Yesterday's puzzle: I've got a neck but no head, shoulders but no arms, and a punt, but I've never played football. I wear a cap or a cork. What am I?
Answer: A BOTTLE. (The punt is the dent in the bottom.)
Word of the day
mortgage
(MOR-gij)
Means: A loan you take out against your house, which the bank keeps a claim on until you pay it off.
Etymology: Old French for "death pledge": mort (dead) plus gage (pledge). The deal dies one of two ways: you pay it off, or you don't and the property is gone. Either way, it's dead. That silent t is left over from the French.
"He says he's not stressed, but he's checked his mortgage rate more times this year than his fantasy team."
Design of the day
Space Age pop
Danish designer Verner Panton spent years trying to make a chair out of one continuous piece: seat, back, and base, with no back legs at all. It finally went into real production in the 1960s as the Panton Chair, the first chair molded from a single piece of plastic, an S-curve that cantilevers and stacks. That's Space Age pop: glossy plastic, bright colors, rounded shapes, and furniture that looked like it belonged on a moon base. You still see Panton chairs in restaurants, offices, and plenty of car-show booths.
"I have made this letter longer than usual, because I lacked the time to make it shorter."
That's Blaise Pascal, the French mathematician, in 1657. It gets pinned on Mark Twain, Winston Churchill, and Oscar Wilde, but Pascal said it first. Pull it out the next time somebody sends a 40-slide deck for a five-minute meeting: short takes more work than long.
Joke
Guy at the bar tells me his wife said if he comes home drunk one more time, she's leaving.
I said, "Then why are you on your sixth beer?"
He said, "I want to see if she means it."
Puzzle
Anagram
Rearrange the letters of ELEVEN PLUS TWO into another three-word phrase that means exactly the same thing.
