Benzene 4

• Without context I would expect "going spare" to mean "abandoning luxuries" or maybe "coming up short on money" rather than "going crazy". But maybe it derives from "going spare on brains" for your meaning.

• Maybe the house elf did what Bill Clinton did to a dress.

[I confess that I paid almost no attention to the whole Monica Lewinsky scandal when it was going on, and not much more even afterward, but I always assumed that Bill Clinton did whatever he did with Monica herself and not just with her dress. The dress, I assumed, just happened to be somewhere nearby, whether on her or off her. Am I mistaken?]

• The only reference for "taking the mickey" I can think of would be a Mickey Finn: a drugged drink. One might laugh hard if dosed with some analog to nitrous oxide, for example.

[Pete has a better answer for this one, below.]

• I think of "chuffed" to connote "made proud", "puffed up" a bit more specifically than just generally "pleased". But that might be just something I inferred from the first one or two situations where it was used.

• "Paradiddle" is the drum riff, not taradiddle. That's why you didn't find it.

[Ah! Thanks, that one was driving me crazy. I was sure I didn't imagine it. Odd that the two unrelated words take such a similar form. Merriam Webster lists both as "origin unknown".

[When I was a kid, I encountered a comic book -- Hot Stuff, I think -- in which someone stumbles into a world populated by stick figure creatures called "fummadiddles". (The first one said, "Hi, I'm a fummadiddle, what's you?") I only remember that because my siblings and I started drawing fummadiddles and they eventually took their place in our own elaborate universe of imaginary creatures.

[Google turns up one hit for fummadiddle, where it appears in a list of words meaning nonsense -- synonyms for "taradiddle", I suppose. Google suggests as an alterative flummadiddle, a commoner word for nonsense which is also the name of some sort of casserole.]

• I agree that (for centuries, probably) "withers" has been that section of a horse, with no singular form. But it wouldn't be surprising to hear that it did once have the Pegasus-style meaning in medieval heraldry, as two wing joints, and eventually the singular use... um... withered away.

• Slipstream is used both by racing bicyclists (it's the advantage to following in the pellaton) and by European auto racers (where USA racers would say "draft"). It's both a noun and a verb, transitive, but it can be used intransitively, implying the slipstreaming of whomever was straight ahead.

[The transitive feels backward to me. I would have thought the person in front would slipstream the person behind. But what do I know about bicycle racing?

[OK, so what's a pellaton?]

• Vanishing Spell: A mouse is indeed more complex than a snail, in terms of the number of internal systems and organs and their individual complexity ... but only by a factor of perhaps three or four, not anything like ten or a hundred times as complex. (I Am Not A Biologist.) You can virtually ignore the snail's shell except to appreciate the elegance of the relatively simple fractally-describable process by which it's created. All the slug-type invertebrates are little more than food-seeking food-processors, but they still have organic systems a lot like those in humans or other large vertebrates. Biologists categorize animals by vertebrate/invertebrate long before they get to differences like what they breathe or what they eat or how many limbs they have. But spineless critters as large as snails that have survived on land (not counting sea creatures here) tend to have basic systems built on the same DNA biochemistry and similar basic coding to those of us with backbone.

[Even if I'm wrong about the anthropocentrism of the whole complexity issue (as others have suggested I am), surely this notion of splitting the animal kingdom into vertebrate and invertebrate is anthropocentric. Unless I'm mistaken, Chordata is but one phylum out of about 20. If one phylum is to be singled out to represent half the animal kingdom, surely it should be the far more numerous arthropods.]

Pete Gaughan (August 13)

Was Richard Adams British?

As a matter of fact, yes:

Richard Adams set the book Watership Down in the region he grew up in. This area is a real place and is south of Newbury. [...]

http://www.mayfieldiow.freewire.co.uk/watershp/

http://www.enotes.com/watership-down/9952

"Large as sledges": Sledge can also mean "large sled," and that's how I took it when I read the book.

http://dictionary.reference.com/search?q=sledge

I've always and only heard "snogging" as "French kissing", and I was confused by the use of it in #5.

"Taking the mickey" is teasing, usually by sarcastic imitation: mocking.

[I haven't read Watership Down in ages. Maybe I'll look for it in a used book store. I wonder if it's too long to read out loud to someone.]

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