Scrying the Crystal Ball Trivia Quiz

Answer: Munificent

Indian spiritual leader Sri Sathya Sai Baba once said, "Spend money in charity; be generous and munificent but not extravagant", implying that one should be charitable but not flaunt or boast that they are doing so.

Santa would be munificent, but Scrooge would be parsimonious, since he is stingy. To be inveigling is to allure or entice one into giving you something, and mordant can either refer to a sharp, harsh type of humour, or a substance which sets dyes into fabrics by binding and fixing the dye.

Answer: Connective tissue covering bodily organs or other structures

Adventitia and serosa are both connective tissues which cover bodily organs. Adventitia tends to form the outermost membrane of a structure, for example in the tunica adventitia of an artery or vein, it helps to protect the blood vessel, supply it with blood itself, and anchor it within the body.

Meanwhile, serosa secretes a lubricating fluid, and its function is more focused on removing friction between structures, rather than binding them as adventitia might.

Answer: Nonpareil

Nonpareil, in French, means 'without equal', and is also accepted as an English word with the same meaning. Hundreds and thousands, for example, could also be considered nonpareil, and the name might have derived from the French's tendency to decorate their confectionery with great intricacy and detail, thus being 'without equal'.

Paramount means 'supreme' or 'most important' but has no relation to confectionery, meanwhile inimitable is without compare in so much as it is unique and matchless. To gazunder is to demand the reduction in sale price after initially agreeing to another price, and is particularly prominent in property sale.

Answer: A hard lump of fecal matter

Breaking the word down, 'fecal' being of feces, and 'lith' deriving from 'lithos', the Greek for stone, combine to describe what is fecal matter of a stone-like hardness. Fecaliths can be a product of chronic constipation, and can also be the cause of appendicitis; in bad cases, they may require surgical removal.

Answer: Epistrophe

Epistrophe is a word of Greek origin originally meaning 'return' or 'upon turning'. It is sometimes also known as epiphora, and is used for poetic effect - the opposite being anaphora, which comprises of repeated words at the beginning of sentences or phrases. An example of its utility might reference part of Abraham Lincoln's Gettysburg Address: "of the people, by the people, for the people".

The incorrect answers are manglings of 'exclamation mark', 'caret' and 'chevron' respectively. A caret is an upwards facing arrow '^' and actually looks mostly the same as a chevron, although caret is used more in programming code and as a proofreading mark, whereas chevron tends to be used in architecture or heraldry.

Answer: False

Breaking the word down again, in this case, the 'a' serves as a prefix to denote lacking in something. The suffix 'osis' tends to refer to disease or a medical disorder indicated more directly by the rest of the word it comprises - therefore, in this case, avitaminosis is a disease caused by the chronic lack of vitamins.

Different vitamin deficiencies are congruent with different diseases - a deficiency in vitamin C, for example, leads to scurvy, whereas vitamin D deficiency can lead to rickets. The over-retention of vitamins is known as hypervitaminosis.

Answer: paradox

Often, people resolve paradoxes by claiming that one of the premises the logical statements are built on are faulty. The grandfather paradox, for example, is a popular dilemma often used within time travel fiction, such as 'Back to the Future', 'Doctor Who' and 'Chrono Trigger', and asks the question: if you travelled back in time and killed your grandfather before he conceived your parent, what would happen?

One part of the theory goes that if you killed him, you would cease to exist, since your parent would not have been born. But, you do exist, since you went back in time to kill him; so, in theory, you may have failed to kill him since you remained alive. This paradox has foxed many people, hence its inclusion in many entertainment media.

Answer: Porringer

The form of the porringer is said to originate from mediaeval Europe, and is a shallow bowl with one or two handles, often made of wood, pewter, ceramic or silver. I'm not sure whether it's coincidence or not that it sounds like porridge, which has been eaten in porringers, but they tend to have been replaced by bowls which serve much the same purpose.

A tureen is a serving dish for a stew or soup, a cauldron is a large metal cooking pot, and a crucible is a container whereby substances placed in it can be heated or melted at extremely high temperatures.

Answer: Telpher

A telpher is often synonymous with the more well known term, cable car. You can use a telpher to cut out the soul destroying matter of climbing mountains and just take a shortcut to the peaks, for example the Huangshuan (or Yellow Mountain) in China has run telphers to give tourists the views they want without doing the hard work. Of course, you could pretend you climbed the whole way up yourself and boast to your friends when you got back...

A jalopy is a dilapidated and effectively banged up car, a junk is a flat-bottomed sailing boat used in Asia, often with colourful sails, and a subcompact is a car which is smaller than a compact car and larger than a microcar (or, alternatively, a gun...).

Answer: Wasting syndrome

Cachexia differs from eating disorders such as anorexia and bulimia in that it is not really due to your nutritional intake, but due to the body's inability to absorb the food into its system. It often comes as a consequence of other diseases, such as the late stages of cancer, and treatment of cachexia has often been unsuccessful.

Fanconi's syndrome (not Fanconi's anemia - which is different) is a disease which inhibits reabsorption of substances in the kidney, leading to a net loss of glucose, amino acids, phosphates and bicarbonates which are expelled in urine.
Meanwhile, cold hand syndrome, or Raynaud's syndrome, involves an interruption in blood flow to fingers and toes, which go white.
And, restless legs syndrome is described as a compulsion to move a body part, often a leg, to satisfy what feels like an itch, and its cause is yet unknown.