The Queen's English

[Eva Elisabeth]

The latest use that comes to my mind dates back to 1968:
"The queen was in the parlour
Playing piano for the children of the king."
http://m.youtube.com/watch?v=OqNpFc6RDzU
Unknown to me before I joined the forum was the "den". Is that a short form? Where does this come from and when did it so?

I found this on "score":
The use of score (20) in reckoning still remains in poetical and Biblical language from the old Celtic system of counting as still to be seen in French, e.g. quatre-vingt-dix-sept= (4 x 20) + 10 + 7 = ninety-seven.
The word score originally meant to cut (cf. Scandinavian sker and English shear). A mark was cut on a piece of wood, or two pieces of wood placed together if it was a matter of a business deal, to keep the tally (which also comes from a word meaning to cut cf. Spanish talar) or "score" (now used in football etc. for any number). This mark came to signify the number twenty. An example by English poet A.E.Housman:

Now of my three score years and ten/ Twenty will not come again./ And take from seventy years a score,/ It only leaves me fifty more.
And since to look at things in bloom /Fifty springs are little room, /About the woodlands I will go /To see the cherry hung with snow."