10 May 2015 - guinea pig

What could be plainer than plain English? Let’s take “guinea pig” as our guinea pig. It’s “guinea” because it never cost 21 shillings and it is not from Guinea, or Guinea-Bissau, or Equatorial Guinea, or New Guinea (it’s from South America). And it’s called “pig” because it’s a rodent. So in fact serial numbers would be plainer than plain English—they wouldn’t mislead you.