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JUDGING by the postbag for our competition to find the most able Tech Speakers among you (‘An enhanced calendered-cellulose probe’, New Å®ÉúСÊÓƵ, 23/30 December 1989), there were more unfortunate souls than we thought with nothing better to do at Christmas than to be linguistically obtuse.

Congratulations; especially to those who sent the tear-stained postcards that made deciphering of their descriptions of the festive tree and its accoutrements even more difficult to appreciate. Many of you provided acronyms and asides that went well beyond the call of a chance to pocket a copy of Edward Tenner’s Tech Speak or How to Talk High Tech: we say to the 10 lucky winners, please don’t let the book change your lives.

Eric Carpenter from Virginia thinks the ball (1) looks more like a ‘vitreous spheroidal photon entropy enhancement pendant’. Well done. Simon Goodman from the Max Planck Institute, Erlangen, could not make up his mind about the candle (2): ‘spherically distributive incoherent wavelength thermally activated hydrocarbon degrad ation apparatus’, if the arrow is pointing at the candle; he says; ‘freeflow intermediate temperature air-carbon interfacing environment’ if we mean the flame; or ‘multicore liquid hydrocarbon capillary transport apparatus’, if it is the wick. Thank you . . . we meant the candle (makes you wonder how they manage to get any work done at all). Mark Griffith, from the Quaker International Centre, just down the road, knew exactly what we meant: ‘religio-aesthetic group light source element’.

Alan Larman, from Stoke-on-Trent, came up with ‘seasonally appropriate non-deciduous cryptogametic angiosperm’ for the tree (3). Tenner, who says Tech Speak is not simply pompous or euphemistic talk, would probably not have been very happy with that one, but then he is not judging the competition.

For the tree’s container (4), filled with muck and debris, Ole Eikeland from Norway thinks ‘Pollpot’ will do. Well, yes it will; and so will the ‘lemniscic containment with mineralo organic support-nutrititive system for maintaining viability of rhizoid anchorage’ that Ian Sinclair from Norwich suggested is appropriate.

One of the few women to respond, Mrs V. Moyses from Banbury, describes the tree trunk (5) as a ‘rigid columnar vegeto-nutritive and sustentative system’. Fine; Tenner has been overruled completely, but he’ll be happy that she’s receiving a copy of the book to discover what he really means by Tech Speak.

Special thanks to Christopher Carter from Northampton, ‘who has spent the holiday programming the tree lights in 6502 assembler language: so this was a natural’; and to D. Rothwell of Wiltshire, who must have pulled more than one ‘decorative explosive multi-person enter tainment and gift distribution system’ over the Christmas lunch. We also liked the entry from Rick Gould of the Swedish Environmental Research Institute, who is forgiven for spelling the name of the reviewer wrong, for reminding us of that favourite carol: ‘While ovine supervisory operatives managed their keratinaceous ruminant collectives during the dark-phase tollusoid diurnal-rhythm.’ And can we say to all of you . . . let’s not strike up a correspondence, please.