A 41-gun salute is the traditional salute to a royal birth in Great Britain.

The number of rounds fired in a salute depends on the place and occasion. The basic salutes are 21 rounds. In Hyde Park and Green Park an extra 20 rounds are added because they are Royal Parks. At the Tower of London 62 rounds are fired on royal anniversaries (the basic 21, plus a further 20 because the Tower is a Royal Palace and Fortress, plus another 21 ‘for the City of London’) and 41 on other occasions. The Tower of Londonprobably holds the record for the most rounds fired in a single salute — 124 are fired whenever the Duke of Edinburgh’s birthday (62 rounds) coincides with the Saturday designated as the Queen’s official birthday (also 62 rounds).

The word "nerd" was first coined by Dr. Seuss in "If I Ran the Zoo."

The first documented appearance of the word “nerd” is as the name of a creature in Dr. Seuss’s book If I Ran the Zoo (1950), in which the narrator Gerald McGrew claims that he would collect “a Nerkle, a Nerd, and a Seersucker too” for his imaginary zoo. The slang meaning of the term dates back to 1951, when Newsweek magazine reported on its popular use as a synonym for “drip” or “square” in Detroit, Michigan. By the early 1960s, usage of the term had spread throughout the United States, and even as far as Scotland. At some point, the word took on connotations of bookishness and social ineptitude.

An alternate spelling, as nurd, also began to appear in the mid-1960s or early ’70s. Author Philip K. Dick claimed to have coined this spelling in 1973, but its first recorded use appeared in a 1965 student publication at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. Oral tradition there holds that the word is derived from “knurd” (“drunk” spelled backwards), which was used to describe people who studied rather than partied. On the other hand, the variant “gnurd” was in wide use at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology throughout the first half of the 1970s.

Other theories of the word’s origin suggest that it may derive from Mortimer Snerd, Edgar Bergen’s ventriloquist dummy, or the Northern Electric Research and Development (N.E.R.& D.) Laboratories in Ontario (now Nortel). The Online Etymology Dictionary speculates that the word is an alteration of the 1940s term nert (meaning “stupid or crazy person”), which is itself an alteration of “nut”.

The Scottish bagpipe was originally made from the whole skin of a dead sheep.

The player keeps the bag inflated by blowing air into it through a blowpipe or pumping air into it with a bellows. Materials used for bags vary widely, but the most common are the skins of local animals such as goats, dogs, sheep, and cows. More recently, bags made of synthetic materials includingGore-Tex have become much more common. Though a drawback of the synthetic bag is the potential for fungal spores to colonise the bag because of reduction in necessary cleaning, with the associated danger of lung infection.

Bags cut from larger materials are usually saddle-stitched with an extra strip folded over the seam and stitched (for skin bags) or glued (for synthetic bags) to reduce leaks. Holes are then cut to accommodate the stocks. In the case of bags made from largely intact animal skins the stocks are typically tied into the points where limbs and the head joined the body of the living animal, a construction technique common in Central and Eastern Europe.