RISE AND FALL

Let's toy with two toys that both rely on blocks. The first is a global craze that goes by the name of LEGO. At some stage, every kid has played with these tiny bricks, building a city, a fairy palace, a pirate ship. Each vivid plastic block has bumps (or nodes) designed to interlock.

A Danish carpenter called Ole Kirk Christiansen dreamt up the idea in 1954. The name 'Lego' echoes the Danish phrase Leg godt, or 'play well'. It's a lovely fluke when you consider that lego is also Latin for 'I collect' — surely what most parents end up saying as they gather the pieces after playtime.

Our second game has more to do with destruction than construction. Yet, strangely, JENGA arises from a Swahili word meaning 'to build'. The game was created by a Tanzanian-born Brit named Leslie Scott, and launched in the 1980s.

To win at Jenga you need to pull out the wooden blocks from a rickety tower, piece by piece, without the whole thing toppling over. Chaos often follows, as hinted at by Jenga's other names around the world. Israelis know the game as Mapolet, or avalanche. Danes prefer Klodsmajor, alias klutz. In Rio, meanwhile, the challenge is called Torremoto, a play on words meaning 'tower-quake'.

1. LEGO is a jumble of OGLE (meaning 'to look at wolfishly'). Can you look at these eight other words for look (or looks), and scramble each one to make a total of 15 words, where every letter is used once only?

scan notes spot study
search notices regard observe
____________ ___________ ____________
____________ ___________ ____________
____________ ___________ ____________

2. Squeeze a T into LEGO and you spell LET GO. Now do the same with the clues below, adding a T to the first answer to reveal the second.

(a) droop/male deer (3/4) _ _ _ / _ _ _ _
(b) run off/naval unit (4/5) _ _ _ _ / _ _ _ _ _
(c) decreasing/desiring (6/7)
_ _ _ _ _ _ / _ _ _ _ _ _ _
(d) out of practice/reliable (5/6)
_ _ _ _ _ / _ _ _ _ _ _
(e) showy shells/pens together (7/2-6)
_ _ _ _ _ _ _ / _ _- _ _ _ _ _ _
(f) went zzz?/went harrumph? (6/7)
_ _ _ _ _ _ _ / _ _ _ _ _ _ _
(g) educates/packing box (7/3,5)
_ _ _ _ _ _ _ / _ _ _ _ _ _ _
(h) hospital operator/fish (7/8) _ _ _ _ _ _ _ / _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _

CURRENT GOSSIP

Water has timeless links to information. These days, office workers hear murmurs at the WATER COOLER, or maybe after work, drinking at the local WATERING HOLE. Long ago the rumour mill was the PARISH PUMP, where villagers would chat as they collected the day's supply.

FURPHY is a great Australian word for a false story. No word of a lie, this term stretches back to World War I when diggers in Egypt and Palestine milled around a water cart to drink and wash — and, presumably, tell tall tales. The cart was called a furphy after its inventor, blacksmith John Furphy from Shepparton, Victoria.

The word SCUTTLEBUTT has similar origins. In this case the idle gossip arose from a drinking cask (or butt) aboard a sailing ship. The barrel had a hatched hole (or scuttle, from Spanish escotar, to cut out), allowing sailors to dip their ladles.

And to disprove the notion that watery words only offer dubious news, we finish our story in the Islamic world. To lead pure lives, Muslims obey SHARIA LAW, a set of rules founded on the Koran. The water link? Sharia is Arabic for the 'path to the well', where the holy word of Allah is viewed as the believer's fountainhead.

1. Ironically, what succulent salt-water crustaceans swim in the letters of SPRING WATER? Every letter is used once only.

_ _ _ _ _ / _ _ _ _ _ _

2. MOUTH-WATERING contains all five vowels once, as does CARRIED OUT. Supplied below are the first halves of nine more such terms, where every vowel appears once only. See if you can figure out the second word. (The number in brackets shows the omitted word's length.)

(a) QUESTION (4) _ _ _ _
(b) BATHING (7) _ _ _ _ _ _ _
(c) UPWARDLY (6) _ _ _ _ _ _
(d) VAULTING (5) _ _ _ _ _
(e) FOUNTAIN (3) _ _ _
(f) LOUNGE (6) _ _ _ _ _ _
(g) PIANO (5) _ _ _ _ _
(h) PLASTIC (7) _ _ _ _ _ _ _
(i) AU (6) _ _ _ _ _ _

TURN, TURN, TURN

The Greek word for spiral is helikos. With a minor twist, the word gives us HELIX (plural 'helices' or 'helixes'), the shape of a spring. Our bodies are full of helices, from the raised swirl that makes up the outer ear, to the double-helix shape of our DNA molecules.

HELICOPTER is another offshoot of helikos, combined with pteron — the Greek word for wing. (A chopper therefore is a spring-wing.) Mind you, the next chopper you come across may be a HELICOPTER PARENT, a mum or dad obsessed with their child's safety and happiness, always hovering in reach. The phrase was coined in a 1990 self-help book by Foster W. Cline and Jim Fay called Parenting with Love and Logic.

So, any stabs at what the word HELICULTURE might mean? If you guessed the growing of spirals, you were close. It's the farming of snails — or escargots — for French dinner tables; this time the helix is the spiralled shells.

Finally, one more twist: ESCARGOT is the French nickname for the @ SYMBOL, due to its resemblance to the snail shell. Dutch people know @ as a monkey's tail, while Swedes call the symbol an animal's trunk, and Norwegians call it a pig's tail. To come full circle, Turks call...