When the above question was posed to me I replied as follows:

This question has long perplexed and puzzled intelligent man and to find the answer to this question we should let our thoughts go back in the pearly mists of time to when monkeys were about to become human, a time when there was no established or written language and monkeys in those times could only communicate with each other by sign or grunts. Nobody today can remember which grunt meant what or what grunt meant which but the monkeys seemed to get along fine and they knew which grunt meant what and what grunt meant which. But things were about to change - monkeys were about to become humans and humans needed to have intelligence and some means of communucating between each other and so .....

One day two monkeys were sitting around pondering over a matter when all of a sudden one jumped up scratching his rear end and, pointing to the ground, made an unusual sound that sounded like "arse". Number two monkey got a fright and made a noise that sounded like "gr". The two monkeys stared at each other awed by what they had just heard. Neither of them had heard these these two sounds before. Number two monkey stared at number one monkey and made the "gr" noise again. Immediately number one replied with the "arse" sound. Then number two made both sounds - "gr" "arse" it said pointing to the ground. Number one got very excited and jumping up and down repeated both sounds over and over again, "gr arse" "gr arse" "gr arse", it said and as it became more excited the two sounds merged into one and became "grarse" "grarse" "grarse". By this time both monkeys were highly excited and kept rolling over and over on the ground until at long last, exhausted, they lay together wondering what they should do with this new sound. As they lay there they kept pulling tufts of the green stuff that covered the ground and throwing it in the air. With each thrown handful they uttered the sound "grarse" which was adopted by all monkeys of the time to mean the short green stuff that grew in the ground. Later alphabet creating monkeys would mistakenly create the word "grass" in place of "grarse".

The true story of course was that number one monkey was trying to convey to number two monkey that he had been bitten on the "arse" by an ant.

Now who in their right mind would name the sky "grass" when the first word ever created by emerging human intelligence was given to the green stuff which carpeted the earth. Why the sky is called "sky" is another story yet to be told. It has to do with the same two monkeys. I should know, I was one of those monkeys.

I was encouraged by a second university student granddaughter to post this tale here.

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