Eighteen and Counting... Trivia Quiz

Answer: eighteen

Eighteen is the numeral "18" written as an English word. Its digits are 1 and 8.
1 + 8 = 9
2 * 9 = 18
A natural number is a counting number: 1, 2, 3, 4, etc. A composite number is simply any number that is not a prime number. Basically those clues were superfluous, for they didn't really narrow things down, as what it was down to was "the only number that equals twice the sum of its digits".

(That question may have seemed difficult, yet if you took note of the title of this quiz, you need not have understood a word of it!)

Answer: gee thin

Gee, did you get it? "Gee, Your Hair Smells Terrific" isn't just a nice thing to say; it's a brand of shampoo from the 1970s. The word "gee" can also be used to command a horse to go faster: "Gee up!" And if you're a gangster or a hard-boiled private detective, you might insist on getting paid "five gees" for your work, short for "five grand" or $5000.

According to the Oxford Dictionary, thin "describes a person whose healthy weight is naturally low in proportion to his or her height, although it may imply that the person is underweight". In the 1920s, the very thin appearance of the flapper became the fashion, and many women starved themselves or ate tapeworms in an attempt to achieve the "flat" look. When the Great Depression made food too expensive to be a symbol, a fuller figure came into fashion, and the number of persons afflicted with eating disorders dropped. In the 1960s, the thin figure once again became the fashionable figure (Twiggy), and eating disorders resurged, the numbers growing exponentially through the 1970s and 1980s.

Answer: teeing

They are placing the ball on the tee, the aforementioned peg, ready to make the first shot of the hole. The first use of "tee" as a verb dates from 1673, according to the Online Etymology Dictionary. Now a "tee" is also the stand on which a child places a baseball before striking it in the classic game of T-ball, played by American children who lack the coordination to hit a ball thrown at them at 90 mph.

But I've never heard "teeing up" used to refer to a T-ball player getting ready to bat. If you can find an example, please share it!

Answer: genie

The word "genie" proceeds from the Latin "genius" and was first used in French translations of "101 Arabian Nights". A better transliteration of the Arabic word for the wish-granting spirit would be jinni, singular of jinn, which you may see in some English writing. But "genie" persists in the language, as in Christina Aguilera's song "Genie in a Bottle", so why fight it?

Answer: gene

We can thank Gregor Mendel (1822-1884), Silesian scientist and Augustinian friar, for laying the foundation for the science of genetics with his experiments on garden pea plants. Unfortunately, his work was rejected in his lifetime and only rediscovered after his death. Were it not for Mendel's pioneering research, which led to the Law of Segregation and the Law of Independent Assortment, and the work of other scientists building upon Mendel's theories, biologists likely could not have mapped the human genome by 2003, some 137 years after the publication of "Experiments on Plant Hybridization".

Answer: nee

The word comes directly from the French language and literally means "born". The word in English may or may not have an accent over the first 'e', and it is usually used as an addendum, e.g. "Susan Jones, née Smith", rather than placed between the forename and the new surname. Perhaps one could use the masculine "né" in reference to a man who has changed his name, e.g. "Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, né Alcindor", but I'm not sure I've ever seen it used this way in English, especially when a man's entire name, not just the surname, is changed (he was born Ferdinand Lewis Alcindor, Jr in 1947).

Answer: en

In the printing industry, the words "en" and "em" are used frequently not only spell out the letters but also to refer to the widths they take up, with "em" being roughly double the space of "en". Printers use these to estimate how much space a text will require.

It also refers to dashes used in properly printed texts, the "en dash" being a shorter dash (but longer than a hyphen) which is supposed to be used when giving a range of values, such as birth and death dates, and the "em dash" being used for huge pauses or changes of direction in thought, and also to set off quotations.

Answer: N

Scotch physician Daniel Rutherford discovered nitrogen in 1772, but French chemist Jean-Antoine Chaptal gave it its name. With atomic number 7, nitrogen is found in Kevlar, in antibiotics, in ammonia, and in nitroglycerin. Aqua regia, which can dissolve gold and platinum, is made of a mixture of nitric acid and hydrochloric acid (ouch). All living things contain nitrogen.

Answer: Ne

The first neon sign appeared in 1910 at the Paris Motor Show. Neon (atomic number 10) is a colorless, non-reactive gas at room temperature, but it glows red-orange in a vacuum tube when a charge is applied. It melts at a frigid -415.46°F (-248.59°C) and boils at the not much warmer -410.94°F (-246.08°C). Scottish scientist Sir William Ramsay and partner Morris Travers discovered this "new" element in 1898, naming it after "neos", the Greek word for "new".

It is a noble gas, meaning it will not form compounds readily.

Answer: hen

A hen is a mature female domestic chicken. Actually, it can refer to any sort of female fowl, especially domestic (e.g. turkey). Did you know it can also refer to a female lobster, crab, or salmon? Moreover, in Britain, male lobsters, crabs, and salmons are called cocks, which is of course another word for roosters, or mature male domestic chickens.

Answer: then

The word comes from the Old Saxon "thanna".

It's a frequently used word with lots of meanings. Another meaning is "next" or "after", as in, "You won the first and then the second hourly game today".

It can also mean "in that case", as in, "Well, if she's not happy, then she should leave."

Sometimes, it's just tagged on. "Okay, I'll see you in a hour, then". It's hard to come with anything interesting to say about "then", so I'll leave it alone, then.

Answer: hi net

"Hi!" = a nice, short greeting, first appearing in the Middle Ages.

"Net" = It can also refer to a network, especially a computer network. I used to see "'net" or "Net" (capitalized) refer to the Internet, but that became passé sometime early in the 3rd millennium. The word is used in the cyber-thriller "The Net" (1995), starring Sandra Bullock as the victim of identity theft and the discoverer of an international conspiracy.

Answer: theine

Did giving you the genus of tea help you come up with the answer? The word comes from combining the Dutch word for tea, THEE, with -INE, just like caffeine comes from combining the French word for coffee, CAFÉ with -INE. According to the Oxford Dictionary, it's pronounced "THEE-een" or "THEE-in". "Martindale's Extra Pharmacopoeia", however, suggests a French origin and offers the pronunciation "TAY-een". (Thanks to player ceetee for that tidbit.) The word isn't used much, but if you are a tea-drinker tired of coffee's dominance, maybe you could say, "Oh, I need my daily dose of theine in the morning". Maybe it will catch on. Stranger things have happened.

Answer: neigh et

Other noises a horse might make are a nicker, a whinny, a snort, a grunt, or a blow. A horse will neigh for all kinds of reasons, including recognition and pleasure, but also anxiety. You have to note the horse's body language to interpret the sound correctly.

The Latin word "et" appears in English in many abbreviations. There is "etc." for "et cetera" meaning "and so forth". There is "et al." for "et alia" meaning "and others" -- used to indicated multiple authors of a work when citing a reference.

My English teacher will cringe if you say, "I et the pie", a rural Americanism. But if you insist, here's a poem for you that was a cultural meme long before the World Wide Web:

'Twas in a restaurant when they met,
Romeo and Juliet.
But when the bill had to be met,
Poor Rome-he-owed what Julie-et.

(Puns hurt.)

Answer: eighteen

And we're back where we started again!

By the way, in Alabama, the age of majority is 19, and in Mississippi, a youth has to wait until he turns 21. In Ohio, the age of majority is 18 or high school graduation, whichever comes first, but in Tennessee it's whichever comes LATER. So if you're still in high school in the Volunteer State at age 19, although you may vote, you are not yet an adult, legally speaking!