Miss Pronunciation

From time to time, I like to do a puzzle that's brief. I mean, you know, not one of these verbose puzzles that require lengthy explanations and dissertations. Sometimes I like to just keep it simple.

Now this one is a two-part puzzler and it has to do with the English language.

Part 1. I was listening to the radio the other day, and as luck would have it, I was listening to the BBC. And they keep mispronouncing this word and I thought I'd set the record straight.

There's the stuff that beer cans and the like are made out of in this country, which the English consistently call al-u-mini-um. Yeah. And of course, as everyone knows, we call them tin cans. Or we call them beer cans or aluminum cans.

So Why do they call them al-u-mini-um cans? Or why do they refer to that metal as al-u-mini-um?

So the first part has to do with the that material, why do they mispronounce it?

And now for the highly technical, automotive part of the puzzle, part B:

What does STP stand for? We're betting there are three people on the whole planet that know this!

Answer the Puzzler »

Remember last week's puzzler?

The Many Clutches

This week's puzzler is one from the past. So this is an oldie.

It was a fellow that came into the garage with a pickup truck. It was a big Ford pickup, an old one.

And he had put a clutch in his pickup truck. He personally had put a clutch in his pickup, and it was good for a few months. And lo and behold it stopped working. He was unable to disengage. He'd the step on the pedal and it would go 'RhyeaRhyeaRhyea", and then gee, what's the matter? Nobody knew. So he put a new clutch in, again by himself.

And then he was all right for a while and then he hears the worst possible sound, and he can't shift it.

So finally he puts another one in and of course, this one doesn't even work for a minute. He just can't shift it and he assumes that there's something else wrong with it other than the clutch. And by this point, he has replaced everything, the clutch, disc, the pressure plate, the release bearing, the pilot bearing. (Now we had this puzzle once before and we said it was the pilot bearing. So don't send that answer in because that isn't it!)

He finally gave up and he took the car to us. We gave up too! No, we didn't give up; we found we found the answer. There was nothing wrong with any of the clutches he had put in all nor was there anything wrong with his transmission, nor was there anything wrong with his shifter. The problem was somewhere else. And it was kind of interesting.

There are a lot of cars this can happen to, but you would not see this happen to a vehicle with a hydraulic clutch.