QI: The Second Book of General Ignorance

by John Lloyd

  STEPHEN What does it mean, Auld Lang Syne?

  DAVID TENNANT Old long remembrance.

  BILL BAILEY Old long signs …

  Which writer introduced the most words into the English language?

  Not Shakespeare, but Milton.

  According to Gavin Alexander of Cambridge University, who has trawled the entire Oxford English Dictionary, John Milton (1608–74) is responsible for introducing 630 words to the English language, beating Ben Jonson with 558 and John Donne with 342 – all of them way ahead of Shakespeare, who notches up a disappointing 229. Milton’s neologisms include pandemonium, debauchery, terrific, fragrance, lovelorn and healthy.

  Not that we can say for sure that these any of these authors actually ‘invented’ all these words; their work simply contains the first recorded use, and famous writers are much more likely to be read than obscure ones. If Milton or Shakespeare had filled their books with hundreds of completely new words, their readers and audiences would have struggled to understand them.

  But English in the seventeenth century was in a state of creative expansion, rapidly overtaking Latin as the language of culture and science. All you had to do was find a reasonably familiar word in French or Latin and anglicise it: most educated people would quickly guess the meaning. It didn’t always work, however. For example, Milton’s intervolve (‘to wind within each other’) and opiniastrous (‘opinionated’) never quite caught on.

  Readers who struggled with new vocabulary could turn to Robert Cawdrey’s Table Alphabeticall. Published in 1604, it is generally considered the first English dictionary – although it isn’t much more than a list of 3,000 ‘hard usual English wordes, borrowed from the Hebrew, Greeke, Latine, or French’.

  English had to wait more than 150 years to get the dictionary it deserved. Despite being half-deaf, blind in one eye, scarred from scrofula, prone to melancholy and suffering from Tourette’s syndrome, Samuel Johnson (1709–84) managed to write 42,773 definitions in nine years, assisted by six copyists. The equivalent French Dictionary took forty scholars fifty-five years.

  Johnson’s Dictionary of the English Language was published in 1755 and cost £4 10 shillings a copy (equivalent to £725 today). It didn’t make him rich (it sold 6,000 copies in its first thirty years) but it did make him famous: for the next two centuries it was simply referred to as ‘the Dictionary’.

  Johnson’s lexicographical standards remained unmatched until the Oxford English Dictionary appeared in the 1880s. His definitions were so thorough that 1,700 of them were carried over into the first edition of the OED. On the other hand, he had no words beginning with X and his etymologies were often dodgy (‘May not spider be spy dor, the insect that watches the dor?’).

  One of the many pleasures of Johnson’s Dictionary is discovering obsolete words ripe for revival. For example: bibacious (addicted to binge drinking); feculent (foul or grimy); grum (bad tempered); keck (to heave the stomach as if about to vomit); lusk (idle or worthless) and tonguepad (a great talker).

  What were Richard III’s last words?

  ‘A horse, a horse, my kingdom for a horse’ is one of the best-known lines in English literature, but the real Richard III never uttered them. His last words are among the few things about the battle of Bosworth Field in 1485 that were accurately recorded. They were ‘Treason, Treason, Treason!’ It was the last time an English king died in battle and it ended the Wars of the Roses in which two branches of the Plantagenet family – the Yorkists and the Lancastrians – effectively snuffed one another out, leading to the founding of a new ruling dynasty, the Tudors.

  The last Lancastrian king was Henry VI. When his son Edward was killed at the battle of Tewkesbury in 1471, the Yorkists resumed power under Edward IV – followed by his son Edward V, then Edward IV’s brother Richard III.

  As a Lancastrian with a tenuous claim to the throne, Henry Tudor, Earl of Richmond, had spent much his life in exile. His arrival at the Welsh port of Milford Haven in August 1485 was at the urging of older exiled Lancastrians like John de Vere, Earl of Oxford, who sensed a chance of turning the tide in their favour with a new candidate for king. When Henry reached Bosworth in Leicestershire he had fewer than 1,000 Englishmen in his army. Most of his troops were French mercenaries or Welshmen. He’d never fought in a battle before, so he left the strategy to his generals.

  What he was good at was marketing. After he’d won, he set about rewriting history, painting Bosworth Field as a contest between good and evil: the young idealistic moderniser versus a bitter, misshapen representative of a corrupt regime. This was so successful that definite facts about the battle are scarce. We don’t even know where it was fought. In 2009 archaeological evidence suggested it was probably 2 miles south of the present official site. What we do know is that Richard became detached from his army and was surrounded by Henry’s Welsh bodyguards. His supposed allies, Thomas Stanley, Earl of Derby, and his brother Sir William Stanley, chose this moment to switch sides. Hence the king’s cry of: ‘Treason, Treason, Treason!’ as he was skewered by a Welsh poleaxe. Even Henry’s official historian was impressed: ‘King Richard, alone, was killed fighting manfully in the thickest press of his enemies.’

  Richard, at thirty-two, was only four years older than Henry. The idea that he was a hunchback came from John Rouse’s Historia Regius Angliae (1491), which merely said he had ‘uneven shoulders’. He was certainly short but, according to contemporaries, he was good-looking with a strong, sporting physique. He wore heavy armour: an impossible feat for someone with a misshapen back.

  Shakespeare was a playwright, not a historian. One of his main sources was the Tudor grandee, Sir Thomas More (1478–1535), who described Richard as ‘ill featured of limbs, crook backed, hard favored of visage, malicious, wrathful, envious, from before his birth ever forward’. By no means everyone has bought into this enduring Tudor propaganda. As early as 1813 a plaque appeared at Bosworth putting the alternative version: ‘Near this spot, on August 22nd 1485, King Richard III fell fighting gallantly in defence of his realm & his crown against the usurper Henry Tudor.’

  When does ‘i’ come before ‘e’?

  The ‘i before e except after c’ rule was abolished in 2009.

  The old mnemonic was taught to British schoolchildren for generations, but Support for Spelling, a teaching aid published in 2009 as part of the British government’s National Primary Strategy, now advises: ‘The “i before e” rule is not worth teaching. It applies only to words in which the ‘ie’ or ‘ei’ stand for a clear ‘ee’ sound, so it is easier to learn the specific words.’

  In fact, even with ‘ee’ sounds, there are still plenty of exceptions owing to the proliferation of foreign words in English. Caffeine, weird and Madeira all break the rule in one direction; species, concierge and hacienda in the other. Judging solely by the list of official Scrabble words, it turns out that the ‘i before e except after c’ rule is twenty-one times more likely to be wrong than right. No wonder the government dropped it.

  English spelling is hellishly complicated. Many people, particularly in America, have tried to simplify it. In 1768, Benjamin Franklin published a phonetic alfabet containing all the familiar letters except c, j, q, w, x and y, and adding six new letters for specific sounds.

  Melville Dewey (1851–1931), the inventor of the Dewey Decimal library system, changed the spelling of his Christian name to Melvil and toyed with adapting his surname to Dui. Late in life, he founded a health club in Florida where he put his spelling reforms into action. At one dinner in 1927 the menu featured Hadok, Poted Beef with Noodles and Parsli & Masht Potato with Letis.

  George Bernard Shaw was another passionate advocate of spelling reform, leaving money in his will for a competition to create an easier system. The most extreme example of the way English doesn’t always sound the way it’s written (although Shaw himself never used it) is the made-up word ghoti.

  In theory, this could be pronounced ‘fish’, using ‘gh’ as in rough, ‘o�
� as in women, and ‘ti’ as in mention.

  In the USA Mark Twain helped draft the Simplified Spelling Board’s list of 300 recommended changes, which was accepted in principle by President Theodore Roosevelt in 1906 but rejected by Congress. Nevertheless, many of the simpler spellings did catch on, such as color, defense, mold and sulfate. Others like profest (professed), mixt (mixed) and altho didn’t make the cut.

  In the UK the Spelling Reform Bill passed its second reading by 65 votes to 53 in 1953 but, after opposition from the House of Lords, it was withdrawn with assurances from the Minister of Education that research would be undertaken into the impacts and benefits of such a change.

  The research confirmed the fundamental problem with all new language systems: that, unless they are adopted wholesale, by everyone at once, they lead to more confusion than clarity. The Spelling Reform Bill, like the ‘i before e’ rule, was relegated to the mists of history.

  How many letters are there in Llanfairpwllgwyngyllgogerychwyrndrobwll-llantysiliogogogoch?

  Admittedly, it looks like fifty-eight, but there are actually only fifty-one. Both ll and ch count as single letters in Welsh – along with dd, ff, ng, ph, rh and th. They’re called digraphs: two consonants joined together to form a single sound.

  Not that it matters, as only tourists (and tourist brochures) call it Llanfairpwllgwyngyllgogerychwyrndrobwll-llantysiliogogogoch. The village on the island of Anglesey, famous for having the longest officially recognised place name in the UK, is known locally as Llanfair. There are a lot of Llanfairs in Wales (it means ‘church of St Mary’), so it’s sometimes called Llanfairpwll or Llanfair PG, to distinguish it from the others.

  Signposts opt for Llanfairpwllgwyngyll, while the Ordnance Survey map prefers Llanfair Pwllgwyngyll. Even the full name is seen with several variants of spelling, and sometimes with a hyphen between drobwll and llan. The English translation of the full name is: ‘The church of St Mary in the hollow of white hazel trees near the rapid whirlpool by St Tysilio’s of the red cave.’

  When the first railway station on Anglesey was opened at Llanfair, local businessmen looked for a way to turn the unremarkable former fishing village into a tourist destination and came up with the idea of creating the longest station sign in Britain, made up of the existing names of the village, a nearby hamlet and a local whirlpool.

  The local council adopted the imaginary place name, jokingly known as ‘The Englishman’s Cure for Lockjaw’, in 1860. It was a hugely successful publicity stunt. A century and a half later, visitors still come to be photographed beside the station sign and to buy elongated souvenir platform-tickets. The village website also has the world’s longest domain name. Llanfair PG has one other claim to immortality: it’s the home of the first British branch of the Women’s Institute (a Canadian invention), which opened in 1915.

  Llanfair PG’s full name is the longest in Europe, but the world record is held by the official name for Bangkok. This begins Krung-Thep-Mahanakhon … and stretches for 167 characters. In second place is a hill in Hawke’s Bay, New Zealand, which comes in three lengths of 85, 92 and 105 characters. The most involved of these is: Taumata-whakatangihanga-koauau-o-Tamatea-haumai-tawhiti-ure-haea-turi-pukaka-piki-maunga-horonuku-pokai-whenua-ki-tana-tahu. Translated from the Maori it means, ‘The hill of the flute playing by Tamatea to his beloved (he who was blown hither from afar, had a slit penis, grazed his knees climbing mountains, fell on the earth and encircled the land). Understandably, the locals just call it Taumata.

  England’s longest place name is only eighteen letters long. Blakehopeburnhaugh (pronounced Black-op-bun-or) in Northumberland combines elements of Middle English (blake, ‘black’), Old English (hope, ‘valley’, burn, ‘stream’) and Old Norse (haugh, ‘flat riverside land’).

  What’s the proper name for the loo?

  There isn’t one.

  The ‘smallest room in the house’ doesn’t have a formal, standard, non-slang name. Whatever you choose to call it, you’re using either a euphemism (from the Greek euphemizein, ‘to speak nicely’, eu, ‘well’ or ‘good’) or a cacophemism (from its Greek opposite kakos, ‘bad’). In other words, you are intentionally using either a more polite or a ruder word for what you want to get across.

  Lavatory comes from the Latin lavatorium, ‘place for washing’. A toilette was originally a lady’s dressing table – from toile, the ‘cloth’ laid across her shoulders when her hair was cut. By extension, the room became her chambre de toilette, in which she might attend to all manner of private functions.

  No one knows where the word ‘loo’ originated, but it’s probably a corruption of the French l’eau, ‘water’, or lieu, ‘place’. Most English terms, whether coy, bawdy or comical, are euphemisms – such as restroom, washroom, bathroom, convenience, WC, comfort station, bog, chapel of ease, jakes, john, khazi, thunderbox, the necessary house, lavvy, the lavabo and ‘the facilities’. In Edward Albee’s play Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf (1962), a dinner-party guest asks if she may powder her nose, to which the host replies, ‘Martha, won’t you show her where we keep the euphemism?’

  This is a perfect demonstration of what linguist Stephen Pinker has called the ‘euphemism treadmill’, whereby one generation’s polite term begins to attract the negative connotations of the object (or place) it is trying to hide, requiring a new euphemism to replace it. Toilet becomes lavatory, lavatory becomes WC, WC becomes restroom and so on.

  Fashions change. Plain speaking about defecation and urination hasn’t always been considered so ill-mannered. A respectable person in the first half of the eighteenth century might, without giving any offence, announce that they were going out to have a piss in the shithouse. But, unlike body parts, where we can sidestep both slang and euphemism by reverting to classical terminology – penis, vagina, anus – we have never had a single, universally accepted term to describe the place where we go when we ask ‘to be excused’.

  This is an extraordinary achievement, given that every single one of us goes there on average 2,500 times a year.

  STEPHEN In Britain in 1994, you might be interested to know, 476 people were injured while on the lavatory. There you are. Underwear hurt eleven people.

  ALAN How many of those people were drunk?

  How much does your handwriting tell about you?

  It reveals who you are, but not what you’re like.

  We all find it easy to recognise the handwriting of someone we know well: the shape, size and slope of the letters are remarkably consistent. Graphology (from the Greek graphein, ‘to write’, and logos, ‘study’ from its original meaning, ‘word’) makes a much broader claim: that a person’s character can be predicted from their handwriting.

  For some reason, it’s an appealing idea, but it’s as inaccurate as judging a book by its cover, or a person’s character from their clothes. All research studies into graphology have shown that it’s much less useful in predicting a candidate’s personality than, say, psychometric tests like the Meyers-Briggs Type Indicator, which uses ninety-three multiple-choice questions.

  For this reason, the British Psychological Society ranks graphology alongside astrology as possessing ‘zero validity’. The only reliable results handwriting tests can produce are to show whether you are male or female or have suicidal tendencies. Research published in the International Journal of Clinical Practice in 2010 confirmed that when graphological analysis was conducted on a group of forty people who had attempted suicide against a control group who hadn’t, the graphological results clearly identified those ‘at risk’.

  There’s a difference between using graphology to detect mental illness and employing it to see if someone has a talent for sales, or is ‘trusting’ or ‘non-trusting’. Despite this, some 3,000 UK businesses regularly use graphology to vet potential employees. The suspicion is that this is used as a cover for illegal discrimination as regards a candidate’s age, sex, race or faith. Consequently, in the US it’s against the law to use graphology in job in
terviews. Such tests may be used to authenticate handwriting (when looking for forged signatures) but not to try to ascertain the physical or mental condition of the writer.

  In its more reliable role of identifying someone, it was handwriting analysis that sent Al Capone (1899–1947) to prison. Police accountant Frank J. Wilson (1887–1970) found three ledgers recording the business of an illegal gambling operation. The profits were recorded as going, in part, to a man named as ‘A’ or ‘Al’. In an attempt to prove this was Al Capone, over three weeks Wilson collected handwriting samples of every one of Capone’s known associates in Chicago. Finally he found a deposit slip from a bank which matched the handwriting in the ledger. Wilson personally traced the bookkeeper who had written the ledgers (a man named Louis Shumway) to a dog track in Miami, and persuaded him to testify against Capone in return for immunity.

  The highwayman Dick Turpin (1705–39) was also caught thanks to his handwriting. While in prison under the false name John Palmer he wrote to his brother-in-law asking for help. His brother-in-law refused to pay the sixpence due on the letter and it was returned to the local post office, where the postmaster – Turpin’s old schoolmaster – recognised his handwriting. His identity was revealed and he was publicly hanged in York six weeks later.

  How can you tell if someone’s pleased to see you?