What trivial behaviour irritates you the most?
Canned laughter.
Richard Orlando, Westmount, Quebec, Canada
• Whenever I go into a cafe or pay at a shop being asked: “How are you today?”
Gillian Shenfield, Sydney, Australia
• Whistling tunelessly around the house.
RM Fransson, Wheat Ridge, Colorado, US
• People using hand-held electronic devices while driving.
David Tucker, Halle, Germany
• If it’s really irritating, then it isn’t trivial.
Lawrie Bradly, Surrey Hills, Victoria, Australia
• Newscasters who read right through the ends of sentences and pause for breath in the middle.
Margaret Wyeth, Victoria, British Columbia, Canada
• Asking stupid questions.
Charlie Bamforth, Davis, California, US
• Being obsessed with trivia.
Trevor Budge, Bendigo, Victoria, Australia
• Trivial behaviour.
Jennifer Horat, Lengwil, Switzerland
• Dumbed down cliched tautologies such as “going forward”.
Lorna Kaino, Fremantle, Western Australia
• Mothers and children armed with trolleys that are blocking supermarket gangways.
E Slack, L’Isle Jourdain, France
The only luck he has is bad
What is luck? Who has it, and who doesn’t?
Luck is the art of being fortunate. Unlucky people don’t luck out and if you are lucky you don’t always realise you are in luck.
Ursula Nixon, Bodalla, NSW, Australia
• Ask the Lady: she has it, I don’t.
Pat Phillips, Adelaide, Australia
• Luck is what happens to you. It can be good or bad, and some people have a disproportionate and often underserved share of one or the other.
Joan Dawson, Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada
• The unaccountable element necessary to succeed, which sometimes comes to the aid of hard workers, but less frequently to the idle.
Philip Stigger, Burnaby, British Columbia, Canada
• If some poor wretches didn’t have bad luck, they’d have no luck at all.
Adrian Cooper, Queens Park, NSW, Australia
I will never get this thing off
If you could ‘uninvent’ one thing, what would it be?
Those tiny sticky labels they put on fruit. All those wasted hours.
Paul Broady, Christchurch, New Zealand
A nation that doesn’t punch
Is there any country that punches below its weight?
I would prefer to live in a country that does not need to punch at all. Meanwhile, as the closest I can find, I have settled in Canada.
Chris Kennedy, Stella, Ontario, Canada
Why did we evolve such fleshy lips?
To ensure that none of the alfredo sauce on the fettuccine escapes.
Jacques Samuel, Chilliwack, British Columbia, Canada
Any answers?
Do we have an inclination to be kind?
William Emigh, Victoria, British Columbia, Canada
What is the best, cheapest vacation?
Richard Orlando, Westmount, Quebec, Canada
Send answers to weekly.nandq@theguardian.com or Guardian Weekly, Kings Place, 90 York Way, London N1 9GU, UK
