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

by John Lloyd

  The phrase was originally used to describe a herby cheese spread. In a Latin recipe poem called Moretum, once attributed to Virgil, the poet describes the lunch of a simple farmer in which he grinds cheese, garlic and herbs together into a ball (color est e pluribus unus).

  By the eighteenth century it had become a well-worn phrase meaning unity or friendship.

  Benfica was created as a merger of two clubs in 1908. It is Portugal’s most popular soccer club, but also fields teams in a range of other sports as well.

  Why do deaf Americans feel at home in Paris?

  American sign language bears a striking similarity to the old French sign language system.

  This is because a deaf Frenchman, Laurent Clerc, was one of the first teachers of sign language in the US in the nineteenth century.

  American Sign Language (ASL) is a complex visual-spatial language used by the deaf in the US and parts of English-speaking Canada. It is a linguistically complete language, spoken as the native tongue of many deaf people as well as some hearing children of deaf families. Though American universities such as Yale do not offer courses in ASL because ‘it is not an academic language’, ASL is one the commonest languages used in the US today, easily in the top dozen.

  Not only is American Sign Language totally different from British Sign Language (BSL), it is so different in grammatical structure from American English that ASL has more in common with spoken Japanese than it does with spoken English. Deaf Americans will find it much easier to make themselves understood in France than in Britain.

  Sign languages are not feeble, mimed versions of spoken or written speech but languages in their own right, with grammatical structures and syntax that do not correspond to their spoken or written forms. They are not universally intelligible. They differ from country to country even more than normal speech and it is not uncommon for sign languages to differ from city to city in the same country.

  From 1692 to 1910, nearly everyone on Martha’s Vineyard, an island off the coast of Massachusetts, was bilingual in Martha’s Vineyard Sign Language (MVSL). The first deaf person arrived there in 1692 and, as a result of the remote nature of the island, and of intermarriage between people with the deafness gene, there was a very high rate of hereditary deafness in the area. In some villages, as many as one in four were deaf.

  Deafness on the island was so common that many people believed it to be contagious, but it was never considered a handicap.

  In 1817, the school now known as the American School for the Deaf opened on the mainland in Hartford, Connecticut, and most of the deaf children were sent there to be educated. Many settled and married nearby and the hereditary deaf gene on Martha’s Vineyard fizzled out. The last deaf native died in 1950 and MVSL is now extinct, although modern ASL still retains some of its features.

  How do the Cherokee pronounce ‘Cherokee’?

  They don’t. Cherokee speech has no ‘ch’ or ‘r’ sound.

  The correct spelling (and pronunciation) is Tsalagi. ‘Cherokee’ is a Creek Indian word meaning ‘people with another language’. The preferred Cherokee word for themselves is Aniyounwiya which means ‘the principal people’.

  There are about 350,000 Cherokee alive today, of whom about 22,000 speak the language. Their written alphabet was devised by Sequoyah (1776–1843), a Cherokee Indian also known as George Guess. He is the only known example in history of an illiterate person inventing a written language.

  Sequoyah was the son of a Cherokee mother and Nathaniel Guess, a German-born fur trader. He was either born handicapped or injured while young, hence his name Sik-wo-yi, which means ‘pig’s foot’ in Cherokee.

  He first became interested in creating a Cherokee alphabet in 1809. An accomplished silversmith and – despite his handicap – a brave soldier, Sequoyah fought for the US in the Cherokee Regiment under Andrew Jackson against the British and the Creek Indians at the Battle of Horseshoe Bend in 1814. A wealthy Georgian farmer called Charles Hicks showed him how to write his own name so he could sign his work as a silversmith. During his military service, Sequoyah became convinced of the need for an alphabet because he saw that – unlike the white soldiers – the Tsalagi were unable to write to or receive letters from home, and all battle orders had to be committed to memory.

  It took him twelve years to work out the alphabet. He called the eighty-five letters his ‘talking leaves’. On showing it to the Tsalagi Chiefs in 1821, it was accepted immediately, and was so simple that, within a year, almost the whole tribe became literate.

  Seven years after its adoption, the first Tsalagi language newspaper, The Cherokee Phoenix, was printed in 1828.

  Jimi Hendrix, Dolly Parton and Cher have all claimed Cherokee descent.

  What did Buffalo Bill do to buffaloes?

  Nothing. There are no buffaloes in North America. However, he did kill a lot of bison – 4,280 of them in fewer than eighteen months.

  The word ‘buffalo’ is frequently misapplied to bison. The North American Plains Bison (Bison bison) is related to neither genus of true buffalo – the water buffalo Bubalus and the African buffalo Synceros. Their most recent common ancestor died out six million years ago.

  The bison population fell from 60 million in the seventeenth century to just a few hundred by the late nineteenth. There are about 50,000 bison roaming the range today. Bison/cattle crosses are bred for meat, called ‘cattalo’ or ‘beefalo’. They have cattle fathers and bison mothers. Offspring of a male bison and female cattle are too broad-shouldered for the cow to deliver safely.

  William Frederick ‘Buffalo Bill’ Cody, hunter, Indian-fighter and showman, joined the Pony Express – the West’s legendary mail service – at the age of fourteen, in response to an ad which ran: ‘WANTED young skinny wiry fellows not over eighteen. Must be expert riders willing to risk death daily. Orphans preferred. Wages $25 a week.’

  The Pony Express only lasted nineteen months and was superseded by the railroad. In 1867, Cody was hired to hunt bison to feed the construction crews of the Kansas Pacific Railroad, which is where he notched up his astounding total.

  He ran his Wild West Show from 1883 to 1916. The show was hugely popular; its European tour was attended by Queen Victoria. On his death in 1917 – and despite the fact there was a war going on – Cody received tributes from the British King, the German Kaiser and President Woodrow Wilson.

  Although he had specified in his will that he should be buried near the town of Cody, Wyoming (which he had founded), his wife stated that he had converted to Catholicism on his deathbed and asked for him to be buried on Lookout Mountain, near Denver.

  In 1948, the Cody branch of the American Legion offered a $10,000 reward for the ‘return’ of the body, so the Denver branch mounted a guard over the grave until a deeper shaft could be blasted into the rock.

  Hatchets weren’t buried until 1968, when there was an exchange of smoke signals between Lookout Mountain (Denver) and Cedar Mountain (Cody), while the spirit of Buffalo Bill was transported symbolically from one mountain to the other on a riderless white horse.

  How does the US government care for its precious sequoia groves?

  It deliberately sets fire to them.

  Giant Sequoia trees (Sequoiadendron giganteum) are the heaviest living things ever to have existed on earth: they can weigh more than 6,000 tonnes and the tallest are as high as a twenty-six-storey building. Their bark is up to 1.2 m (4 feet) thick, but the seeds are tiny, weighing 1/3,000th of an ounce each, about a billionth of the weight of the fully grown tree.

  The massive number of minuscule seeds of the Giant Sequoia is contained in egg-shaped cones less than 7.6 cm (3 inches) long. The tree’s thick bark also protects it against insects and lightning strikes. As a result, many trees are completely hollow but still standing.

  Paradoxically, forest fires are essential for the sequoia’s survival. Because of their thick bark they survive fires that completely destroy all other trees. The fires leave the forest clear of undergrowth, whic
h enables the sequoia’s absurdly tiny seeds to survive. The trees also rely on the heat of the fires to open their tough seed cones and to expose the bare soil.

  Since time immemorial, forest fires had swept through the sequoia groves every five to fifteen years. In the 1950s and 1960s, the US Forest Service became concerned that the trees had stopped reproducing. Studies by Dr Richard Harteswood in the 1960s proved that it was because the US Forest Service had managed (quite brilliantly) to suppress all fires in the area since being formed in 1905. The solution offered by Dr Harteswood was to reverse the process by deliberately starting fires, and this is in fact now government policy.

  Also known as Wellingtonia trees, Giant Sequoias are native to California but have been planted worldwide. In terms of volume, they are the fastest-growing trees in the world.

  The tallest known Giant Sequoia was 95 m (311 feet) tall and more than 40 feet in diameter, but Giant Sequoias are not the tallest trees in the world: California redwoods (Sequoia sempervirens) can be as much as 116 m (380 feet) tall.

  Sequoias are named after a half-breed Native American called Sequoyah (1776–1843), otherwise known as George Guess, who invented the Cherokee alphabet (see ‘How do the Cherokee pronounce “Cherokee”?’).

  Where was baseball invented?

  England.

  Baseball (originally base ball) was invented in England and first named and described in 1744 in A Little Pretty Pocket Book. The book was very popular in England and was reprinted in America in 1762.

  Baseball is not based on rounders, the first description of which didn’t appear in print until 1828, in the second edition of The Boy’s Own Book. The first US mention of rounders is in 1834 in The Book of Sports by Robin Carver. He credited The Boy’s Own Book as his source, but called the game ‘base ball’ or ‘goal ball’.

  In the first chapter of Northanger Abbey, written in 1796, the young heroine Catherine Morland is described as preferring ‘cricket, baseball, riding on horseback and running about the country to books’.

  The baseball authorities were so paranoid about the non-American origin of the game that in 1907 they carried out a shameless fraud. In a report into the game’s origins commissioned by the major league’s executive board, they advanced the story that the game was invented by the Civil War general and hero Abner Doubleday in Cooperstown, New York, in 1839.

  A legend was born. Despite the evidence of numerous bat-and-ball games being played all over early Puritan America, and the fact that Doubleday never visited Cooperstown, or ever mentioned baseball in his diaries, it stuck firm in the American psyche. As one wag put it, ‘Abner Doubleday didn’t invent baseball, baseball invented Abner Doubleday.’

  If any one person should be credited with inventing the modern US game, it is Alexander Cartwright, a Manhattan bookseller. He had been a volunteer fireman and in 1842 founded the Knickerbocker Baseball Club (after the Knickerbocker Fire Engine Company).

  He and other firemen played on a field at 47th and 27th Streets. The rules of the modern game are based on their by-laws and Cartwight was the first to draw a diagram of the diamond-shaped field.

  He was finally inducted into the Baseball Hall of Fame in 1938.

  How did the game of rugby begin?

  According to the irrepressible old folk tale, rugby football was invented at Rugby School in November 1823, when seventeen-year-old player William Webb Ellis – ‘with a fine disregard for the rules’ – first picked up a ball and ran with it.

  Even at Rugby they don’t believe this. It’s been acknowledged as a myth since 1895, when an investigation by the Old Rugbeian Society admitted that the only source for the story was an 1876 article in the school magazine by an old boy who had barely known Ellis and had left the school three years before the ‘famous’ incident. Other contemporaries had no memory of Ellis as either a rebel or a particularly gifted footballer (he became a low-Church evangelical Anglican priest). What they did confirm was that the rules at the school were complicated and that, while running with the ball in hand was definitely forbidden at the time, it did happen. In the unlikely event that Ellis did run with the ball, he certainly wasn’t the first.

  Games similar to rugby, involving the kicking and catching of balls, have been played throughout history, all over the world. The ancient Greeks, Romans, Chinese and Mayans all had their own versions of the running-with-a-ball game. Closer to home was caid in Ireland, criapan in Wales and the various English versions of Shrovetide football, where vast crowds of players hacked at and tripped up one another at will. Henry IV, Henry VIII (despite being a keen player himself), Elizabeth I, James I and Charles II all had it banned.

  Nevertheless, by the early nineteenth century, some version of the game was being played at most major public schools. Handling the ball was common in many of them. What made Rugby stand out was that a group of boys produced a printed set of rules in 1845, the first written rules for any game of football.

  This formed the basis for the code adopted by the Rugby Football Union, founded at the Pall Mall Restaurant in London in 1871. Eight years earlier, the Football Association had been established, using a largely hands-free version played at Cambridge University. This marked the formal split between the two sets of rules, which evolved into the modern sports of soccer and rugby union. (Rugby league split from rugby union in 1895.)

  From time immemorial, all balls for such games had been made from inflated pig’s bladders, so they were always more egg-shaped than spherical. But, in 1862, Richard Lindon, a local Rugby shoemaker, whose wife had died from lung cancer caused by blowing up hundreds of diseased pig’s bladders, was inspired to develop a leather version with a rubber inner tube and so produced the world’s first round football. A request from Rugby School for an oval alternative (whose shape made it easier to catch and throw) meant that Lindon also gets the credit for the first proper rugby ball. Its distinctive shape was formalised in 1892.

  Unfortunately, Lindon didn’t patent his invention, although through it he had rather more influence on rugby’s development than William Webb Ellis, who died in obscurity in France in 1872, completely unaware that, four years later, he would be immortalised as the ‘father of rugby’.

  What’s the only sport invented entirely in the USA?

  Basketball.

  And although it was invented in the United States, it was actually devised by a Canadian, James Naismith, in 1891 – the same year that ping-pong was invented.

  Naismith was a PE instructor at Springfield College (then the YMCA training school) in Springfield, Massachusetts, from 1890 to 1895. He was asked to create a sport that could be played indoors without special new equipment. He is supposed to have thought of the idea as he screwed up sketch after sketch of ideas for games and aimed the balls of paper at his waste-paper basket across the room.

  Initially, players dribbled a soccer ball up and down any old indoor space. Points were earned by landing the ball in a peach basket nailed to a balcony or high on a wall. It was twenty-one years before anyone got round to putting a hole in the bottom of the basket. Until 1912, after every score, someone had to climb a ladder up to the basket or poke the ball out with a long pole.

  In 1959, twenty years after his death, James Naismith was inducted into the Basketball Hall of Fame (now called the Naismith Memorial Hall of Fame).

  One of the apocryphal reasons given for the success of VHS in becoming the world standard videocassette is that the original Sony Betamax was slightly too short to record an entire basketball game.

  What do you call someone from the United States?

  Not American, that really irritates the Canadians.

  In fact there is no agreed right answer. In the UK, the use of ‘US’ as an adjective is common in media and government house-styles. In Spanish americano tends to refer to any resident of the Americas; English spoken in Latin America often makes this distinction as well. In the North American Free Trade Agreement (1994), the Canadian French word for an American is given as
étatsunien; in Spanish it is estadounidense. This is clumsy in English. US-American is better and that’s what the Germans tend to use (US-Amerikaner).

  Some (not all serious) suggestions for a specific English word meaning ‘citizen of the US’ have included: Americanite; Colonican; Columbard; Columbian; Fredonian; Statesider; Uessian; United Statesian; United Statesman; USen; Vespuccino; Washingtonian. And Merkin – from the way Americans pronounce ‘American’.

  The likely source for Yankee is the Dutch name Janke, meaning ‘little Jan’ or ‘little John,’ dating from the 1680s when the Dutch ran New York. During the Civil War, ‘yankee’ referred only to those loyal to the Union. Now the term carries less emotion – except of course for baseball fans. The word gringo is widely used in Latin America to mean a US citizen, particularly in Mexico, though not necessarily in a pejorative way. It’s thought to come from the Spanish griego, ‘Greek’ – hence any foreigner (as in English ‘it’s all Greek to me’).

  STEPHEN What’s the right word for someone who’s from the USA?

  JOHNNY VEGAS ‘Obese.’

  GRAEME Is it ‘burger-eating invasion monkey’?

  What was Billy the Kid’s real name?

  a) William H. Bonney

  b) Kid Antrim

  c) Henry McCarty

  d) Brushy Bill Roberts

  Billy the Kid was born Henry McCarty in New York City. William H. Bonney was just one of his aliases, the one he was using when he was sentenced to death.