Britney Spears

It's probably impossible to say where the spear came from, but we know it's very old. In cave paintings that are as old as 30,000 years there are representations of humans using what appear to be spears. The spear is probably one of the oldest weapons known to humans, just beyond picking up a big rock or club. The Illinois State Museum website shows pictures of beautifully crafted spear points at least 14,000 years old. (Click the related link below, then scroll down to the image gallery. While you're there, look through the rest of the site.)

The earliest humans probably had spears, at first possibly simple sharpened sticks. From there, there would have been a technological progression to fire-hardening the wooden point and eventually adding a sharp stone to increase the spear's effectiveness. The spear is both simple and sophisticated. If you were an early hunter, picking up a rock to club an animal to death would bring you into possibly too-close proximity to prey that could kick or bite. It's well known that a powerful kick from the hoof a prey animal can disable or kill a predator. As a human, you would want to extend your reach to be able to wound or kill prey without getting yourself hurt. Throwing a rock with great force might do the job, but jabbing with or throwing a sharpened stick would seem to be a better solution. Spears might have developed from "deadfalls:" digging a hole in the ground of an animal trail, sticking sharpened stakes in the bottom of it, then covering it over with a mat of sticks and leaves to camouflage it.

If you visit the website cited above, you'll notice that they emphasize the "flutes" or grooves along the sides of these distinctive points. These are very important, although it's not known how they were developed. It may have been by accident. The flutes are characteristic of two types of spear points found only in the Americas, called Clovis or Folsom points from the towns in New Mexico where they were first discovered. The distinguishing characteristic of both are the flutes or grooves along the sides, which, it turns out, allowed blood to flow more easily out of a wound created by such a point and thus would cause an animal to go down faster. Some paleoanthropologists believe that the development of these "bleeder" grooves was so important and sophisticated that it possibly led to humans making extinct many animals that were known to exist in the so-called "New World" prior to humans, such as camels and horses. Interestingly, if you look at most modern combat knives, such as the Marine Ka-Bar or the standard M7 bayonet, one of the distinguishing characteristics of these knives is a "bleeder channel" or grooving on the sides of the blade. They're made much like Clovis or Folsom spear points!

Britney Spears doesn't really have a new boyfriend; she was still with Kevin. But Justin Timberlake has been pretty friendly with her lately; he was one of the only people who was nice to her after Brit broke down.

Right now she's with Jason Trawick. You can Google it.

Yes, they are distantly related to each other.

'k' is always hard, as in kite, kitten and bike.

'c' can be hard, like a k, or soft, like an 's'.

Or with an h (ch) it is often like a 'j', but unvoiced, e.g. compare joke, with choke.

Or with an s (sc) the pronunciation can be 'sh', as in conscious / kon-shus /

Hard: comic / komic /; cat / kat /

Soft: certain / serten /; cigarette / sigaret /; also as an 's' in ice, twice ; mice.

Mixed: convince / konvinss /: ceramic / seramik /: citric / sitrik /; coccyx / kok-siks /

Examples: "Are you convinced that in the word certificate, the first c has an 's' sound and the second c has an 'k' sound?"

When learning English, whilst it is helpful to know how individual letters are usually pronounced, it is better to practice the pronunciation of complete words, because English has come from many different languages, and for some letters there is no fixed rule on how they should be pronounced.