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

by John Lloyd

  Barry was stuffed and now has pride of place in the Natural History Museum in Berne. In his honour, the best male pup from each litter at the St Bernard’s Hospice is named Barry.

  Sometimes, the Hospice’s duty to provide food and shelter for all who ask can prove troublesome. One night in 1708, Canon Vincent Camos had to provide food for over 400 travellers. To save manpower, he had a device built like a large hamster-wheel attached to a spit. Inside, a St Bernard trotted along turning the meat skewer.

  It’s estimated the dogs have made over 2,500 rescues since 1800, though none at all in the last fifty years. As a result, the monastery has decided to sell them off and replace them with helicopters.

  What goes hunk-hunk?

  An Albanian pig.

  Albanian dogs go ham ham.

  In Catalan, dogs go bup bup. The Chinese dogs say wang wang, the Greek dogs go gav gav, the Slovenians hov hov and the Ukrainians haf haf. In Iceland, it’s a voff, in Indonesia, it’s a gong gong, and in Italian, it’s a bau bau.

  Interestingly, when there is less variety in an animal’s noise, languages seem to agree more commonly on its interpretation. For example, nearly every language has a cow going moo, a cat going meow and a cuckoo going cuckoo.

  Dogs even develop regional accents, according to researchers at the Canine Behaviour Centre in Cumbria. Scouse and Scots dogs have the most distinctive accents. The Liverpudlians have higher-pitched voices, whereas the Scots have a ‘lighter tone’.

  To gather their data the Centre asked for owners and their dogs to leave messages on their answering machine; experts then compared the pitch, tone, volume and length of the sounds made by humans and dogs.

  They concluded that dogs imitate their owners in order to bond with them; the closer the bond, the closer the similarity in sound.

  Dogs also mimic their owners’ behaviour. A terrier owned by a young family will tend to be lively and difficult to control. The same dog living with an old lady will end up quiet, inactive and prone to long periods of sleep.

  What noise does the largest frog in the world make?

  None at all. Particularly not RIBBIT.

  The three-foot-long Goliath frog from central Africa is mute.

  There are 4,360 known species of frog, but only one of them goes ‘ribbit’. Each species has its own unique call. The reason everyone thinks all frogs go ‘ribbit’ is that ‘ribbit’ is the distinctive call of the Pacific tree frog (Hyla regilla). This is the frog that lives in Hollywood.

  Recorded locally, it has been plastered all over the movies for decades to enhance the atmosphere of anywhere from the Everglades to Vietnamese jungles.

  Frogs make a huge variety of noises. They croak, snore, grunt, trill, cluck, chirp, ring, whoop, whistle and growl. They make noises like cattle, squirrels and crickets. The barking tree frog yaps like a dog, the carpenter frog sounds like two carpenters hammering nails out of sync, and Fowler’s toad makes a noise like a bleating sheep with a heavy cold. The South American paradoxical frog (Pseudis paradoxa) grunts like a pig (it’s paradoxical because the tadpoles are three times larger than the frog).

  Female frogs are mostly silent. The noise is made by male frogs advertising themselves to potential mates. The loudest frog is the tiny coquí of Puerto Rico, whose Latin name, Eleutherodactylus coqui, measures more than its body. Male coquís congregate in dense forest – one to every ten square metres – and compete to see who can call loudest. From three feet away, this has been recorded at ninety-five decibels, about the same as a pneumatic drill, and close to the human pain threshold.

  Recent research has solved the riddle of how frogs avoid bursting their own eardrums. They use their lungs to hear. By absorbing up the vibrations of their own calls, the lungs equalise the internal and external pressure on the surface of the eardrums, protecting the delicate inner ear.

  Frog calls operate rather like radio stations: each species selects its own frequency. So what we hear – a forest or pond full of competing froggy racket – is much less distracting to the lady frogs, who only tune in to the calls of their own species.

  Internationally, frogs are generally regarded as making a similar sound to ducks. But not everywhere. In Thailand, for example they go ob ob, in Poland kum kum, in Argentina berp; Algerian frogs make a gar gar noise, similar to the Chinese guo guo; Bengali frogs go gangor-gangor; in Hindi frogs go me:ko:me:k-me: ko:me:k (the colon indicates that the preceding vowel is long and nasalised); Japanese frogs produce a kerokero sound and Korean frogs go gae-gool-gae-gool.

  STEPHEN Frogs actually make a huge variety of noises; they croak, snore, grunt, trill, cluck, chirp, ring, whoop, whistle, and growl.

  ALAN They also say, ‘It’s not easy being green!’

  Which owl says ‘Tu-whit, tu-whoo’?

  William Shakespeare first used the phrase ‘tu-whit, tu-who’ in his song ‘Winter’ from Love’s Labour’s Lost:

  Then nightly sings the staring owl,

  Tu-who;

  Tu-whit, tu-who: a merry note,

  While greasy Joan doth keel the pot.

  No single owl has ever gone ‘tu-whit, tu-whoo’.

  Barn owls screech. Short-eared owls are largely silent. A long-eared owl makes an extended low pitched ‘oo-oo-oo’ noise.

  The owl noise that most resembles ‘tu-whit, tu-whoo’ is made by Tawny owls. Two of them.

  The male Tawny – also known as a Brown Owl – calls with a hooting ‘hooo-hoo-hooo’, and the female replies with a hoarser ‘kew-wick’.

  What did Darwin do to dead owls?

  He ate them, although only once.

  Charles Darwin was driven by gastronomic, as well as scientific, curiosity. While half-heartedly reading Divinity at Cambridge University, he became a member of the ‘Glutton’ or ‘Gourmet Club’ which met once a week and actively sought to eat animals not normally found on menus.

  Darwin’s son, Francis, commenting on his father’s letters, noted that the Gourmet Club enjoyed, among other things, hawk and bittern, but that ‘their zeal broke down over an old brown owl,’ which they found ‘indescribable’.

  Over the years, Darwin sharpened up considerably in the academic arena and lost his faith in God, but he never lost his taste for the allure of an interesting menu.

  During the voyage of the Beagle, he ate armadillos which, he said, ‘taste & look like duck’ and a chocolate-coloured rodent that was ‘the best meat I ever tasted’ – probably an agouti, whose family name is Dasyproctidae, Greek for ‘hairy bum’. In Patagonia, he tucked into a plate of puma (the mountain lion Felis concolor) and thought it tasted rather like veal. In fact, he originally thought it was veal.

  Later, after exhaustively searching Patagonia for the Lesser Rhea, Darwin realised he had already eaten one for his Christmas dinner, while moored off Port Desire in 1833. The bird had been shot by Conrad Martens, the ship’s artist.

  Darwin assumed it was one of the common Greater Rheas, or ‘ostriches’, as he called them, and only realised his mistake when the plates were being cleared: ‘It was cooked and eaten before my memory returned. Fortunately the head, neck, legs, wings, many of the larger feathers, and a large part of the skin, had been preserved.’ He sent the bits back to the Zoological Society in London and the Rhea darwinii was named after him.

  In the Galapagos, Darwin lived on iguana (Conolophus subcristatus) and, on James Island, wolfed down a few helpings of giant tortoise. Not realising the importance of giant tortoises to his later evolutionary theory, forty-eight specimens were loaded aboard the Beagle. Darwin and his shipmates proceeded to eat them, throwing the shells overboard as they finished.

  A Phylum Feast is a shared meal using as many different species as possible, eaten by biologists on 12 February to celebrate Darwin’s birthday.

  ARTHUR What’s the most disgusting thing you’ve ever eaten, Alan?

  ALAN Ear wax.

  Can barnacles fly?

  No, although this is a relatively recent insight.

 
For hundreds of years people thought the feathery-legged shellfish were the embryos of geese. Because these geese breed in the Arctic Circle no one had seen them mate or lay eggs. When they flew south in the autumn, by complete coincidence, barnacle-laden driftwood also blew ashore. Some bright spark spotted this and made the connection.

  The Latin for Irish goose is Anser hiberniculae, Hibernia being the Roman name for Ireland. This was shortened to bernacae and by 1581 ‘barnacle’ was used for both the geese and the shellfish. The confusion was widespread and persistent.

  This caused problems for the Irish Church. Some dioceses allowed the eating of geese on fast days because they were a kind of fish, others because they came from a bird-bearing tree, and were ‘not born of the flesh’, and therefore a kind of vegetable or nut. Others didn’t, so papal intervention was required. Pope Innocent III finally banned goose-eating on fast days in 1215.

  Four hundred years later, the Royal Society still carried accounts of wood laden with ‘shells carrying the embryos of geese’ and even Linnaeus gave some credence to the legend by naming two species of barnacle Lepas anatifera (duck-bearing shellfish) and Lepas anserifera (goose-bearing shellfish).

  Abiogenesis, the idea that living creatures arise from nonliving matter, was one of the less useful legacies of Aristotle. Despite the work of seventeenth-century scientists like van Leeuwenhoek and Francesco Redi showing that all living creatures, however small, reproduce, the theory persisted well into the nineteenth century. It wasn’t until Pasteur showed that even bacteria reproduce that the idea of ‘spontaneous generation’ could finally be thrown out.

  When does ‘ring-a-ring o’ roses’ date from?

  The seventeenth century, surely? It’s about the plague: the rings of roses are skin lesions, the first signs of infection; the posies are the doomed attempts to keep the disease at bay; the sneezing is a symptom of the advancing sickness; ‘all fall down’ is death.

  Like most attempts to attribute precise historical meaning to nursery rhymes this doesn’t hold water. It was first advanced in 1961 by the popular novelist James Leasor in his racy account of life in seventeenth-century London, The Plague and the Fire. Until then, there was no obvious connection (and absolutely no evidence) that the rhyme had been sung in this form for almost 400 years as a way of preserving the trauma of the plague.

  That’s because it hadn’t. The very earliest recorded version comes from Massachusetts in 1790:

  Ring a ring a rosie

  A bottle full of posie,

  All the girls in our town

  Ring for little Josie.

  There are French, German and even Gaelic versions. Several have a second verse where everyone gets up again; others mention wedding bells, pails of water, birds, steeples, Jacks, Jills and other favourite nursery images.

  A more credible theory is that the rhyme grew out of a ring game, a staple element of the ‘play-parties’ which had grown up in Protestant communities in eighteenth-century America and Britain where dancing was forbidden.

  ‘Ring-a-ring o’ roses’ remains our most popular ring game today.

  Henry Bett in his 1924 collection of Nursery Rhymes and Tales took the view that the rhyme is of an age ‘to be measured in thousands of years, or rather it is so great it cannot be measured at all.’

  What were Nelson’s last words?

  ‘Drink, drink. Fan, fan. Rub, rub.’

  These were the absolutely last things the dying admiral said. He was hot and thirsty. His steward stood by to fan him and feed him lemonade and watered wine, while the ship’s chaplain, Dr Scott, massaged his chest to ease the pain.

  Historians are certain that Nelson did indeed say ‘Kiss me, Hardy’ rather than, as some have suggested, the more noble ‘Kismet’ (meaning fate). Eyewitnesses testified that Hardy kissed the admiral twice: once on the cheek and once on the forehead, as Nelson struggled to remain conscious.

  Nelson asked his flag-captain not to throw him overboard and to look after ‘poor Lady Hamilton’. He then uttered the immortal words. After Hardy’s first kiss he said, ‘Now I am satisfied.’ After the second, ‘Who is that?’ When he saw it was Hardy he croaked, ‘God bless you, Hardy.’

  Shortly afterwards he muttered, ‘Thank God I have done my duty’ and then ‘Drink, drink. Fan, fan. Rub, rub.’ He lost consciousness, the surgeon was called and Nelson was declared dead at 4.30 p.m.

  It seems that Nelson had deliberately decided to die at the moment of his greatest victory at Trafalgar. For a guinea each he bought four large silver stars and had them sewn into his uniform along with the glitzy Neapolitan Order of St Ferdinand. He then stood brazenly in the middle of the deck of HMS Victory till he was shot at a range of fifty feet by a French sniper.

  It was a comprehensive victory. Though 1,700 British sailors had been killed or wounded, no ships were lost. The French and Spanish fleets had been decimated: 18 ships captured or destroyed, 6,000 men killed or wounded and 20,000 taken prisoner. The risk of an invasion of Britain had passed. Nelson’s immortality was assured.

  His body was preserved on its way back from Trafalgar in a cask of brandy. Rumour had it that, on the voyage home to England, sailors drank the contents of the barrel, using tubes of macaroni as straws. This is not the case. The barrel was kept under armed guard and, according to eyewitnesses, when it was opened in Portsmouth, seemed well topped-up.

  Whether true or not, the legend stuck and the Navy adopted the phrase ‘tapping the Admiral’ for the surreptitious swigging of rum.

  STEPHEN How did Nelson keep his men’s spirits up after he died?

  JO Did he allow Hardy to use him as a ventriloquist’s dummy?

  Which eye did Nelson wear his eye-patch on?

  Neither. Nelson never wore an eye-patch.

  He didn’t wear anything at all over his damaged right eye, though he had an eye-shade built into his hat to protect his good left eye from the sun.

  Nelson didn’t have a ‘blind’ eye. His right one was badly damaged (but not blinded) at the siege of Calvi in Corsica in 1794. A French cannon ball threw sand and debris into it, but it still looked normal – so normal, in fact, he had difficulty convincing the Royal Navy he was eligible for a disability pension.

  There is no contemporary portrait of Nelson wearing an eye-patch, and despite what most people recall having ‘seen’, the Trafalgar Square column shows him without an eye-patch. It was only after his death that the eye-patch was used to add pathos to portraits.

  He used the damaged eye to his advantage. At the battle of Copenhagen in 1801, he ignored the recall signal issued by his superior Admiral Sir Hyde Parker. Nelson, who was in a much better position than Parker to see that the Danes were on the run, said to his flag-captain: ‘You know, Foley, I only have one eye – I have the right to be blind sometimes.’

  He then held his telescope to his blind eye and said: ‘I really do not see the signal!’ This is usually misquoted as: ‘I see no ships.’

  Nelson was a brilliant tactician, a charismatic leader and undeniably brave – had he been alive today he would have been eligible for at least three Victoria Crosses – but he was also vain and ruthless.

  As captain of HMS Boreas in 1784 he ordered 54 of his 122 seamen and 12 of his 20 marines flogged – 47 per cent of the men aboard. In June 1799, he treacherously executed 99 prisoners of war in Naples, after the British commander of the garrison had guaranteed their safety.

  While in Naples, Nelson began an affair with Lady Emma Hamilton, wife of the British ambassador. Her father had been a blacksmith and she a teenage prostitute in London before marrying Sir William. She was enormously fat and had a Lancashire accent. Another admirer of Nelson was Patrick Brunty, a Yorkshire parson of Irish descent, who changed his surname to Brontë after the King of Naples created Nelson Duke of Bronte. Had he not done so, his famous daughters would have been Charlotte, Emily and Anne Brunty.

  In contrast to the public grief at news of Nelson’s death, Earl St Vincent and eighteen othe
r admirals of the Royal Navy refused to attend his funeral.

  How many senses does a human being have?

  At least nine.

  The five senses we all know about – sight, hearing, taste, smell and touch – were first listed by Aristotle, who, while brilliant, often got things wrong. (For example, he taught that we thought with our hearts, that bees were created by the rotting carcasses of bulls and that flies had only four legs.)

  There are four more commonly agreed senses:

  1 Thermoception, the sense of heat (or its absence) on our skin.

  2 Equilibrioception – our sense of balance – which is determined by the fluid-containing cavities in the inner ear.

  3 Nociception – the perception of pain from the skin, joints and body organs. Oddly, this does not include the brain, which has no pain receptors at all. Headaches, regardless of the way it seems, don’t come from inside the brain.

  4 Proprioception – or ‘body awareness’. This is the unconscious knowledge of where our body parts are without being able to see or feel them. For example, close your eyes and waggle your foot in the air. You still know where it is in relation to the rest of you.