Notes & Queries began in 1989 as a weekly column in the Guardian, and rapidly acquired a cult following. Since then, it has spilled out of the newspaper into six books and two BBC television series.

Now, thanks to the internet, it is reaching a worldwide electronic audience for the first time. New readers with a mathematical bent will be quick to point out that the answers outnumber the questions.

No doubt they will argue that so many different answers can't all be right. That, if we may say so, is exactly the point. Ask a simple question like why water is wet and someone will swear that it isn't wet anyway. Ask why dusters are yellow and psychologists will battle with historians over conflicting theories. If there's a moral to all this, it's probably that the more sure you are about the answer, the more likely you are to be wrong.