Hangmen's greatest fear was decapitation

Question: Over the centuries, prisoners condemned to be hanged by the neck have had plenty to worry about. Have the hangmen/executioners had anything to worry about?

Answer: Old-fashioned "short drop" executions caused death by strangulation as the rope pressed on the windpipe and arteries to the brain, a 10-second demise, says New Scientist magazine.

Alas, that was only if the noose was correctly applied. Witnesses of public hangings often reported victims "dancing" in pain at the end of the rope, struggling violently for many minutes as they asphyxiated to death. In some cases strugglers were cut down and resuscitated, even after 15 minutes! When public hangings were outlawed in Britain in 1868, the "long-drop" method took over with a lengthy rope to build up greater speed to assure a more "merciful" breaking of the neck.

Here the length had to be tailored to the victim's weight, as too great a force "could rip the head clean off, a professionally embarrassing outcome for the hangman."

Yet an analysis as late as 1992 of the remains of 34 prisoners found that only in about half of cases was the cause of death at least partially spinal trauma, with a fifth showing the classic "hangman's fracture." The rest died in part from asphyxiation. But, adds Canadian anthropologist Michael Spence, who studied U.S. victims, the trauma of the drop would have rapidly rendered all of them unconscious anyway. "What the hangmen were looking for was quick cessation of activity, and they knew enough about their craft to ensure that happened. The thing they feared most was decapitation."

Question: From a Charlottesville, VA editor: "Why is the letter 'W' called a double-U instead of a double-V? It sure looks like a double-V. Who mixed up these two letters in the first place?"

Answer: Norman scribes in the 11th century introduced the "w" to replace the runic symbol "wynn" from Old English, says David Crystal in "The Cambridge Encyclopedia of the English Language."

It got the name "double-U" because in Middle English "v" and "u" were interchangeable forms, with scribes writing "uu" for the /w/ sound. This old double-identity is still evident in cognate pairs such as flour/flower and suede/Swede (from askoxford.com).

Oddly, the "w" is the only English letter name with more than one syllable, says Wikipedia.org, giving the Web's ubiquitous nine-syllable initialism "www" the irony of being an abbreviation with three times as many syllables as the unabbreviated form World Wide Web.

Question: Don't even think about trying to top this one, but what's the record for skid marks on a public road?