut reduplication’. You can’t have a pair of flop flips or jamjims, or play pong ping.
— Susie Dent (@susie_dent) February 20, 2020
Pretty in pink
Photographs of the world’s only known pink manta ray were released this week.
Brief Lives
Zoe Gail, the entertainer chosen to switch on the lights in Piccadilly after the wartime blackout; Larry Tesler who invented ‘cut, copy and paste’; Pearl Carr who won Eurovision with husband Teddy Johnson; cricket all-rounder Bapu Nadkarni; broadcaster and astronomer Heather Couper and; hero of the Munich air disaster Harry Gregg.
