StrangeSights

• Seems Britons are having some trouble separating fiction from reality. A new UKTV Gold survey shows that nearly a quarter of British people think former PM Winston Churchill is a myth and the same percentage - 23 per cent - put Florence Nightingale in the same category while a massive 58 per cent think Arthur Conan-Doyle’s fictional detective Sherlock Holmes was real.

• More on words, this time in Australia. The Macquarie Dictionary has announced its word of the year for 2007 and the winner is pod slurping (”the downloading of large quantities of data to an MP3 player or memory stick from a computer”). Honorable mentions went to infomania (”the tendency to give immediate attention to incoming messages such as email, text messages, etc., resulting in constant distraction and a corresponding drop in the recipient’s attention levels and work performance”), carbon footprint (”the carbon dioxide emissions for which an individual or organisation can be held responsible, as by their travel, fuel consumption, diet, energy requirements, etc) with password fatigue (”a level of frustration reached by having too many different passwords to remember, resulting in an inability to remember even those most commonly used”) taking out the people’s choice award.

• Back in Britain and a survey commissioned by You & Your Wedding magazine has found that one in five would-be brides has said they would ask their bridesmaids for a “prenuptial agreement” with clauses including such things as not putting on weight nor getting deliberately pregnant.