ETAINOS is not, as you might imagine, a Greek, word for waiting in the cold outside, but a handy little aide memoire to tell you the seven most common letters of the English alphabet.
Thus, e is used most often, followed by t, a, i, n, o and s in decreasing frequency. H and r, on the other hand, are used only half as much as e, while down at the very bottom of the list lie k, q, j and x, finally, the most shunned z.
In Shakespearean drama, Hamlet is the equivalent of e. He is by far the most verbose of all the characters, being given a total of nearly 1,600 lines to utter "trippingly on the tongue", well ahead of the two joint seconds, Richard III and Iago at a mere 1,100 lines apiece.
Brutus, Romeo and Macbeth are less than half as talkative as Hamlet, while Desdemona and Cordelia Lear have, by comparison, hardly anything to say.
You can play little games like this with the weather. In Dublin, for example, the wettest month of the year, based on average figures from 1951 to 1980, is December. The second-wettest, which may not surprise you now as much as it might have done a month ago, is August, and this is followed by September, November, January, October and July, in that order.
April is the driest Dublin month in terms of total rainfall, followed by March and June. In the west of the country, the pattern is more regular and less surprising. It shows a wet part of the year from September to January inclusive, with significantly less rain in the period from February through August.
A similar regularity occurs if, instead of measuring the total amount of rain that falls, you count the number of "wet days", the number of days on which you get at least a decent shower of rain.
Dublin by this reckoning has a very constant profile, with an average of about 10 or 11 "wet days" every month. In the west there are, on average, 19 or 20 days in wintertime with at least one millimetre of rain, compared to 12 or so in the "dry season" of late spring and early summer.
There are many contenders for the worst winter of the present century. The favourites for the title are 1909-10, 1916-17, 1932-33, 1946-47, 1962-63, 1978-79 and 1981-82, all of which had periods of widespread and disruptive snow.
The best summers in recent times, on the other hand, are reckoned to have been 1975, 1976, 1983, 1989 and, of course, the most recent 1995. And the bad ones? They were 1985, 1986 and 1993, to which might now be added this summer, 1996.