LETS Swap!
Pokemon cards, Moshi monsters, jelly stickers, friendship bracelets – at some point over the last few years my kids have swapped all these things. And in return they get good stuff back.
Wouldn’t it be great if you could go into a shop and, even if you had no money, you could still swap something you had for something you want?
In communities all over the world, people are doing just that. Or something very like it.
Local Exchange Trading Schemes or LETS for short, enable people who live near each other to swap their skills and receive goods and services without having to pay a penny.
Why DO Kids Want to Play Minecraft?
Sitting back, ready for another interesting and rather aggressive night on COD (Call of Duty), I launch my dashboard to see the usual suspects all gathered playing the latest shoot ’em ups.
Except one. Looking again, I notice my 13-year-old brother Jimbob is playing a game I’ve never seen – MINECRAFT.
After much persuasion and explanation “COME ON BRO, BUY IT PLEASE, YOU BUILD STUFF”, I decide to purchase it, in order to support him in our mum’s campaign to play online more responsibly.
The game launches and all I see is blocks. Have I got the right game? Where are the graphics?
Wandering mindlessly around, past trees, rivers and spiders, until Harvey Jimbob asks me to come to his house. Here’s the strangest part: he built it.
Have you ever wondered…why leaves change colour in autumn?
Autumn is a season of change; the weather gets colder, there’s less daylight and leaves change colour and fall from plants. But why does this happen?
Why Do Plants Have Leaves?
Leaves contain a chemical called chlorophyll (pronounced KLO-ro-fil), which as well as giving them their lovely green colour also helps create food for the plant. The leaves act like tiny solar panels, and use the sun’s energy to convert water (from the ground) and a gas called carbon dioxide (from the air) into sugar and oxygen. This process is called photosynthesis (pronounced foto-SIN-theh-sis), and the sugar is what the plant lives on.
Do Earwigs Really Live in Our Ears?
There has long been a myth that earwigs use human ears either to lay their eggs or to live in and feed off our ear wax, or other similar things. It sounds pretty gruesome, doesn’t it? After all, who would actually like the idea of an insect living inside their ear? But do earwigs really live in our ears?
Fortunately for us, it is not true. Despite their name, earwigs don’t actually live in our ears and neither do they use them to lay eggs. They much prefer their normal habitat of nests under rocks and logs or in flowerbeds. So where does the earwig get its name?
Old English Origins
Yet the name itself suggests that this has been a myth for a long time, so let’s examine the name. It can easily be split into two parts: ear and wig. These two parts both come from Old English; which is what we call the language as it was spoken when it was first written down, right up to the tenth century. So this would include the period of Kind Alfred the Great; he of the burning cakes.
In Old English, the words were eare and wicga. The first part, which you can recognise quite easily, meant ‘ear’. But the second part, wicga, meant ‘insect, beetle, worm’. The interesting thing is that it came from a root that did not have anything to do with insects at all, but instead meant ‘wiggle’.
Think about how even today we say ‘wiggly worm’; or think about how you would describe the movement of a caterpillar. You can see how this word came to be associated with insects. So if we put the two parts of our word together again, we have ‘ear-insect’. It seems that our very early linguistic forebears did indeed believe that earwigs lived in the ear.
Blame it on the Romans
But where did this myth that they dwell in our ears come from? It is not unique to English; in German it is known as Ohrwurm, or ‘earworm’, and it is the same in Welsh with pryf clustiog; while in French it is perce-oreille, or ‘ear-piercer’.
To find the origins of the myth, we have to go back in time all the way to the days of the Romans. In around 77 CE, Roman naval commander and writer Pliny the Elder published his work Historia Naturalis, or Natural History.
In it he writes about a great deal of the natural world, including insects. It is here that the myth may have begun, as he writes about earwigs getting into the ear. Perhaps he saw one that had happened to go into the ear by chance, much as a fly or a spider might, and jumped to the wrong conclusions.
The Pincer Insect
Other languages have taken the name from the apearance of the insect; in Italian it is known as forbicina, and in Spanish it is tijereta, while Greek has ψαλίδα [psalida] All three of these translate as ‘little scissors’, deriving from the pincers that the earwig uses to catch its prey.