Skeleton Trivia for Monday, 2025-06-09
Ye Olde Voyced Dentalle Phrycative
Hiya Skeleton Crew,
It’s been heatin’ up here in my neck a’ the woods. My personally recommendation for stayin’ cool is to get an old bathtub (one a’ those claw-foot guys works best), fill it up with a nice gazpacho, an’ soak yourself in there for at least an hour or two.
Or, no, wait, that’s the trick for gettin’ a skunk smell offa ya, ain’t it? Ah jeez.
Answers to Last Time
Io was turned into a cow by Zeus in a frankly kinda weird attempt to hide her from Hera.
That list I gave ya last week were the five smallest emirates a’ the United Arab Emirates, a.k.a. the UAE. (The biggest two emirates bein’ Abu Dhabi ’n’ Dubai, in case ya were curious.)
Between Io ’n’ UAE, those two answers comprised the five classic vowels—no more ’n’ no less!
Today’s Trivias
Trivia 1
So, the standard way a’ teachin’ the vowels is “A, E, I, O, U, ’n’ sometimes Y”. But ain’t that kinda givin’ Y short shrift? I feel like in most words Y’s more vowel-y than consonant-y. All’s I’m sayin’ is, if I were in charge, I’d say usually Y instead a’ sometimes Y.
Incident’ly, didja know that Y gets called the “Greek I” in a bunch a’ Romance languages? Like in French ’n’ Romanian ya got i grec, in Italian it’s i greca, an’ in Spanish it’s i griega.
Can ya tell me what’s the Greek name for the letter Υ?
Trivia 2
Back in the early days a’ the printin’ press, my pal Wynkyn de Worde was strugglin’ in England with the typesets he’d get from the Low Countries ’cross the channel. Namely, none a’ the types had the Þ character in ’em! It was a problem, since English used Þ at the time for a <th> sound—which a’ course was all over the place, owin’ to how the word the starts with a th.
Anyways, his (and other printers’) way ’round the problem was to start usin’ Y as a stand-in for Þ.1 So that’s how we ended up with all those Ye Olde Time signs that say YE Olde instead a’ THE Olde.
Can ya tell me whaddya call that Þ character, anyway?
OK then
Byeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee
Back in those days we were writin’ Þ in a way that kinda looked like Y, so it wasn’t so much of a stretch as maybe it seems.