779-1: Feedback, Notes and Comments

Festucine Nick Humez pointed out that the poem I quoted from wasn't the epic of Gilgamesh as we know it today but a romantic Victorian attempt by Leonidas Le Cenci Hamilton in 1884 to reconstruct part of the story from a fragment of a later poem, Ishtar and Izdubar (the latter name is a nineteenth-century misreading of Gilgamesh, due to confusion between Sumerian and Akkadian cuneiform).

Insurance Last week, I wondered about the term before-the-event insurance. Numerous readers pointed out that, like the majority of people in the UK, I was unaware that it is in fact possible to get after-the-event insurance, particularly for legal expenses. If you suffer some accident and don't have before-the-event cover, you can take out after-the-event insurance, at a price, to reimburse your costs if you lose the case.

Nerd Joyce Melton responded to last week's article. "Cartoonists, illustrators and other artists have used nerds to mean eraser crumbs for more than sixty years. When I worked at newspapers in the sixties, we had a special brush (called a broom) for getting rid of nerds before inking a drawing because the tiny pieces of rubber would cause blots and blobs on the art. When the movie Revenge of the Nerds came out, I imagined eraser crumbs with giant art brooms pursuing people. That wasn't what the movie was about but it still makes me laugh to think of it."