Hot air at Heathrow
These days businesses must address the size of their carbon footprints — it's the right thing to do and it's good PR. One of the biggest offenders — the aviation industry — has been struggling to fall into line, but Heathrow Airport trumpeted that it had become carbon neutral in emissions, though only from the parts of the airport it ran and not including flights. Understandably, people on social media were a little sceptical because that's not how carbon neutrality works. One Twitter user said: "I am teetotaller, but only on weekdays and not including wine."
![Glasgow Council has estimated that removing traffic cones from the head of the Duke of Wellington statue costs it £10,000 ($20,390) a year. Photo / Supplied](https://www.nzherald.co.nz/resizer/v2/LIGVVVXJW4MG4N6PO7VBFL4NJE.jpg?auth=e8eef859fa2fb5191ce45b7661adb22ddc59676af7186962390df6454a46fc06&width=16&height=25&quality=70&smart=true)
Moult teasers
In 1940 H.L. Mencken received a letter from a woman who called herself Georgia Southern. She said her profession was known as strip teasing, and she wondered whether Mencken could provide "a new and more palatable word to describe her art". He wrote back: "It might be a good idea to relate strip teasing in some way or other to the associated zoological phenomenon of moulting. The word moultician comes to mind, but it must be rejected because of its likeness to mortician. There is the scientific name for moulting, which is ecdysis, produces both ecdysist and ecdysiast." She went with ecdysiast. It was briefly hoped that it might open the way to lifting a ban on strip teasing; that went nowhere, but "the inevitable Association of Ecdysiasts soon appeared in the United States". ("Euphemisms," from Mencken's The American Language, 1947.)