Sam's Word of the Week - Monday 23rd May, 2005

Chalk (n)

A piece of soft, porous, coloured material. This item is mostly used to write on such items as blackboards. Chalk is grown on chalk trees by farmers all over the world, and alongside water, is quickly becoming one of the world’s most precious resources. Teachers are the biggest users of chalk, but a recent trend shows that they are shifting towards using the enemy – the whiteboard marker. With the recent release of the new Star Wars film, the new craze sweeping schoolyards nationwide are chalk sabres. Sadly, this is resulting in the new condition known to hospitals as “chalky eye”. Chalk is easily snapped; which causes the fingernails to scrape the blackboard, producing that awful screeching sound that everybody loves. Germany is world-famous for its annual chalk-eating contest, in which Hans Bleicher gained a world record for consuming 363 sticks of chalk in an hour. He died sixteen minutes later. Recent university studies have discovered that chalk and turnip chips taste extremely similar, so much so that identifying between the two tastes blindfolded is near impossible.