What rhymes with orange?

There are two rhymes for orange in English, although both are proper nouns:  Blorenge and Gorringe.

The Blorenge is a hill outside Abergavenny in Wales, and Gorringe is a splendid English surname

The best view of Abergavenny is from the top of the Blorenge, a 1,833-foot hill owned by the South East Wales Hang-fliding and Paragliding Club, who bought it from the Coal Authority in 1998.

Distinguished Gorringes include:  General George Frederick Gorringe (1865-1945), the unpopular British First World War commander; Harry Gorringe, the first-class Australian cricketer, and Henry Honeychurch Gorringe, the man who brought Cleopatra's Needle from Egypt to New York's Central Park.

In 1673, New York was called New Orange (so the New Orange became the Big Apple).  The city was founded by the Dutch in 1653 as New Amsterdam, taken by the English in 1664 and renamed New York, and retaken by the Dutch in 1673 and named New Orange.  It lasted less than a year.  Under the Treaty of Westminster in 1674 the city was ceded to the English, and New York became its permanent name.

The word 'orange' is a good example of what linguists call wrong word division.  It derives from the Arabic naranj and arrived in English as 'narange' in the fourteenth century, gradually losing the initial 'n'.  The same process left us with apron (from naperon) and umpire (from noumpere).

Sometimes it works the other way round, as in nickname (from an eke-name, meaning 'also-name') or newt (from an ewt)

Orange was first used as the name for a colour in 1542.

What colour was Robin Hood's tights?

Red.

The earliest Robin Hood stories were ballads dating from the fifteenth century.

In the longest and most important of these, A Gest of Robyn Hode, Robin and his 'merry men' wear 'a good mantel of scarlet and raye', a kind of striped bright red wrap.

In other ballads, Robin wears red or scarlet while his men wear green.  This reflects his status as leader - 'scarlet' was the most expensive cloth in medieval England, dyed using kermes, the dried bodies of the female shield louse (Kermes ilicis).

This also explains the name Robin - associated with the robin redbreast - and that of one of his closest associates: Will Scarlet.

It is only in later versions that 'Lincoln Green' becomes the colour for the outlaws' gear but even this may not have been green.

Lincoln was the capital of the medieval English dyeing industry.  'Lincoln Green' was green (blue dye made from woad was over-dyed with yellow) but 'Lincoln Grain' was scarlet. dyed with kermes, known as 'graine'.

The early Robin Hood stories are obsessed by clothing.  As well as Robin being named after his headgear, mantles, kirtles, coats, breeches, shirts and six different colours of cloth are mentioned in the Gest, and at one point Robin plays at being a draper, selling the King 123 feet of green cloth.

This has promoted the idea that the ballads may have been written for the Livery Guilds, companies of merchants involved in manufacturing.  Many of them were founded at the time the Gest was written (c1460) their preferred style of uniform was a coloured hood.

At least one historian has suggested that the real point of the Robin Hood stories is not the traditional 'forest versus town' or 'rich versus poor' battle, but the victory of the merchant adventurer over the failing, corrupt nobility.

Robin Hood, dressed in expensive red cloth, was really the champion of the emerging middle-classes rather than the poor.

Which organisation invented Quaker Oats?

Not the Quakers.

The Quaker Oats Company, started in Pennsylvania in 1901, was named after the Quakers because there were a lot of them in Pennsylvania and they had a reputation for honesty.

However, Quaker Oats, now part of the huge Pepsi/Co corporation, has no affiliation at all with the Quakers (or Religious Society of Friends) and, unlike the chocolate companies Cadbury's, Fry's and Rowntree, was not founded by Quakers, or established on Quaker principles.

This has caused some distress among The Society of Friends.

In the 1950s, researchers from Quaker Oats, Harvard University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology conducted experiments to try to understand how nutrients from cereals travelled through the body.

Parents of educationally subnormal children at the Walter E. Fernald School (formerly known as the Massachusetts School for Idiotic Children) were asked to let their children become members of a special Science Club.  As part of the club, the children were put on a diet high in nutrients and taken to baseball games.

What was not made clear, however, was that the food the children were given was laced with iron and radioactive calcium so its path could be traced in the body.  The parents sued the Quaker Oats company, who agreed to pay out $1.85 million to more than 100 participants in 1997.

The cheery character on the front of the box is sometimes said to be William Penn, the founder of Pennsylvania in 1682, and an influential Quaker.  The Quaker Oats company, perhaps wishing to improve relations with the Society, has emphatically denied this.

It was painted by Haddon Sunblom in 1957, the artist who also created Coca-Cola's iconic Santa Claus images in the 1930s.  Sunblom's last commission was a Christmas cover for Playboy in the early 1970s.

It is often alleged that The Society of Friends got the nickname 'Quakers' following the trial for blasphemy in 1650 of George Fox, the founder of the movement, who suggested during sentencing that the judge should 'tremble at the word of the Lord'.  However, the sect already had the reputation for 'trembling' in religious ecstasy and this seems a more likely source.