Education & Reference Questions & Answers

The term stands for celebrities who attend posh soirees organized to collect saliva for genetic sequencing. Simply put, it is a celebrity spit party. The term is a combination of the words ‘spit’ and ‘glitterati’. A start-up called 23andMe hosted the parties as a promotional tool for popularizing personal genomics. The marketing strategy first began in January, 2011 at the …

Children born in the early 21st century will never know a world without the internet, cable TV, virtual libraries, and other forms of instant intellectual gratification. Critics of this phenomenon fear that instantaneous access has the potential to overload users. Instead of delving deeper into one discipline, many people are dabbling on the surface of many subjects. Author Richard Foreman …

This was George Borrow’s Wild Wales, its People, Language and Scenery which was published in 1862. It was the popular journal The Spectator which printed this well-earned praise.

Jargonauts are people who are fond of bureaucratic terms as also a person who uses a lot of jargon in everyday conversation or while writing. A jargonaut is also a person who is adept in comprehending everyday jargon-filled literature. A person who aims to invent new jargon.

None other that the famous courtier to Queen Elizabeth I, Sir Walter Raleigh. After Queen Elizabeth I died, King James I ascended the throne. James did not like Raleigh who was soon arrested on a trumped up charge of high threason, condemned to death and imprisoned in the Bloody Tower at the Tower of London. It was there that he …

Robert Southey was born at Bristol, August 12, 1774. When he was 20 years old, the French Revolution was in full swing and Southey was so inspired by this that he stupidly conceived the idea of founding a communal republic in the United States. He was ably abetted in this notion by Samuel Coleridge, also a poet. The two young …

Savinien Cyrano de Bergerac. He was a gascon, as was D’ Artangnan the hero of The Three Musketeers. In fact, both swordsmen lived at the same time for D’ Artagnan really lived. He was a king’s Musketeer who became a Marshal of France. Cyrano de Bergerac was born in Perigord in Gascony, a south-west province of France in 1619. He …

Marcel Proust’s ‘A La Recherche Du Temps Perdu’ (translated as In Search of Past) is the world’s longest novel, according to the Guinness World Records. The influential 13-volume work contains 9,609,000 characters, with each letter and space counting as one character.

He was Francois de Montcorbier, known as Villon, born in 1431. His father died when he was quite young and he was brought up by a relative, Guillaume de Villon, whose name he adopted. He was educated at the University of Paris from where he graduated in 1449. He soon fell into bad company and roistered through the seedy taverns …

The titles of the three books are Beau Geste, Beau Sabreur and Beau Ideal and they were written by Percival Christopher Wren who was born in 1885. Having served in the British, French and Indian armies and having been a member of the French Foreign Legion, he was for a while assistant director of public education in the Bombay Presidency. …