STOREHOUSE OF ABSOLUTELY USELESS INFORMATION

 STOREHOUSE OF ABSOLUTELY USELESS INFORMATION

My friend Radhakrishnan Nair posted on his wall: How many words can you think of in a minute without the letter 'a'? Clue: I can think of a hundred in a minute.

He gave the answer soon enough: one to one hundred! Did you know that?

I am sure he was simplifying the question for us. What he did not tell us is that in fact, none of the letters A, B, C and D is present in any of the numbers zero to ninety-nine!

And, if one ignores the A in "and" (as in 101), the letter A first comes in 1000. The first B comes in one billion. For the first C, you have to travel as far as octillion (I followed by 27 zeroes!) [We are, of course, not talking about the Indian system of enumeration where crores and lakhs (also spelt lacs) are used.] D first comes in "thousand".

Of what earthly use is this information? About as useful as the knowledge that the King of Hearts is the only king in a deck of cards without a moustache. Or that the color you'll see when you open your eyes in a pitch-black room is called "eigengrau." Or when you say "I'll be back in a jiffy", you are guilty of extreme exaggeration because a jiffy is one trillionth of a second.

The word "dreamt", apart from "undreamt" derived from it, is the only word ending in MT. And some common words like month, orange, purple and silver have no rhyming words.

Here are some more:

The opposite sides of a die (used in a game of Ludo or Snakes and Ladders) will always add up to seven.

Golf balls have an average of 336 "dimples."

"Spoonfeed" is the longest word with letters in the reverse alphabetical order.

When words with f followed by i (like define, fight, office, difficult) are printed, the little dot over the i (did you know that it is called tittle?) disappears. Can't believe this? Check the words in this paragraph!

My brain is a repository of such useless information. Why do I collect and retain them? The answer is what George Mallory gave when he was asked, "Why do you climb the Everest?" He famously replied, "Because it is there."