Milk, Toast, and Milquetoasts Trivia Quiz

Answer: Only toast.

Milk toast was, and still is, a great breakfast treat. It is made with sugar and butter mixed with hot milk poured over toast. I'll still have it on a cold morning, but as delicious as it is, it is not spelled Milquetoast. Additionally, if you have milk that you can slice, you are either going to be sick or you are a Newcomer (shout out to our "Alien Nation" fans).

Answer: An assassination in San Francisco.

Harvey Milk was killed by assassin, Dan White, in San Francisco. White, a former supervisor for the city, had turned in his resignation and then attempted to rescind that resignation five days later and reclaim his job. The mayor, Moscone, and Milk had blocked him, and White killed the pair in revenge.

Answer: Maziwa!

Salud and Sláinte are what you say before drinking in Spanish and Irish-Gaelic respectively, and both of them mean "health" in the same way that Santé in French and Salute in Italian do. Kampai is the Japanese way to make a toast and it means "drain your cup". In Japanese, 乾杯, where the first character means alcohol cup and the second means dry.
Maziwa, cheekily, means Milk in Swahili.

Answer: In medieval times, people would clink their glasses together to spill their drink into each other's glasses. This was to prevent poisoning.

Though the idea of touching glasses to provide a mix of poisons is cited everywhere, your humble test creator thinks that is a load of horse pucky. If you have ever tried to smash glasses together to get their liquid to spill into each other, you will know how difficult that is. Additionally, the minimal amount spilled does not seem enough to ensure poison protection that a simple mixing of the wine in the glasses would ensure. Also, consider the jobs of the poor food tasters! If this worked, think of their mass unemployment. Finally, the most damning case against this being a decent explanation is that there are poisons that you can build up an immunity to - as Westley proved and Vizzini discovered.

The whole thing is simply Inconceivable! Finally, the Biblical quote is not from the Bible, but a slight rewording of a trashy piece of fiction. I nearly pulped it but kept it at the last minute.

Answer: Casper

Casper Milquetoast was the shy and retiring hero of the cartoon strip "The Timid Soul" from 1924 till 1953.
Casper the Friendly Ghost was a cute, if creepy in retrospect, kids' cartoon. Though there is not much evidence connecting him to Milquetoast, rumors persist.
Bugs Bunny was accidentally named for his inventor, Bugs Hardaway, when someone at the animation studio mistakenly wrote Bugs Bunny instead of Bugs' Bunny on a sketch.

Answer: Teddy Roosevelt

Teddy Roosevelt often said, "Speak softly and carry a big stick; you will go far." In using this aphorism to direct his foreign policy, Teddy built up the military - especially the navy - sending "The Great White Fleet" to circumnavigate the globe to show US strength. He beefed up the Monroe Doctrine and forced through the Panama Canal.
Poor old Casper was often on the other end of a stick.

Answer: None, any and all milks can be drunk.

Amazingly humans can drink and process any and all mammal milk! And in fact it seems they have. In doing research for this quiz I tried to find the weirdest milk I could think of and I could not find one that a human had not tried.

Answer: The toast centre of the brain, a part of the brain devoted entirely to detecting the smell of toast.

Dr. Wilder Penfield was a neurosurgeon who expanded the field of brain surgery in the mid-20th century. Penfield was working with a patient who suffered from severe epilepsy and claimed that she could smell toast right before she was about to have one.

He opened up her skull and poked around in her brain until she smelled toast. He then cut that part of her brain out and she was cured of epilepsy.

Answer: Thin strips of toast to dip into the eggs.

Again, we lack of a true handle on how toast came to be called soldiers. The rather obvious answer is that they look like soldiers on parade when lined up, but not a few sources claim that the reasoning behind them getting this name is that they are usually dipped into soft eggs and so it is a recreation of the king's guard trying to put Humpty Dumpty together again.

Answer: over spilt milk

People have apparently been crying over spilt milk for the last 350 years. The first version of this proverb comes from a book from 1659 by James Howell. In it he warns us that there is "no weeping for shed milk". All of this is to say that one should not regret things that are past and you can't change. Should Mr. Howell have come to regret his phrasing of his little aphorism, perhaps his ghost has been crying over spilt ink, if not milk, for the last 350 years.