c4countdown

Stewart Gordon

Is that what they said - it looked rubbish? Or are you just hazarding a guess? Furthermore, at the moment I don't remember being unable to see it properly. And you would have thought it would have been sorted out by now.

Stewart Gordon

I was surprised nobody mentioned OVENING in round 10. I'm also surprised that it doesn't seem to be a word according to ODO, but would have thought someone would have at least queried it.

(If I try searching for it it gives me "micro-ovening". It's even weirder that that's in there.)

Stewart Gordon

Back in the day, we had the pencam.

When the laptop was introduced to replace the paper ODE, the pencam was replaced with superimposing a screenshot of the ODO over the central portion of the screen.

However, they then stopped doing this. Does anybody have any idea why?

Stewart Gordon

This game doesn't seem to be moving ... let's give it some of this stuff:

Stewart Gordon

At the risk of telling the world how far behind I am with Countdowns.... Malaphor. I've come across the concept but had no idea there was a word for it. The 'Mangled Expressions' section here has a few examples of these. The one I've heard quite a bit in my time is "get the short end of the stick".

Stewart Gordon

Vatican City (dubious if this is counted) OF COURSE THIS COUNTS. Wait what? That's a sovereign state that's a member of the UN in its own right? I went there while I was in Rome. So 9. Vatican City is one of the two sovereign states that aren't UN members - the other being Taiwan. At least, I'm not...

Stewart Gordon

Not quite at the bottom of the list with 6/197 (3/4):
United Kingdom, Netherlands, France, Republic of Ireland, Belgium (purely by the 10-minute rule), Finland (England, Scotland, Wales)

Stewart Gordon

I'm confused. The Facebook event page says it's cancelled, but the indication here and on the entry form is that it's still going ahead. Which is correct?

Stewart Gordon

Looks like MATEY now has a variant form MATY. So by standard English rules, MATIES would be the plural. But if (as Susie implied) the dictionary doesn't explicitly give the plural, then according to something we were told once upon a time the plural would be MATYS. Unless it's changed since that tim...

Stewart Gordon

Stewart Gordon

Has anybody kept track of these?

It would be good to have a full list, or as near to a full list as we can, of the various sets and title sequences and the range of series for which each was used. And maybe start a page or two on the wiki....

Stewart Gordon

I see. So the dictionary that used to be freely available (and which Countdown use) has now been hidden behind a paywall, and a cut-down version has been sneakily put in its place. And so now only subscribers to Oxford Dictionaries Premium can verify if a word validation error has been made on the s...

Stewart Gordon

It seems that on a handful of occasions this word has been given by a contestant, and each time allowed. I've just checked the dictionary, and from what I can make out it isn't a valid word at all. There is no entry for MOTLIER, MOTLY or MOTLIE on en.oxforddictionaries.com. The entry for MOTLEY does...

Stewart Gordon

Yes, as I guessed, OUTBOX as a verb means to be better at boxing than someone else. On the other hand, INBOX as a verb is somewhat more puzzling. To my surprise, ODO tells me the email meaning of OUTBOX is an Americanism. What's it called on these shores then? I always thought it was called an outbo...

Stewart Gordon

Susie talked about expletives. I knew about the literal meaning being 'filler word'. According to Wikipedia, this includes something not mentioned in Susie's piece: words such as "it" and "there" when used as grammatical placeholders.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Syntactic_expletive

Stewart Gordon

Do you reckon CUTLERIES would have been allowed in round 4? (Where does the scope of the 'portions' rule begin and end?)

Also, there was no mention of PULSATOR in round 11.

Stewart Gordon

Hi Martin, just wondering: Are you any relation to Jack or Josh? Or, for that matter, Bill, John, Rachel or Tony?

PS Congrats for winning the series.

Stewart Gordon

Chipping in a bit late here (and if I've counted correctly):

England: 15 (17 if you include having changed trains there; 16 if you include those that later became cities; 18 if you include both)
Wales: 0
Scotland: 1
Northern Ireland: 0

Stewart Gordon

You wouldn't speak of "a tinsel" or "five tinsel", therefore it's nonsense. Speaking nonsense in the name of saving time is a false economy.

I'm pretty sure her usual "shortcut" explanation is "you can't pluralise it"....

Stewart Gordon

Joe asked if TINSELS would be valid. So TINSEL is the word that Susie was claiming is singular, plural and a mass noun all at the same time. (Which might actually be true of some words, but they would be distinct subcategories of noun to which the word belongs, not ways of saying the same thing.)

Stewart Gordon

I have trouble believing Susie managed to make this fundamental error: "Yes, same in the plural. It's a mass noun, in other words." Somebody of her standing certainly shouldn't be confusing the two concepts.

Stewart Gordon

The point is that something appearing on a menu seems to be an invitation for people to stick an S (or ES or whatever) on the end of a word regardless of how its usually pluralised or indeed whether it is usually pluralised What are the exact rules about the "S (or ES or whatever)"? I think we need...

Stewart Gordon

What are people thinking of doing about lunch?

Stewart Gordon

What sort of dress and make-up do the production team insist on for contestants appearing on the show? I am asking this for a serious reason. I was on in 2007. What I remember being told is: Not white No logos or patterns, other than wide stripes Preferably not round-necked T-shirts for men (why me...

Stewart Gordon

How many meanings of DINGBAT are people here familiar with? It seems odd to me that Nick apparently knew only the "crazy person" meaning. I knew both meanings (crazy person and crazy Unicode character), but was surprised that the clue was basically just a dictionary definition/description of only t...

Stewart Gordon

No Susie, the French for "to the right" is "à droite", not "à droit". The two words are very closely related, but you have to be careful not to confuse them when giving or interpreting directions.

Stewart Gordon

How many meanings of DINGBAT are people here familiar with? It seems odd to me that Nick apparently knew only the "crazy person" meaning.

Stewart Gordon

Of WORSER, "According to the rules of Countdown, we'd allow it, because WORSE is a single syllable." So the rules now say you can put the -ER on any single-syllable word? And so a lot of these agent nouns that have been rejected in the past are now valid? Even if she meant only single-syllable adjec...

Stewart Gordon

Gavin Chipper wrote:People see the "dis" and think of that even though that would make it dis-hevelled.

Maybe. But on this basis I ought to have come across at least one commentary that includes a comment to the effect of "If this were the opposite of anything, it would be 'hevelled'".

Stewart Gordon

Not for the first time, Susie spoke about words like "gruntled", "kempt" and "couth". It seems that "shevelled" always comes up in discussions of this nature. Susie gives it as an example of "where we think only the opposite exists". It puzzles me that these discussions seemingly always fail to even...

Stewart Gordon

Gavin Chipper wrote:You definitely want to look right as the last thing you do before crossing. That's where you'd get hit from as you step into the road.

Exactly. Well said.

Stewart Gordon

Tim Vine was taught the Green Cross Code as "look left, then look right, then look left again". Opposite of what my mum taught me and what seems to make most sense. Do you think he learned it from someone in a country that drives on the right? That said, according to every edition of the Highway Cod...

Stewart Gordon

I was taught as a child that you're only allowed to play April Fool before 12:00. But I've always wanted to know who invented that rule.

Stewart Gordon

I thought we had multiple recap writers ... so they've all collapsed? :( (I'd volunteer myself, but knowing me I'd probably fall behind with it.) For the meantime, where's the best place to start discussions of things referred to on individual Countdown episodes? For example: the words the contestan...

Stewart Gordon

The last one here seems to be from 4 March.

Stewart Gordon

Johnny Canuck wrote:Her mind must have only been going a few knots per hour when she said it, I guess.

(Where's the like button when I need it?)

Stewart Gordon

Susie misread the definition of POUNDAL. And everybody seemed blissfully unaware that "an acceleration of one foot per second" makes no sense....

(Not to mention that it actually came out as "icceleration"....)

Stewart Gordon

Gavin Chipper wrote:There is also WOMAN but no WOWOMAN.

What would that be - an adult fefemale human being?

Stewart Gordon

The male contestant takes first blood with a masculine word which apparently has no feminine equivalent. Nope, not even in the 2016 aptodic update can one be a SHOWWOMAN^. If she were still with us in Recapland, Jen would be outraged. You could well ask. There are loads of feminine words that seem ...

Stewart Gordon

Do many people realise that, once your opponent has buzzed in and got the conundrum wrong, you have the rest of the time to yourself? Margaret should have taken her time, and checked her answer before buzzing in.

Stewart Gordon

Gavin Chipper wrote:We don't have to know literally everything to come up with a "best explanation". My version has the gap of why Susie doesn't/didn't use the pronunciation guide.

Which is the whole thing I was asking in the first place. Hence my point.

Stewart Gordon

Gavin Chipper wrote:1. She uses the same dictionary as us but doesn't use the pronunciation guide,

How does this explain why she refuses to use the pronunciation guide?

Gavin Chipper wrote:or at least didn't use it on this occasion.

How does this explain why she decided not to use it on this occasion?

Please stop this silliness.

Stewart Gordon

Gavin Chipper wrote:That Susie doesn't look at the pronunciation guide.

That isn't an explanation at all. It's really just saying the same thing I'm querying (that she guessed the pronunciation rather than referring to any pronunciation guide) in different words.

Stewart Gordon

Is that a quote from Susie? Is the point you're making that because she didn't know the pronunciation even though it's specified, she must have been using a different dictionary? Of course. I don't think that's really evidence that they use a different dictionary. What alternative explanation do yo...

Stewart Gordon

Gavin Chipper wrote:
Tony Atkins wrote:The fifth COREA (Countdown in Reading) is on the Saturday of Easter weekend
But is it Easter Saturday?

Don't start that again.

Stewart Gordon

Ben Wilson wrote:As always, COLIN will begin at 11:30

I could have sworn it used to start earlier than that....

Stewart Gordon

Those of you who aren't regulars on the wiki might be interested to know that we have a comprehensive list of such people.

Stewart Gordon

"I think 'ow-bwwt' probably." I had to look it up.
http://www.oxforddictionaries.com/defin ... ish/ouboet does give the pronunciation. So it looks like we were wrong, and this isn't the dictionary the show uses after all.

Stewart Gordon

What are the lunch arrangements this time round?

Stewart Gordon

From which dictionary did Nick get that NYLON comes from London and New York? I was explicitly taught that this isn't the case ... and I would have expected Susie to comment on the matter.

Stewart Gordon

VASELINE is weird - it's marked as a trademark but it's lowercase. I would say the trademark supersedes the case, as many trademarks have a lowercase initial letter anyway (ebay to name but one - I have always thought of it styled as eBay but maybe I imagined it?). Is the rule that the word must st...

Stewart Gordon

I'm sure that when the ODO was being put together there were many competing requirements. It's hard to imagine the needs of Countdown being the highest priority. What other requirement would have competed with this one, exactly? I can imagine. The Countdown community would have just been a small bu...

Stewart Gordon

You'd think that with an online dictionary you could just enter a word in the search box, and if it's a word then it'll find it, and if it isn't then it won't. Sadly, it doesn't seem that this is the case with ODO. For instance, POETRIES brings up POETRY, even though Susie once told us there's no se...

Stewart Gordon

I've just looked it up , and it now gives RAVIOLI as a plural noun. It must have been listed as a mass noun in the dictionary that Countdown used at the time. So now, if they allow RAVIOLIS, then I guess that they would have to allow CHIPSES? Or does it make a difference whether it's listed as a plu...

Stewart Gordon

Different structural forms of the same element are allotropes. It's a similar concept to isomers in that they are different arrangements of the same atoms. But allotropes are necessarily of a single element, and not necessarily at the molecular level as isomers are.

Stewart Gordon

I'm surprised Susie read out only the nuclear physics definition of ISOMER (an atomic nucleus with the same atomic/mass numbers as another but a different energy state), and not the chemistry one (a compound with the same combination of atoms as another but a different arrangement of the atoms). I'd...

Stewart Gordon

From where did Nick get that Boris Becker was, at 17, the youngest ever Wimbledon winner? According to sources I've seen, it was 15-year-old Lottie Dod in 1887.

Stewart Gordon

I'm in!

Stewart Gordon

No mention of whether ANTIQUER would have been valid. Would it? It would have to be listed under this entry , and it's not. Have you established that this is indeed the dictionary Countdown uses now? I wasn't sure whether it was actually the free-for-all one or a more comprehensive one that you hav...

Stewart Gordon

Susie wasn't sure whether FAILOVERS is a word. It seems to me that it ought to be. But what would have happened if a contestant had tried the word and Susie couldn't make up her mind about it? Is it an 8 you are prepared to gamble if you need the points ? I hope I would manage not to misdeclare it ...

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