Monkey's Wedding - 28 October 2013

<p>It's the art of constructive feedback: If you're a teacher with a mountain of papers to grade, you may find yourself puzzling over which kinds of notes in the margins work best. Martha and Grant discuss strategies for effective paper-grading. And when your inbox is full of spam and LinkedIn requests, even a bad emailed joke starts to look good. Martha shares one, along with some riddles from Portuguese and Spanish. And that slithering reptile in the garage -- is it a garden snake, a gardener snake, or a garter snake? Plus, creek vs. crick, the origins of shank, rhubarb, and ping me, and the devil is beating his wife.<br /><br />FULL DETAILS<br /><br />If you have seven oranges in one hand and six in the other, what have you got? "Really big hands"--and a really bad joke.<br /><br />When it's raining and sunny at the same time, Brazilians say there's a marriage between a fox and a nightingale, and South Africans say it's a monkey's wedding. Those images are far happier than an American phrase for the same meteorological phenomenon, the devil is beating his wife. In each case, the common thread seems to be that it's a supernatural occurrence.<br /><br />When a jacket's been on the hanger too long, the shoulders get punched out, meaning they become distended. The same principle is behind the term butt-sprung, which describes a skirt that's distended by the wearer, and now applies to anything that's worn out.<br /><br />The sportscaster Red Barber popularized the term rhubarb, meaning a scuffle on the baseball mound. It has now expanded to various kinds of arguments. <br /><br />Try this riddle translated from Spanish: I come from singing parents but I'm not a singer, I have a white body and a yellow heart. What am I?<br /><br />Attention Sue Grafton fans: A is for Amusing might be a good title for this week's puzzle from Quiz Guy John Chaneski.<br /><br />A Florida State University professor is tired of writing the same comments over and over on student papers. He wonders about the most effective written feedback