Bad Words Trivia Quiz

Answer: Badge

According to the web site 'Baronage' badges took on social and military importance in the time of King Edward III of England. They were worn by servants and retainers of the aristocracy (but never by the aristocrat him/herself - he or she always used a coat of arms to signify rank and position), and also as decoration in the homes of the barons. Military badges indicated which baron the soldier served and later took on importance as an indication of one's regiment. Badges were also used to mark trade goods, and were the predecessors of today's trademarks and logos.

Answer: Badinage

The French word for joker is badin, so it's easy to see how joking conversation or teasing came to be called badinage. The word is thought to have originated in the eighteenth century and since polite society in England back then often conducted its social conversation en francais, badinage became a fixture in the English language.

Incidentally, badin has its origin in the Provencal badar, which means 'to gape', which is probably where we also get our word banter.

Answer: Badinerie

The badinerie (which has the same root as badinage) is a short, spirited French dance. In the 18th century, baroque composers often included a badinerie as one of the movements in a suite of music. My favourite - and perhaps the best known example of a badinerie - is found in J.S. Bach's Orchestral Suite No.2 in B Minor for Flute and Strings (BWV 1067). Check it out and see if you can keep your toes from tapping.

Answer: Baden-Baden

Baden-Baden is in Baden-Wurttemberg in the Karlsruhe region of south-western Germany and it is a very popular tourist resort. The town is famous for the springs which feed its spa and it has been a popular resort since Roman times, when it was known as Aurelia Aquensis.

There's a story that the town was founded by the Roman Emperor Hadrian, but since this is based on an unauthenticated inscription in the Roman ruins, we can probably put that to one side. However, it is known that the Roman legionaries did their R and R in the refreshing mineral waters, and bits and pieces of Roman statuary can still be seen in the remains of the Roman vapour baths which were excavated in 1847.

By the middle ages, the town was known as Baden (it was named Baden-Baden in 1931 for bureaucratic creasons, seeing that it was the town of Baden in the state of Baden). Nowadays, tourists flock to Baden-Baden not only for the spa but also for the casinos, shopping and night life.

Answer: Badminton

The ancient Greeks and Egyptians played a game similar to badminton, but it came to England in the 19th century when officers in the British army returned home from India, bringing the game with them. In India the game was known as Poona (probably because that's where they played the game while on leave). By the 1860s it was played at the country homes of the aristocracy as a light-hearted amusement. It was the Duke of Beaufort who, in 1873, named it badminton, for Badminton House, his country seat in Gloucestershire.

Originally the game was played under the rules that applied in India but in 1887 the Bath Badminton Club anglicized the rules and in 1893 the Badminton Association of England created definitive rules which are very similar to those in place today. The BAE also inaugurated the All England Open Badminton Championships in 1899. The Badminton World Federation was formed in 1934 with Canada, Denmark, England, France, the Netherlands, Ireland, New Zealand, Scotland and Wales as its founding members. The game has become very popular all around the world, particularly in Asia.

In 1992 badminton was included as an Olympic sport. You may not be aware of the fact that the shuttlecock has been clocked at speeds of up to 260 kph, making badminton the fastest of the racquet sports. Players need to be in good shape, too, because during an average game they could travel some six kilometres over the court.

Answer: Scheherazade

Scheherezade is the teller of the stories found in "The Book of One Thousand and One Nights" (also known as "The Arabian Nights"). Scheherezade tells the stories to her husband King Shahryar as a way of prolonging her life. The king, put his first wife to death when he discovered that she had been unfaithful to him. From then on, believing that all women are false, he married a new wife each day, only to execute the poor girl on the morning after the wedding night. Scheherezade was the last in a long line and in order to save her own life, she came up with idea of telling the king a story, only to break it off at the crucial point to be continued the next night. This went on for the one thousand and one nights of the book's title, and by the end of the one thousand and one nights, Shahryar realized that (a) Scheherezade had never been untrue to him and (b) he loved her, so all ended happily.

Some of the best known of the stories are 'The Seven Voyages of Sinbad the Sailor', 'Aladdin', and 'Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves'.

The book as we know it traces its origins back to ancient Persia, India, and Arabia, and even Greek influences can be found. Some of the themes in the stories can be traced back to the Mesopotamiam epic 'Gilgamesh'. 'One Thousand and One Nights' has been around in one form or another since the early 800s, as indicated by the fragments of a handwritten manuscript discovered in Syria in 1948. The best known English translation is that of Sir Richard Francis Burton (1885), the famous explorer, soldier, linguist and diplomat (he's the chappie who set out to find the source of the Nile and discovered Lake Victoria instead). He was also the first known non-Muslim to complete a haj, the sacred pilgrimage to Mecca (he disguised himself as a Muslim and faced death had he been found out!) Burton married Isobel Arundell, who was as big a prude as he was a voluptuary. She was horribly embarrassed by the fact that he translated "The Kama Sutra" and "The One Thousand and One Nights", both of which she deemed obscene. Indeed, after Burton's death she burned many of his translations of Persian and Indian literature, particularly his translation of 'The Perfumed Garden". Lord only knows what those two had in common!

The Rimsky-Korsakov clue refers to his Opus 35 Scheherezade.

Answer: Carlsbad Caverns

Cowboy Jimmy White (1882-1946) is credited with the discovery and first exploration of the Carlsbad Caverns, near Carlsbad, New Mexico. Jimmy first entered the caverns in 1898 following bats (there are 16 species of bats inhabiting the caverns), and discovered a wonderland.

The site became a U.S. national park in the 1920s and Jimmy was its first chief ranger and guide until his retirement. Extensive geological surveys have been carried out and more caverns have been discovered and explored. I'm always amused by the fact that we credit people with discovering sites that have been known to the indigenous peoples for thousands of years.

The Apache certainly knew and used the caverns as shelter for hundreds of years, and archaeologists have found evidence of a people known as the Basketmakers who lived in the caverns thousands of years ago.

Answer: Dame Agatha Christie

Heather Badcock gets bumped off in Christie's novel 'The Mirror Crack'd'. The method of disposing of Mrs. Badcock is quite ingenious but I won't be a plot spoiler. Go read the book for yourself.

The clue refers to the title of the book which is taken from Alfred, Lord Tennyson's poem 'The Lady of Shalott':
"Out flew the web and floated wide.
The mirror crack'd from side to side.
"The curse is come upon me!" cried
The Lady of Shalott."

You want more? Read the poem.

Answer: Hermione Baddeley

Character actress Hermione Baddeley (her real name was Hermione Youlanda Ruby Clinton-Baddeley, but you try getting that on a marquee!) was born in 1906 in Shropshire, England. She was a descendant of General Sir Henry Clinton, who served with the British army during the American Revolutionary War, and the younger sister of actress Angela Baddeley, (another character actress who is best-known on both sides of the Atlantic as Mrs. Bridges in the long-running television show 'Upstairs, Downstairs').

Hermione appeared in a string of hit films, among them 'Brighton Rock', 'The Belles of St. Trinian's', 'Passport to Pimlico', 'The Pickwick Papers', 'Tom Brown's Schooldays' and 'A Christmas Carol' (as Tiny Tim's mum). American audiences got to know her in movies like 'Mary Poppins' (she played Ellen the maidservant) and 'The Unsinkable Molly Brown', and later in the TV series 'Maude' (qv the Mrs Naugatuck clue) and 'Little House on the Prairie'. She was also in demand for voice-over work in animated films ('The Aristocats' and 'The Secret of NIMH') She was nominated as best Supporting Actress for her role as Elspeth, the music teacher in 'Room at the Top' in 1959, but she lost out to Shelley Winters who won it for 'The Diary of Anne Frank'.

Hermione Baddeley died in 1986 at age 79 after suffering a stroke.

Answer: Badger

The greatly anthropomorphized characters who live on the river bank and in the wild wood of Kenneth Grahame's classic 'Wind in the Willows' look to Badger for good advice and wisdom. The book, which came out in 1908, has remained a favourite and has been adapted for stage and screens large and small.

There have even been sociological papers written on the meaning of the book! According to the sociologists, Toad represents the British aristocracy, while Badger and Ratty fit into the upper-middle and middle classes respectively and dear old Mole represents the lower classes (due, no doubt, to his earthiness!) Me, I say pshaw! to the sociologists and just enjoy the story, which is pure delight and contains one of my favourite literary lines (said by Ratty): "There is nothing - absolutely nothing - half so much worth doing as simply messing about in boats!"