QI: The Book of General Ignorance - The Noticeably Stouter Edition

by John Lloyd

  ‘Crocodile’ means lizard, from the Greek krokodeilos. This name was first recorded by Herodotus who remarked on them basking on the pebbly banks of the Nile. ‘Alligator’ is a corruption of the Spanish el lagarto das Indias, ‘the lizard of the Indies’.

  Neither animal cries as it savages you to death. Crocodile tears are a myth from medieval travellers’ tales. Sir John Mandeville, writing in 1356, observed, ‘In many places of Inde are many cokadrilles – that is, a manner of long serpent. These serpents slay men and eat them weeping.’

  Crocodiles do have tear ducts, but they discharge straight into the mouth, so no tears are visible externally. The origin of the legend may be in the proximity of the throat to the glands which lubricate the eye. These can cause the eye to water a little from the effort of swallowing something large or reluctant. They can’t smile either: crocodiles and alligators have no lips.

  The digestive juices of crocodiles contain enough hydrochloric acid to dissolve iron and steel. On the other hand, there is no need to worry about alligators living in city sewers. They can’t survive without the ultraviolet radiation from the sun that enables them to process calcium. This urban legend can be traced back to a New York Times article in 1935, which reported that some boys had dragged an alligator out of a sewer in Harlem and beat it to death with shovels. It probably swam up a storm conduit after falling from a boat.

  RICH When it says to defend yourself against an alligator, that’s the trick part of the question. This means if the alligator is litigious. And trying to sue you. Let’s say, because you’re wearing his mom on your feet. There’s a lot of paperwork involved in defending yourself in court against an alligator.

  JEREMY HARDY Is that where the word ‘allegation’ comes from?

  What is the bravest species of animal?

  The carrier pigeon, which has received more than half of all the Dickin Medals for Animal Bravery ever issued.

  The medal was instituted by Mrs Maria Dickin, founder of the People’s Dispensary for Sick Animals (PDSA) in the UK in 1943. Between 1943 and 1949 the PDSA awarded fifty-four Dickin Medals to thirty-two pigeons, eighteen dogs, three horses, and one cat. Recently a few more awards have been given, most notably to two guide dogs that led their owners to safety down more than seventy floors of the World Trade Center on 11 September 2001.

  Messenger pigeons were used throughout World War II, during communication blackouts and attacks. One of the first to win the DM was Winkie, who was on a plane when it crashed. Winkie broke free and found her way back to her owner in Scotland. From her oily and bedraggled appearance, Winkie’s owner could roughly estimate how long she had been flying. Using this information, along with the last known coordinates of the plane, the crew were saved.

  A few years later, a pigeon named Gustav was issued to the war correspondent Montague Taylor, and braved a 150-mile trip to deliver the first account of the Normandy landings. Gustav came to a sticky end after the war when someone cleaning out his loft accidentally sat on him.

  In 1942, behavioural scientist B. F. Skinner came up with the idea of using trained pigeons to guide weapons. The system worked by training pigeons to earn a food reward by pecking at the image of a ship. Three of them were then placed in the nose of a missile. Once launched, the pigeons would see the ship in their window and peck at it, triggering a corrective mechanism linked to the missile’s guidance system.

  The closer the ship got, the bigger it appeared in the screen, and the more the pigeons pecked, so that just before they hit the target and were obliterated, they were being showered with grain.

  The system worked well in simulations but the Navy eventually balked at putting it into practice.

  The pigeon guidance technology work wasn’t entirely wasted – for a while the US Coastguard used pigeons to guide rescue helicopters. They were trained to peck at orange dots, which meant they could be used in searches for orange lifejackets in open seas, their eyesight being ten times sharper than that of the pilots.

  Name a poisonous snake.

  Wrong.

  The correct answer is ‘grass snake’.

  Vipers, cobras, rattlesnakes and mambas aren’t poisonous – they’re venomous. It’s an important distinction: poison harms you when you swallow it, venom when it’s injected into you. So, something’s ‘poisonous’ when you bite it, but it’s ‘venomous’ when it bites you.

  Though experts believe there may be others yet to be discovered, there are only two known species of ‘poisonous’ snake. One is the yamakagashi or Japanese grass snake (Rhabdophis tigrinus). It eats toxic toads and stores their poison in specially adapted glands in its neck. When attacked, it arches the front of its body to make the glands stand out, with the result that anything biting its neck (the usual place for predators to strike) gets a fatal mouthful of poison. As it happens, the yamakagashi is venomous as well, but its fangs are located right at the back of its mouth, so you have to really annoy it to get bitten.

  The orange-bellied, rough-skinned newt (Taricha granulosa) of North America is not a snake, but it is one of the most poisonous creatures on earth, packed full of tetrodotoxin or TTF – the same poison contained in the puffer fish used to make the legendarily risky Japanese delicacy fugu. In 1979 a twenty-nine-year-old man in a bar in Oregon swallowed one of these newts for a bet. He was dead within hours.

  The only creatures known to eat these newts and survive (and thus the only other known poisonous snakes) are a small population of garter snakes, also resident in Oregon, that have evolved a tolerance to the poison. This produces a deadly surprise for any of their predators, such as foxes and crows, which are partial to their livers.

  Virtually all spiders are venomous – including the 648 species recorded in Britain – but most of them are too small for their tiny fangs to puncture human skin and deliver their venom.

  The Anglo-Saxon word for spider was attercop, which meant literally ‘poison-head’, from ator, poison, and cop, head.

  As far as we know, there are no poisonous spiders. Crispy tarantulas, for example, are eaten in Cambodia with no ill effects.

  What’s three times as dangerous as war?

  Work is a bigger killer than drink, drugs or war.

  Around two million people die every year from work-related accidents and diseases, as opposed to a mere 650,000 who are killed in wars.

  Worldwide, the most dangerous jobs are in agriculture, mining and construction. According to the United States Bureau of Labor Statistics, in the year 2000, 5,915 people died at work – including those who had a heart attack at their desks.

  Lumberjacks had the most dangerous job, with 122 deaths per 100,000 employed. The second most dangerous job was fishing and third was airplane pilots – with a death rate of 101 per 100,000. Nearly all of the pilots, you’ll be reassured to hear, died in small-plane crashes, not passenger jets.

  Structural-metalworkers and people in mining and drilling came fourth and fifth, though the death rate for both was less than half that of timber cutters.

  The third most common cause of death on the job in all occupations was murder, which claimed 677 workers. Fifty policemen were murdered. But so were 205 salespeople.

  Falls were the second most common cause of death, accounting for 12 per cent of the total. Roofers and structural-metalworkers were the main victims.

  The most common cause of death on the job was the car accident, accounting for 23 per cent of the total. Even police officers were slightly more likely to die behind the wheel than by homicide.

  The single most dangerous specific job is said to be that of Alaskan crab fishermen working in the Bering Sea.

  The risk of death can be calculated using the Duckworth scale, devised by Dr Frank Duckworth, editor of the Royal Statistical Society magazine. It measures the likelihood of dying as a result of any given activity. The safest kind of activity scores 0 and 8 will result in certain death.

  One game of Russian Roulette carries a risk of 7.2. Twenty years of rock cli
mbing weighs in at 6.3. The chances of a man being murdered are 4.6. A 160-km (100-mile) car journey by a sober middle-aged driver scores 1.9: slightly more risky than a destructive asteroid impact (1.6).

  On the Duckworth scale, 5.5 is particularly perilous. It’s the risk of death by car crash or an accidental fall for men, as well as the chance of either sex dying while vacuuming, washing up or walking down the street.

  STEPHEN It’s work. You’re more likely to die at work than you are at war.

  ALAN Does that include soldiers?

  What killed most sailors in an eighteenth-century sea battle?

  A nasty splinter.

  Cannon balls fired from men o’ war didn’t actually explode (no matter what Hollywood thinks), they just tore through the hull of the ship causing huge splinters of wood to fly around the decks at high speed, lacerating anyone within range.

  British naval ships of the period were often rotten and unseaworthy. Many of the officers had no idea how to sail, fight or control their men. Hernias caused by manhandling acres of wet canvas were so common that the navy was forced to issue trusses. To cap it all there wasn’t a single pay rise for a century.

  At close range, a 32-pound ball was capable of penetrating wood to a depth of 60 cm (2 feet). The best way to stop splinters (other than by building a metal ship) was to use a type of wood found in the south-eastern USA which resisted splintering.

  As well as being one of the hardest of all woods, the Live Oak (Quercus virginiana) is the state tree of Georgia and a symbol of strength and resistance for the southern states. It is the tree draped with long garlands of moss in films like Gone with the Wind.

  Which war killed the highest proportion of British soldiers?

  The English Civil War (or the ‘War of the Three Nations’ as historians now call it).

  In the seven years between 1642 and 1649, a staggering one in ten of the adult male population died, more than three times the proportion that died in the First World War and five times the proportion who died in the Second World War.

  The total UK population in 1642 is estimated at five million, of whom roughly two million were men of fighting age: 85,000 died on the battlefield, another 100,000 died of their wounds or of disease. The war was the biggest military mobilisation in English history with a quarter of those eligible to fight finding themselves in uniform.

  In Ireland, things were even worse as the Civil War merged into a doomed battle for independence. Some historians calculate that half the Irish population had perished by the end of Cromwell’s expedition in 1653.

  In a 2004 poll organised by the BBC, it was revealed that 90 per cent of Britons cannot name a single battle of the English Civil War, 80 per cent do not know which English king was executed by Parliament in 1649 and 67 per cent of schoolchildren have never heard of Oliver Cromwell.

  JEREMY HARDY ‘All anybody knows about it is the hairstyles. All anybody says, ‘Oh, it’s Roundheads and Cavaliers,’ and you think, ‘Yeah, that’s it, really, one lot looks like the Grumbleweeds, the other looked like Laurence Llewellyn-Bowen,’ so it all kicks off.

  What’s the word for Napoleon’s most humiliating defeat?

  Rabbits.

  While Waterloo was no doubt Napoleon’s most crushing defeat, it was not his most embarrassing.

  In 1807, Napoleon was in high spirits having signed the Peace of Tilsit, a landmark treaty between France, Russia and Prussia. To celebrate, he suggested that the Imperial Court should enjoy an afternoon’s rabbit-shooting.

  It was organised by his trusted chief-of-staff, Alexandre Berthier, who was so keen to impress Napoleon that he bought thousands of rabbits to ensure that the Imperial Court had plenty of game to keep them occupied.

  The party arrived, the shoot commenced, and the gamekeepers released the quarry. But disaster struck. Berthier had bought tame, not wild, rabbits, who mistakenly thought they were about to be fed rather than killed.

  Rather than fleeing for their life, they spotted a tiny little man in a big hat and mistook him for their keeper bringing them food. The hungry rabbits stormed towards Napoleon at their top speed of 35 mph (56 kph).

  The shooting party – now in shambolic disarray – could do nothing to stop them. Napoleon was left with no other option but to run, beating the starving animals off with his bare hands. But the rabbits did not relent and drove the Emperor back to his carriage while his underlings thrashed vainly at them with horsewhips.

  According to contemporary accounts of the fiasco, the Emperor of France sped off in his coach, comprehensively beaten and covered in shame.

  Who blew the nose off the Sphinx?

  The Sphinx, which means ‘strangler’ in Greek, was a mythical beast with the head of a woman, the body of a lion and the wings of a bird. As you may have noticed, its giant 6,500-year-old statue beside the pyramids has no nose.

  Over the centuries, many armies and individuals – British, German and Arab – have been accused of deliberately blowing it off for various reasons, but Napoleon generally gets the blame.

  Almost none of these accusations is true. In fact, the only person that we can definitely say damaged it at all was an Islamic cleric named Sa’im al-dahr, who was lynched for vandalism in 1378.

  The British and the German armies in either of the two World Wars are not guilty: there are photographs of the Sphinx without its nose dating from 1886.

  As for Napoleon, there are sketches in existence of a noseless Sphinx done in 1737, thirty-two years before he was even born. When he first clapped eyes on it as a twenty-nine-year-old general, it had probably been missing for hundreds of years.

  Napoleon went to Egypt with a view to disrupting British communications with India. He fought two battles there: the battle of the Pyramids (which wasn’t, as it happens, at the Pyramids), and the battle of the Nile (which wasn’t at the Nile). As well as 55,000 troops, Napoleon brought with him 155 civilian experts known as ‘savants’. It was the first professional archaeological expedition to the country.

  When he returned to France after Nelson sank his fleet, the Emperor left behind his army and the savants, whose work continued. They produced the Description de l’Egypte, the first accurate picture of the country to reach Europe.

  Despite all this, Egyptian guides at the Pyramids today still tell tourists that the Sphinx’s nose was ‘stolen by Napoleon’ and taken back to the Louvre in Paris.

  The most likely reason for the missing organ is the action of 6,000 years of wind and weather on the soft limestone.

  What’s the name of the Piccadilly Circus statue in London?

  a) Eros

  b) The Angel of Christian Charity

  c) Cupid

  d) Anteros

  The famous monument in Piccadilly Circus was erected in 1892 to commemorate the work of Lord Shaftesbury, the Victorian philanthropist.

  Designed by the sculptor, Sir Alfred Gilbert, it represents Anteros and stands for, ‘reflective and mature love, as opposed to Eros or Cupid, the frivolous tyrant’. Anteros was the younger brother of Eros.

  This complicated idea never caught on. Because of the bow and the nudity, and people’s generally shaky grasp of classical mythology, everyone assumed it was Eros (known to the Romans as Cupid), the Greek god of love.

  As a result, a counter-rumour was spread by those wanting to protect Shaftesbury’s reputation, claiming the memorial was, in fact, the Angel of Christian Charity (Greek, agape), a rather obscure, but less racy, alternative.

  Whatever its name, the statue was technologically groundbreaking, as it was the first in the world to be cast in aluminium.

  The use of a nude figure on a public monument was controversial, but it was generally well received. The Magazine of Art described it as ‘… a striking contrast to the dull ugliness of the generality of our street sculpture’.

  Old London hands tell you that the memorial used to stand bang in the middle of Piccadilly Circus, aiming its bow down Shaftesbury Avenue (‘he buries his shaft in Sha
ftes-bury’). During the Second World War the statue was removed for safe-keeping. When it was returned, so the story goes, the whey-faced bureaucrats of the London County Council decided to move it to one side and point it down Lower Regent Street instead.

  This isn’t so. It was certainly removed, but it has always pointed down Lower Regent Street, because Gilbert designed it to face the direction of Shaftesbury’s home in Wimbourne St Giles, Dorset.

  What did Nero do while Rome burned?

  He certainly didn’t play the fiddle, which wasn’t invented until the fifteenth century.

  The other charge was that Nero sang a song about the burning of Troy while Rome burned in AD 64, implying that he had set fire to the city himself in order to do so.

  In fact, when the fire broke out, he was more than 56 km (35 miles) away at his seaside holiday home. When told the news, he raced back to Rome and took personal charge of the fire-fighting efforts.

  The suspicion that he wanted to burn down Rome may have arisen from his stated ambition to redevelop the city. He eventually managed to shift the blame on to the Christians.

  As to what Nero actually did: he was a transvestite who loved acting in women’s clothes, singing, playing music and having orgies, and he had his mother killed. He was very proud of his musical abilities; his dying words are reported to have been ‘What an artist the world is losing in me!’