Social Science Questions & Answers

Frenemy is made of two opposites – friend and enemy – and is used for a person who appears to be both. A friend who shares similar interests and hangs around with you, but who secretly works against your interests and is fiercely competitive. It came into currency with chicklit and television serials, mostly in the feminine world.

A flexitarian is a person whose diet is vegetarian for the most part, with an occasional meat dish. They are different from those who eat only fish and chicken, besides vegetables. Flexitarianism is not a movement yet.

A person who works on the move is called a digital nomad. Such a worker may or may not be on the rolls of a company, and could be a consultant / freelancer / a writer on the move. They are persons with a free spirit who like a remote lifestyle and earn as they move, and believe that with …

A deleb is a dead celebrity, who is used to endorse products and continues to earn good revenue even after death. Good examples are Elvis Presley, Lennon, Yves St Laurent, Albert Einstein, Marilyn Monroe, Johnny Cash and now, Michael Jackson. But a deleb is not short for delebrity, which means a ‘designer celebrity’.

One of the earliest antecedents to the modern speech bubble was the speech scroll – wispy lines that connected first person speech to the mouths of speakers in Meso-American art. In Western graphic art, labels that reveal what a figure is saying have appeared even in the 13th century. Word balloons began appearing in 18th century printed broadsides and political …

The board game, today called Snakes and Ladders, originated in ancient India, where it was known with the name Mokshapat or Moksha Patamu. It’s not exactly known when or who invented it, though it’s believed the game was played at a time as early as 2nd century BC. According to some historians, the game was invented by Saint Gyandev in …

Shorthand is believed to have been invented by Tiro, a slave of Marcus Tullius Cicero, to keep pace with the speeches his master delivered. Cicero (106 BC – 43 BC), a statesman, lawyer, political theorist, and philosopher, is considered one of Rome’s greatest orators. His political speeches are well known, and he delivered these in an elaborate and flowery style, …

There was no single ‘inventor’ of photography. It evolved through the combined work of many people of many different nationalities. One Frenchman, Joseph Nicephore Niepce (1765-1853), often gets the credit, however, since he was the first to obtain a picture ‘from nature’ with a camera, in the modern photographic sense. He was also the first to ‘fix’ a picture, so …

Charles Darrow, a US citizen, invented Monopoly in 1931, during the Great Depression. Out of work, Darrow earned a living inventing puzzles and games, to sell to toy-makers. With some difficulty, he sold Monopoly to Parker Brothers on a royalty basis. The game sold so well that Darrow became a millionaire. The original game had properties named after streets, hotels, …

Phillip M Parker, an American, has written 200,000 books. He has devised computer algorithms which write text, search and do many more defined operations which have helped him write these books. Among his publications include The Official Patient’s Sourcebook on Acne Rosacea (168 pages), Stickler Syndrome: A Bibliography and Dictionary for Physicians and Sets That Measure 6-Feet by 9-Feet or …