Silly, chilly... and very tricky

Four questions keep on coming up in these pages. One's a bit silly, another could be chilly and the last two are decidedly tricky.

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Let's take the silly one out of the way first.

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Q. What is 'pig' Latin
A. There's a full article on this elsewhere in the Answerbank. But, briefly, it's a set of rules for constructing a kind of schoolboy code which apes one perceived characteristic of the Latin language (perceived by people who've just started learning it, that is).

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So, having got that off our chests, on to the chilly one...

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Q. What is 'going commando'
A. Ask Mel Gibson! It refers to the Braveheart-style fashion statement which requires gentlemen to eschew the wearing of undergarments beneath their trousers/shorts/kilts.

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But we're pretty sure Mel got the idea from that other well-know historical commentator, Sid James, in a somewhat earlier movie: Carry on Up The Khyber!

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OK, now we're on a roll. Let's tackle a tricky one...

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Q. Is the Paul Harvey riddle just a trick question
A. In a word, yes. But as these things go, it's quite a thought-provoking one.

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The riddle, as almost everyone user of the internet probably knows by now, is:

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What is greater than God,
More evil than the devil;
The poor have it, the rich need it -
But if you eat it, you die

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And the answer is 'nothing'. Neat, huh

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And finally...

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Q. What's the origin of 'The whole nine yards'.

A. Pass. That's the honest answer.

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OK, we all know it's the title of a Bruce Willis movie - but that's no reason to avoid the question. In truth, though, there are a lot of plausible answers.

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The meaning most often attributed to it is 'to give it all you have got', and the majority view seems to be that it's a mutation of an olde English expression 'to then eyne', meaning 'dressed to the eyes'. This was gradually corrupted into 'the neyne', then to 'the nine' and...

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In the US, it's often held to have something to do with a winning run in baseball. But that's ten yards - so another American strand has it that it's to do with the length of machine-gun belts used by the American military.

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Nautical types like to believe it's to do with rigging all the spars on a three-masted vessel. Which has a certain charm - and the advantage of being almost totally unproveable...