The Skin Game Trivia Quiz

Answer: Cole Porter

Cole Porter wrote 'I've Got You Under My Skin' in 1936, for the Eleanor Powell film 'Born to Dance'. In the film it was sung by Virginia Bruce. Frank Sinatra sang it on his weekly radio show in 1946 and it quickly became one of his biggest hits. In 1956, Sinatra recorded the definitive version of the song, a swinging big band rendition, backed by Nelson Riddle and his orchestra. From that time on, Sinatra included the song in most of the concerts he gave.

In 1993, on his album 'Duets' Sinatra recorded the song with Bono (who also included the duet on his 'Stay (Faraway, So Close!)' In 1966 the 30-year old classic became a Top Ten hit for The Four Seasons.

Other versions have been recorded by Ella Fitzgerald, Dinah Washington, and James Darren, and more recently by Canadians Diana Krall and Michael Buble.

Answer: Dylan Thomas

'Adventures in the Skin Trade and Other Stories' was published posthumously in 1955 (Thomas died in 1953) and is a semi-autobiographical collection of stories drawn from incidents in Dylan Thomas' life. It is wonderfully funny and wickedly pointed in its depiction of the characters.

Answer: There's more than one way to solve a problem

Before I get tons of mail from all the aleurophiles taking this quiz denouncing me for cruelty to cats, let me hasten to assure you that the cat in question is a catfish. Evidently, one has to skin a catfish before cooking it because the skin is very tough and inedible (that's what people who eat catfish tell me anyway.) I'm told that it's something to do with the whiskers, which are actually barbs.

The phrase is American in origin and dates from around 1893 as far as I can tell. As one who loves cats, I would never stoop so low as to skin an actual cat! Nor would I eat a catfish, if it comes to that!

Answer: Thornton Wilder

'The Skin of Our Teeth' is a wonderfully funny play that won the Pulitzer Prize for Thornton Wilder in 1943. Despite its marvellous comedic script, the play has an underlying darkness, weaving great moments in myth and history to relate the sum of human experience.

When it was first published it prompted a chorus of praise and also a hail of criticism. Wilder was accused of lifting the idea for 'Skin' from James Joyce's 'Ulysses' and it is thought that the controversy about suspected plagiarism prevented the Nobel prize panel from awarding Wilder the Nobel Prize for Literature.

Answer: The Book of Job

The King James version of the Bible gave us 'by the skin of the teeth'. You'll find it in the Book of Job, chapter 14, verse 20: 'My bone cleaveth to my skin, and to my flesh, and I am escaped by the skin of my teeth.' Miles Coverdale, who translated the Bible into English in the 1530s, gave that verse as "My bone hangeth to my skin, and the flesh is awaye. Only there is left for me the skynne about my teeth." Either way, it sounds pretty awful! When one reads the Book of Job one quite understands St. Teresa of Avila's outburst to God: "If this is the way you treat your friends, it's not surprising you don't have many!"

Answer: Skinflint

I made up skinshanks and skindlehapper and a skintrader is not spoken of in polite society. The term skinflint has an interesting derivation, by way of the old English saying 'the skin of a flint' meaning something absolutely worthless! The French use 'tondre sur un oeuf' (fleece on an egg), and the Romans referred to 'lana caprina' (goat's wool).

A skinflint is one who drives a hard bargain, literally taking the skin off a flint. Pinch farthing, pinch penny and niggard mean the same thing as skinflint.

Answer: Revolutionary War vigilantes

During the Revolutionary War the Skinners terrorized people in Westchester County, New York by beating up and robbing those who refused to take an oath of loyalty to the fledgling Republic. One assumes that they were called Skinners because they literally left their victims with little more than their skin!

Coracles, if you're interested, are little round boats made from the hides of bulls from which all the hair has been scraped. They were invented by the Celts and one can still see people using coracles on rivers in the remoter parts of Wales.

Answer: Class struggle

'The Skin Game' was written and first performed in 1920 when British society was undergoing changes. The aristocracy, represented by Squire Hillcrist, was losing its status, while self-made men like Galsworthy's unpleasant nouveau riche Hornblower were taking over the running of the country. The play achieved great notoriety because the British public realized that World War One had been disastrous despite the fact that the Allies had won the day. The British generals, most of whom were drawn from the aristocracy, had made woeful blunders in strategy that resulted in the loss of hundreds and thousands of soldiers, most of whom were drawn from the working classes.

Ecdysiast, by the way, is a fancy term for a stripper. The word was coined in 1940 by H.L. Mencken in an article about striptease artiste Gypsy Rose Lee. There is a publication called 'The Ecdysiast' but it has nothing to do with striptease. It is a scientific quarterly for people interested in crustaceans, which are also called ecdysiasts because they regularly shed their shells and grow new ones. Ecdysiast comes from the Greek 'ekdusis' meaning 'to cast off'

A golf tournament with a high cash prize is called a skins game, possibly because at one time animal skins were used as currency.

Answer: Rudyard Kipling

Kipling doesn't seem to have had a very high opinion of women. Like most Victorian males he classified them either as being as pure as nuns or as impure as streetwalkers. In Kipling's ballad 'The Ladies' the narrator recounts his amorous liaisons with women of various colours and classes, and claims that all women are alike when it comes to affairs of the heart. Hmmm! Isn't that rather like saying all cats are grey in the dark?

Answer: John Davies

Hands up all those who thought it was either Shakespeare or Ecclesiates. Not surprising, really, since a great many sayings have their origins with either the Bard or the Bible. (I was once told that the majority of book titles are taken from either Shakespeare or Holy Writ. You can check that out at your local library.)

In this case, however, the originator of the phrase is John Davies, an Anglo-Welsh poet (born in Hereford around 1565 and died in London in 1618). Davies was usually referred to as John Davies of Hereford by way of distinguishing him from the hundreds of other John Davies' of his day. Unlike most Welshmen, he wrote pretty dull poetry and even duller prose. You'll find 'beauty's but skin deep' in his highly moralistic poem entitled 'A Select Second Husband for Sir Thomas Overburie's Wife', published in 1616.

Sir Thomas Overbury was the victim of one of the most scandalous murders of the early seventeenth century, but you can look that up for yourselves.