Announcing Rare Entries contest MSB31

'I'm having kipper for tea' sounds like perfectly good English to my ears. I don't know if it's a regional thing, though.

They have the same scoring, but they're not the same games [no lines-out in sevens, and quite distinct scrummaging rules]. Until quite recently, RU Sevens and RU had (subtly) different scoring rules (since one was allowed to drop kick conversions in 7s to speed the game up. This has now been added to the 15 man code)

The IRB laws are clear that the games aren't the same, too.

You know, there a few of us who find these movie questions fairly boring. This time I was reliefed to realize that I didn't have to spend lots of time to find a correct answer, but there was I know by heart. Trap or not.

On http://www.m-w.com I find:

2 a : an ox, cow, or bull in a full-grown or nearly full-grown state; especially : a steer or cow fattened for food <quality Texas beeves> <a herd of good beef>

'beef' was an answer I considered, but which I discarded after having read this.

'By some sort sensible interpretation of that phrase', I would take to include a single game in a series of 10 that a curing match consists of. And in such a game, you can score 3. And while unlikely, it does seem impossible to win a game with 3-0.

WHAT???? Winning a football games gives three points in several leagues, including the groups in the World Cup. And of course you can score 3 points for individual statistics, if that is what you count.

By the way, in ice hockey, in Swedish Elitserien, you also get three points for winning a game in three full periods. (If there is a draw after three periods, both teams gets one point each, and there is a five minutes overtime followed by penalty shots which decides to which team the third point goes.)

At first, I agreed with Mark - but then I saw that Mark accepted baseball as an answer, despite the fact that you can't score 3 on a single play if you exclude all previous plays (as there have to be two or three players on base in order to score 3 in one play), and in that case, you can make the case that the last stone in an end can 'score

My first thought was that in baseball, the first two runs scoring are entirely contingent on the single third play - but that's true in curling, too, in the event that the last stone knocks out an opposing stone and leaves three stones scoring. I don't see how those scenarios are different.

Mark Brader:

Keith Willoughby:

Well, I did mean to mention that I also checked the OED1 and RHU1 and found the same sort of definition. The ruling stands.

Mark Brader:

Gareth Owen:

Didn't have to be. The specification was: 'Answers that name different variants of the same sport, where the way to score exactly 3 points is essentially the same in both variants, will be counted as the same.' Ruling stands.

Mark Brader:

Erland Sommarskog:

You know, there a few of us who find sports questions boring, and others who find geography questions boring, or science questions, or history questions, or music questions. I fall into two of these groups myself. But I try to keep the questions as varied as I can manage, even when it makes it a lot more work to score them.

Good point. But I think this sense is relatively obscure, and if this is an error it's not a serious enough one to require rescoring.

The jargon in English for this is an 'end'.

This is a language problem; Erland doesn't understand that a single 'play' in a game must involve some sort of continuous playing action. An end consists of a sequence of 8 shots by each each; the proper application of the word 'play' to curling is to say that each shot is a play.

But the score is for the whole end, not the individual shot.

I'm not familiar enough with soccer to list all the ways of that a 'play' might end in that sport, but clearly it can't apply to a whole game. Any time the ball goes off the field, or a goal is scored (if that ever happens), that certainly ends the current play. So does half time. A whole game is not a play.

But can 3 statistical points be scored on a single play? (In NHL hockey, a player who scores a goal gets 1 point, and if other players of his team have touched the puck since the opponents last did so, the last two of them each get 1 point for an 'assist'.)

Again, complete games are irrelevant.

Don Del Grande:

Keith Willoughby:

The difference is that in curling, what actually causes the scoring to happen is not that the last rock did what Keith said, but that the end ended. In baseball, the scoring happens within the play.

Ruling stands.

Doesn't the same apply to hamburger?

That's stretching it, besides I'm sure I've heard of 'having kippers.' Hamburger isn't a type, it's a method of production - same as kippered, smoked, fileted...