Is Ralph Klein poised to announce a tax cut? And will this tax cut benefit the wealthiest Albertans more than the rest of us slobs? And is that $400 egalitarian oil bribe a decoy/distraction to make us look the other way? Just asking.

THE SURVEY SAYS...

According to the DEW Line’s mail, 80 per cent of people will put their $400 towards heating costs/gas. The remainder plan to spend the money on a variety of items that range from beer to cigarettes to "prozac refills," the exception being one generous soul, who says she’ll be sending hers "to the Bissell Centre."

THE MEANING OF "TINGO"

We had heard that there was no word for "hangover" in Italian, that the Finns have no future tense, and that the French Academy had to devote man hours and brain power to making up a new word for computer because the English word sounded too much like French slang for "vagina of a whore."

But until we read in The Independent about Adam Jacot de Boinodt’s new book The Meaning of Tingo (tinyurl.com/cra5o) we had no idea the Albanians have 27 different words for "moustache," and another 27 for "eyebrows," or that one tuft of hair on an "otherwise bald head" is known as "kucir" in Indonesia, a country which also gives us the word "desus" ("The quiet, smooth sound of somebody farting but not very loudly"). Persian turns out to have a lot of colorful words for very specific things and activities. "Ghiqq" is "The sound made by a boiling kettle," and "mahj" means "Looking beautiful after having a disease." "War nam nihadan" translates as, "To murder somebody, bury their body, then grow some flowers over the grave in order to conceal it."

"Tingo," incidentally, from the Pascuense language of Easter Island, means

"Borrowing things from a friend’s house, one by one, until he has nothing left."

QUOTE OF THE WEEK

"I am about to–or I am going to–die; either expression is used." the last words of Dominique Bouhours, French grammarian, 1702