Rare Entries contest MSB20

So what in the question determines which is *the* Triple Crown? The pacing and trotting events are certainly American and certainly horse racing, and it seems flimsy to carry the weight of the question on an article. Maybe if the word 'thoroughbred' had been inserted in front of 'horse'......

Well, it's the one that's called that.

I know I forgot to enter this time (but played along at home) but I hope that doesn't prohibit me from commenting. Does the word 'longer' in the question have any meaning I'm unaware of? Cheers,

writes

If 'seas do not count', then I would say that Morocco and Senegal should be acceptable. The boundary of Gambia consists of its boundary with Senegal, and its coastline. But its coastline 'does not count'. Therefore, it is surrounded by Senegal. The same for those bits of Spain on the Moroccan coast.

Was the United Kingdom at war at the time that Attlee was prime minister? He became prime minister a couple of weeks after Germany's defeat, and I'm unaware of the U.K. having ever been at war with Japan during WWII.

The word 'glucose' is shorter than the word 'sugar'???

True, but would the most common term not simply be the one word

The question doesn't say that the coastline doesn't count. It says that territorial lakes and seas don't count, which means that the water doesn't count as part of Morocco or Senegal, which means that the foreign territory isn't surrounded. Regardless, there's no indication that the word 'surrounding' is somehow to be redefined for the purposes of the question.

The same thing that determines which is *the* United States, or which is *the* Olympics, or which is *the* Eiffel Tower (as opposed to something at Busch Gardens).

Yep, that was exactly the same reasoning that led me to conclude that 'Senegal' would be a valid entry.

Obviously, 'breasts' *is* longer than 'mammae' so ignore that.

I based my choice of 'haboob' on the Encyclopedia.com entry for 'sandstorm', which has the sentence:

'The haboob is a sandstorm prevalent in the region of Sudan around Khartoum.'

and the Encyclopedia Britannica Online, which has:

'hot and moist, strong wind that occurs along the southern edges of the Sahara in The Sudan'

Sounds pretty darn 'specific to one region' to *me*!

I think I got caught by a language issue here. In Dutch schools, at least, hundreds of thousands of children learn the word 'deler' (the Dutch for 'divisor' when they are taught fractions for the first time in arithmetic class.

Only an, um, fraction of those children will go on to more advanced (University or pre-University) forms of mathematics teaching and encounter the term 'factor'. But of course I was thinking about 'everyday Dutch', so I shouldn't have expected my answer to be equally valid for 'everyday English'.

You may be unaware of it, but that does not mean it didn't happen. Many British servicemen lost their lives in the war against Japan, and that war is a well-documented historical fact.