One of my daughters just passed on an astonishing factoid.

Australians are familiar with the word Cerberus as the name of the Australian Navy training base on the Mornington Peninsular.

But they might not be as familiar with the origins of the name.

Yes, yes, it’s the name of the hell hound which guarded Hades, which is both the God of the Underworld and for hell itself in ancient mythology.

Derr, who didn’t know that?

But what is the background to that?

Someone did some digging and traced Cerberus back to ancient Indian Sanskrit where karbarah was a word for something dappled or spotted.

Thus, Hades, the God of the Underworld, named his dog … Spot.

(A little aside: this was also the name for Lady Macbeth’s dog, as Shakespeare has her saying: “Out, damned spot! Out, I say!” Heh heh.)

Whoever discovered this probably has a ruined right arm from patting himself on the back for days.

As would the person behind this next bit of cleverness.

I suspect it’s a bit of an urban myth as I’ve seen it claimed for schools in different countries, but it’s claimed that the school was forced in the 1970s to scrap its official motto: “I hear. I see. I learn.”

What’s wrong with that?

In Latin it’s “Audio. Video. Disco.”

I have long tried to source the author of one of the best palindromes ever, if only to slap him or her on the back as well and ask where the heck it came from

It’s a very Churchillian sentence which reads as well coming or going.

“Are we not drawn onward, we few, drawn onward to new era?”

It’s on many lists of palindromes, but who wrote it is more difficult to discover.

In an ideal world, Bushwhacked would love to say: “I did, did I?”

But in this Trumpish world, that’d be an alternative fact.

And what sub-editor in the entire world would not immediately up-stump and retire to the local pub to celebrate this next wonder?

Actually, the real wonder is how long it took the Ulster Gazette’s deputy editor, Richard Burden, to create it.

A little background for you: the article outlined anger at the rising cost of a local railway project because of land purchases needed and the amount of red tape involved.

The headline: “OVER £100M!”

And the subheading: “Is this the rail price? Is this just fantasy? Caught up in land buys. No escape from bureaucracy.”

To paraphrase a conversation between Oscar Wilde and James Whistler – “Wish I had said that?” “Don’t worry, Oscar, you will.”

And finally, I have a great fondness for this clever piece of thinking, which shows the silliness of some aspects of the English language.

How do you spell fish?

Just like that, surely?

Well, yes and no.

In a phonetic English language version you could have “gh” as in enough.

And you could have “o” as in women.

And you could have “ti” as in station.

Thus, ghoti is one way of spelling fish.

WAYNE GREGSON