QI: The Second Book of General Ignorance

by John Lloyd

  On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life – as it was originally called – was the first genuinely popular work of scientific theory. Published by John Murray, the first print run sold out before it had even been printed and Darwin produced another five revised editions. Many of the initial reviews were hostile, anti-evolution organisations were formed, and Darwin was often ridiculed, but the mockery came as much from politicians and editors as from churchmen. Darwin had to get used to pictures of his head on a monkey’s body in newspapers, and when he went to collect his honorary degree from Cambridge University, students dangled a stuffed monkey from the roof.

  Sometimes his work was simply ignored. Just before On the Origin of Species came out, in 1859, the president of London’s Geological Society awarded Darwin a medal of honour for his geological expeditions to the Andes and for his four-volume work on barnacles without even mentioning the book.

  Darwin lost his own faith, but he hadn’t intentionally set out to subvert religion. He always claimed he was an agnostic, not an atheist. And the Anglican Church certainly didn’t abandon him. When he died in 1882, it awarded him its highest accolade. He was buried in Westminster Abbey, next to England’s greatest scientists Michael Faraday and Isaac Newton.

  Who is the only person on Earth who can never be wrong?

  No, not even the Pope is ‘always right’. He can still commit sins and not everything he says is ‘infallible’.

  The First Vatican Council introduced the Doctrine of Papal Infallibility on 18 July 1870. Under the doctrine, certain specific statements by the Pope are preserved forever from any possibility of error by the action of the Holy Spirit. This does not mean that all the Pope’s private or public statements are beyond argument. Many of the Church’s strictest laws (those against contraception, for example) are binding on all Catholics, but are not protected by the doctrine of papal infallibility. Nor does the doctrine imply that the Pope himself is ‘impeccable’, or ‘incapable of sin’ (peccare is Latin for ‘to sin’).

  For a papal statement to be ‘infallible’ it has to fulfil strict conditions. The Pope must be speaking ex cathedra (literally, ‘from his chair’), in his official capacity as pastor of all Christians, not as a private individual. He has to make it clear he is pronouncing on a doctrine of faith or morals and that this is the last word on the matter. Finally, he must confirm that the statement binds the whole Church and that everyone must agree to it, on pain of what the Catholic Church calls ‘spiritual shipwreck’.

  An infallible teaching by a pope can contradict previous Church teachings (as long as they were not themselves issued infallibly) but the Pope cannot use his infallibility to make other people’s statements retrospectively infallible by agreeing with them. Nor is the whole of a statement made ex cathedra necessarily infallible: the Pope has to make clear which bit is which.

  This is quite a tall order, even for a pope, so it isn’t surprising that, since 1870, only one infallible papal statement has actually been issued. In 1950 Pope Pius XII stated that the Virgin Mary was bodily taken up to Heaven at the end of her life. This is known as the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary, and it is celebrated on 15 August. The Pope did this because, although the Assumption had been taught and observed since the sixth century, it had no direct scriptural authority. By making it a dogma (from the Greek verb dokein, ‘to seem good’), all doubt was removed (although theologians still can’t agree whether Mary was carried up to Heaven before or after she died).

  Though only one pope has ever made only one infallible statement, the Vatican has since decided that the content of Pope John Paul II’s 1994 pronouncement Ordinatio Sacerdotalis (‘Ordination to the Priesthood’), in which it was made explicit that Roman Catholic priests have to be men, was infallible even though the Pope had failed to say so at the time.

  If the Vatican is correct, any future pope who permits female priests will instantly excommunicate himself.

  What are the four main religions of India?

  Hinduism, Islam, Christianity and Sikhism in that order. Not Buddhism: although Buddhism was founded in India, its spiritual home today is Tibet.

  The figures from the latest available census (2001) are: Hindu 80.5 per cent, Muslim 13.4 per cent, Christian 2.3 per cent and Sikh 1.9 per cent. More than three-quarters of the population of India describe themselves as followers of Hinduism, the oldest continually practised faith in the world, and India’s Muslim community, at around 145 million, is the third largest in the world, after Indonesia and Pakistan. There are about 25 million Christians in India (almost as many as the UK’s 29 million) and 15 million Sikhs.

  Buddhists in India account for only 0.7 per cent of the population. New Zealand has a higher percentage of people professing Buddhism (1.08 per cent) than India does. The members of the influential Indian ascetic sect known as Jainism are even fewer in number – about 0.5 per cent. The number of Indian atheists is smallest of all: only 0.1 per cent of the population are rated ‘unspecified’ by the census.

  Buddhism was founded in India and grew rapidly there for a thousand years. But most of its adherents now live in China (notably in Tibet where, until quite recently, one in every six males was a Buddhist monk) as well as Indochina and Japan. It is also the majority religion in Sri Lanka.

  Buddhism disappeared gradually from India from the sixth century AD. Though Hinduism absorbed many of its practices (such as vegetarianism) and accepted Buddha into the pantheon of gods, Buddhism was a monastic religion, based on detachment and meditation. This made it less attractive to the state rulers of India who liked to court popularity by staging lavish and colourful Hindu festivals. With the arrival of Islam in the tenth century, Buddhism was finally relegated to its present ‘tiny minority’ status.

  This is only ‘tiny’ in relative terms. 0.7 per cent of the population of India is 7.5 million people, making it the ninth largest Buddhist community in the world.

  There are also twice as many Buddhists as Jains in India. Mahavira (599–527 BC), whose name means ‘Great Hero’, founded Jainism in north-east India, in the same area and at almost the same time as the Buddha (563–483 BC), whose name means ‘Awakened One’. Both men were born to high-caste families, which they both abandoned at about the age of thirty. Mahavira lived as an ascetic, much of the time naked.

  Though Jainism declares that everything in the universe, including non-living things, has a soul, it is atheistic in nature and the existence of God is seen as an irrelevance. They believe the taking of any life is a sin and Orthodox Jain monks wear a net over their mouths to avoid swallowing spiders and gently sweep the street before them as they walk to avoid crushing insects.

  Gandhi was greatly influenced by Jainism. The Jains’ symbol is the fylfot, an old English word for the good luck sign better known as the swastika.

  From which country did the Gypsies originate?

  The Gypsies, or Romani, are not from Egypt, or Rome or Romania. Their ancestral home was India.

  There are an estimated 10 million Romani people spread across Europe, Asia and the Americas, of which the biggest concentration are the Roma of Central and Eastern Europe. From their first arrival in Europe in the fourteenth century they have travelled under many different names: ‘gypsy’ and the Spanish gitano are just two, and both derive from the mistaken assumption that they came from Egypt. Romani, the name they call themselves, doesn’t come from a geographic area at all, but from their word Rom, meaning ‘man’.

  Romani had survived as an oral rather than a written language and it wasn’t until the mid-nineteenth century that linguists were able to solve the puzzle of its origin. Analysis of the structure and vocabulary confirmed Romani as an Indo-European language descended from Sanskrit, the ancient language of northern India – just like Hindi, Bengali, Gujarati and Punjabi. Romani also contains elements of Greek, Turkish and Iranian, which suggest that they migrated out of India, through Turkey and eventua
lly into Europe.

  A century and a half later, geneticists have come to the same conclusion. In 2003 several hundred Romani were analysed for evidence of five genetic mutations linked to certain diseases. The results confirmed that a founder group of perhaps a thousand Romani emerged from India in AD 1000 and then spread out in smaller units. This explains the complex pattern of Romani dialects that are found all across Europe.

  For most of the last thousand years, the ability of the Romani to move and adapt has only been matched by the persecution they have suffered at the hands of the sedentary populations they encountered. Forced into slavery in Eastern Europe, ghettoised in Spain, marked out by head shaving and ear removal in France and England, they have been discriminated against legally and socially in every state they have travelled through.

  Their painful history culminated in the Nazi regime’s attempt at genocide, known as the Porjamos (‘the devouring’ in Romani). This killed an estimated 1.5 million people between 1935 and 1945. And, as recently as 2008, the Italian government blamed a rise in city crime specifically on Romani migration, describing their presence as a ‘national emergency’.

  The Romani have enriched European culture for centuries with music, stories and language. A surprising number of English words are borrowed from them, including pal (from phal, ‘friend’); lollipop (from loli phabai, ‘red apple’); gaff, in the sense of a place (from gav, ‘town’); nark, meaning ‘informant’ (from naak, ‘nose’) and, most prominently in recent times, chav – which comes from the Romani chavi meaning ‘young boy’.

  What was shocking about the first cancan dancers?

  It wasn’t young women showing their knickers. The cancan started as a dance for both men and women – and neither was saucily dressed. The familiar line of whooping, high-kicking girls didn’t come along till almost a hundred years later.

  The cancan originated in the working-class dance halls of Montparnasse in the Paris of the 1830s, where it was first known as the chahut (meaning ‘uproar’). It was for men and women, dancing in quartets, and it quickly became the rock-and-roll of its day, shocking polite society by the amount of bodily contact it allowed between the couples. A contemporary account makes it sound like a demented tango: ‘They mingle, cross, part, meet again, with a swiftness and fire that must be felt to be described.’ On a visit to Paris, the German poet Heinrich Heine (1797–1856) called the chahut a ‘satanic ruction’.

  Some of the earliest chahut stars were men, whose athletic high-kicks and mid-air splits (or grand écart) were copied from stage acrobats of the time. When women began to try the high-kicks, they often revealed more than just their athleticism. As the fashion for wider hoop-reinforced skirts brought with it ever-frillier layers of undergarment, the kicking, skirt-lifting and bottom-waggling began to take over. The chahut was a dance for everyone, but the cancan that evolved from it was the pole dance of the 1860s, performed on stage by semiprofessional ‘dancers’ (often a euphemism for prostitutes).

  The cancan’s reputation grew increasingly sensational. An attempt to bring it to Moscow in the mid-1850s led Tsar Nicholas I to ban the dance, imprison the promoter and deport the performers under armed Cossack guard. The first ‘French Cancan’ was staged in England in 1861 by the impresario Charles Morton (1819–1904) in his new Oxford Street music hall. It wasn’t particularly French (the cancan quartet were mostly Hungarian) but it was an immediate hit with the audience and the police threatened the theatre with closure for promoting indecency.

  By the time the great Parisian cabaret clubs opened at the end of the century, female cancan dancers like Jane Avril (immortalised in Toulouse-Lautrec’s famous poster) and La Goulue (who danced in expensive clothes, borrowed from her mother’s laundry business) had become Paris’s highest-earning celebrities. Their provocative routines at the Folies Bergère and the Moulin Rouge were incorporated into the cancan chorus lines that started in the 1920s and which still attracts the tourists to Paris today.

  But high-kicks and skirt twirls weren’t invented in Paris in the nineteenth century. A country dance in sixteenth-century Brittany had women doing high-kicks in billowy skirts, and there are reliefs of ancient Egyptians doing something similar at the Tomb of Mehu in Saqqara. They date back to 2400 BC.

  The cancan bears out George Bernard Shaw’s observation that dance is ‘the vertical expression of a horizontal desire, legalized by music’. It probably gets its name from the French verb cancaner, which means ‘to quack’ – ducks are great bottom-wagglers. Cancaner also means ‘to spread scandal’.

  Where does tartan come from?

  Tartan isn’t particularly Scottish.

  Making cloth involves interlacing vertical and horizontal threads called the warp and the weft. This produces an almost infinite possibility for bands and blocks of colour. Patterns similar to those we call ‘tartan’ have appeared in almost every culture since the invention of weaving in prehistoric times.

  Nor is the word itself Scottish. First recorded in English in 1454, it probably comes from the French tiretaine, meaning ‘strong, coarse fabric’. In medieval Scotland, ‘tartan’ merely meant woven (as opposed to knitted) cloth. Plaid, now used interchangeably with tartan, was originally Gaelic for blanket. By the late sixteenth century, individual weavers all over the Highlands were producing their own tartan cloths known as ‘setts’, much as the weavers of Harris do today with tweed. And, just as there are 4,000 registered patterns of tweed, what drove the patterns of the setts was the taste and skill of the individual weaver, the availability of coloured dyes and the quality of the local wool. It had nothing to do with any official ‘clan’ identity.

  The original kilt was a much longer, over-the-shoulder garment, shunned by most lowland Scots and banned by the British after the defeat of the Jacobite Rebellion in 1745. The short kilt was the invention of an English industrialist, Thomas Rawlinson, who opened an ironworks in the Highlands in the mid-eighteenth century and needed something practical for his local workers to wear.

  At the time English regiments stationed in Scotland were filled with lowland Scots, loyal to the Crown but keen to create an identity distinct from other British regiments. What we now call ‘traditional’ Scottish dress (short kilt, sporran, dirk) was the creation of these regiments and they were the first to commission regimental tartans such as the Black Watch. A growing sense of ‘Scottishness’ turned into a full-scale Scottish Revival led by Romantic writers like Sir Walter Scott (1771–1832). By the 1820s kilts, ballads, Highland games and retellings of Scottish legends were the height of fashion. The high point was the state visit of King George IV to Edinburgh in 1822 – the first by an English monarch for 170 years, and expertly stage-managed by Scott himself.

  ‘Clan tartans’ were a hoax from the beginning. John and Charles Allen, two brothers claiming to be Bonnie Prince Charlie’s grandsons – but who were actually from Egham in Surrey – ‘discovered’ a late fifteenth-century manuscript called the Vestiarium Scoticum. Its authenticity was assured, they said, because they’d asked clan chieftains to ‘check’ their tartans against the book. In fact, it had happened in reverse. Clan chieftains had chosen tartans they liked and the Allens had turned it into a book. Much like the brothers, it was a complete fake. Even Sir Walter Scott was forced to conclude that the ‘idea of distinguishing the clans by their tartans is but a fashion of modern date …’

  Who wrote ‘Auld Lang Syne’?

  According to Robert Burns, it wasn’t him.

  Robert Burns (1759–96) never claimed to have written the song ‘Auld Lang Syne’. ‘I took it down from an old man’s singing,’ he wrote in 1793, in a note accompanying the lyric. He sent it to James Johnson, the editor of the Scottish Musical Museum (an anthology of traditional Scottish songs) stating that it was ‘an olden song’ that had never been written down. In fact, Burns was wrong about that – versions of it had been in print several times, including one as recently as 1770.

  ‘Auld Lang Syne’ originated in an anonym
ous fifteenth-century poem that went under various names in various different versions such as: ‘Auld Kindries Foryett’, ‘Old Longsyne’ and finally, in 1724, ‘Auld Lang Syne’.

  Pretty conclusive, you might think – but the song’s authorship remains a hot topic among Burns scholars. Only Burns’s first verse and chorus bear much similarity to the song’s previous incarnations. Some say he claimed the song was a traditional one to give his work extra credibility amongst antiquarians. Others argue that, whether the story of the old man was true or not, Burns had taken a traditional source, as in several other of his most famous poems (such as My love is like a red, red rose) and remoulded it into something stronger and more affecting than the original.

  If you thought ‘Rabbie Burns’ wrote ‘Auld Lang Syne’, you’d be doubly wrong. Burns never signed his name ‘Rabbie’ or ‘Robbie’ (or, indeed, ‘Bobbie’ Burns, as some North Americans insist on calling him). His signatures included ‘Robert’, ‘Robin’, ‘Rab’ – and, on at least one occasion, ‘Spunkie’.

  Another piece of Burns-related pedantry you might want to bear in mind for New Year’s Eve is this: the last line of the chorus isn’t ‘For the sake of Auld Lang Syne’. Since ‘auld lang syne’ already means ‘old times’ sake’, this is tautologous (from Greek tautos, ‘the same’, and logos, ‘word’). In Scots, ‘for the sake of Auld Lang Syne’ is the nonsensical ‘for the sake of old time’s sake’.

  The two extra notes in the line – which is what makes people feel they need to add ‘the sake of’’ – should be dealt with by singing two extra notes for each of ‘for’ and ‘old’. Try singing ‘For-or oh-old la-ang syne’ next Hogmanay and be ready with the explanation. And say we sent you.