From hand to hand

Answer: This really happened. Carefully the surgeons attached the hand to the right wrist, intricately weaving and criss-crossing critical tendons and nerves to assure that when J. E. meant to move his thumb he wouldn't have to think about moving his pinky and vice versa, says David Wolman in "A Left-Hand Turn Around the World: Chasing the Mystery and Meaning of All Things Southpaw."

With his thumb to the outside and smallest fingers closest to his body, J.E. looked as if he'd swung his arm around like a contortionist. He had to relearn doing even the simplest things such as putting on a wristwatch. Fascinatingly, the brain has the plasticity to adapt, able to control a left hand via the right-hand nerve center of the brain.

Question: What's possibly the coolest word in the English language?

Answer: Try "cool," the word having outlived generations of its slang predecessors, including hot, bully, groovy, hep, hip, crazy, far-out and tubular, says Mark Davidson in "Right, Wrong, and Risky: A Dictionary of Today's American English Usage."

As far back as 1825, "English Spy" magazine described a certain college grad as "a right cool fish." Since the 1930s, American jazz musicians, beatniks, hippies and people in many walks of life have adopted the word.

"The King of Cool" was "Time" magazine's 2000 tag for Morocco's young monarch Mohammed VI. According to the "American Heritage Dictionary," the French and Germans have even borrowed the term. "The New York Times" also ID'd cool as the favorite expression of Bill Gates "and just about everyone else in computerdom." For Microsoft employees, depending on context and tone, cool can mean perfect, phenomenal, awesome, ingenious, eye-popping, bliss-inducing, pretty clever, enchanting, fine, adequate, acceptable, OK and more (author Fred Moody).

Question: Whose eggs are on today's world's menu?