QI: The Second Book of General Ignorance

by John Lloyd

  Sir Rowland Hill also invented postcodes. He divided London into ten districts each with a compass point and a central office. The original ten areas were EC (Eastern Central), WC (Western Central), NW, N, NE, E, SE, S, SW and W. All were contained within a circle of 12 miles’ radius from central London. The present system was introduced in Croydon in 1966. It is made up of the outward code (e.g. OX7 – needed to sort from one town to another) and the inward code (e.g. 4DB – required for sorting within the town).

  The first letterboxes were set up in Jersey, thanks to the novelist Anthony Trollope (1815–82). Hill sent Trollope to the Channel Islands in 1852 to see how best to collect mail on the islands, given the unpredictable sailing times of the Royal Mail packet boats. Trollope suggested using a ‘letter-receiving pillar’ that could be picked up whenever there was a sailing. The first box, erected in November 1852, was olive green. It worked so well that the Post Office rolled them out across the nation. By 1874 so many people had walked straight into the green boxes that red was settled on as a better choice. The Royal Mail still has a trademark on the colour ‘pillar box red’.

  STEPHEN Do you know Jimmy Tarbuck? He was doing one of those Royal Command performances, and as he was going off, he looked up into the royal box and said, ‘Ooh, that reminds me. I must buy a stamp.’

  When did women first show cleavage?

  Not until 1946.

  Until then cleavage was a word used exclusively by geologists to describe the way a rock or crystal splits.

  In the 1940s, the British film studio Gainsborough Pictures produced a series of raunchy bodice-rippers collectively known as the ‘Gainsborough Gothics’. The Wicked Lady (1945) was an eighteenth-century tale of a husband-murdering, society-beauty-cum-highwaywoman, starring Margaret Lockwood (then Britain’s most bankable female star), James Mason and Patricia Roc. It was a huge hit in Britain, but the revealing costumes caused problems in the USA.

  The Motion Picture Production Code Administration, popularly known as The Hays Code, was a voluntary system of movie censorship introduced in 1930 by Will Hays (1879–1954), the US Postmaster General. Its job was to spell out what was and wasn’t acceptable to show on the screen. In 1945 it changed its name to The Motion Picture Association of America. The MPAA is still with us today: it’s the body responsible for rating films as PG, PG-13, R and so forth.

  When The Wicked Lady hit the USA, the MPAA demanded changes, but it seems they were overcome by coyness. They hid their embarrassment by using a dry geological term as a euphemism for ‘the shadowed depression dividing an actress’s bosom into two distinct sections’.

  In 1946 Time magazine picked up the word when it reported:

  Low-cut Restoration costumes worn by the Misses Lockwood and Roc display too much ‘cleavage’. The British, who have always considered bare legs more sexy than half-bare breasts, are resentfully re-shooting several costly scenes.

  A new usage was born. Until the end of the Second World War, the partial exposure of a woman’s breasts was covered by the French term décolletage, first recorded in English in 1894 and derived from décolleté, ‘low-necked’ (1831), from the verb décolleter, ‘to bare the neck and shoulders’.

  It’s arguable that décolletage is still the prettiest way of putting it. In Middle English the ‘cleavage’ was bluntly called ‘the slot’ and, today, the best the International Federation of Associations of Anatomists can manage is the intermammary cleft or intermammary sulcus (sulcus is the Latin for ‘fold’ or ‘furrow’).

  So it seems cleavage is here to stay: and the way it’s used is proliferating. A lateral view of breasts is ‘side cleavage’. A glimpse beneath is ‘neathage’ or ‘Australian cleavage’. Bottom cleavage – a visible buttock cleft – has been known as ‘builder’s bum’ since 1988. Toe cleavage, the partial exposure of toes by ‘low-cut’ shoes, is considered both sexy and stylish. According to shoe guru Manolo Blahnik, ‘The secret of toe cleavage, a very important part of the sexuality of the shoe, is that you must only show the first two cracks.’

  The back of a thong peeking over the top of a pair of jeans (which implies cleavage without revealing it) is called a ‘whale-tail’. In 2005 the American Dialect Society voted it the most creative new word of the year.

  What effect does testosterone have on men?

  Contrary to popular belief, it’s a lack of testosterone that makes people aggressive; if anything, surplus testosterone seems to make them friendlier.

  Both men and women make testosterone, though the levels in women are, of course, significantly lower. It helps grow muscle mass, increases bone density and prevents osteoporosis.

  In 2009 Ernst Fehr of the University of Zurich gave 120 women either testosterone pills or placebos, and then involved them in a role-playing situation. The mythic reputation of testosterone is so powerful that those women who thought they had been given it acted aggressively and selfishly (even if they’d actually received the placebo), whereas those who really did get testosterone behaved more fairly and were better at interacting socially, whether they believed they had received the pill or not.

  Testosterone is linked to aggression in animals, so until very recently it was assumed to have a similar effect on humans. This seems not to be the case. It appears that low testosterone levels are more likely to cause mood disorders and aggression. Studies into testosterone have only been going on for ten years, so its function is not yet fully understood. Oddly, in the first few weeks of life, baby boys are pumped full of as much testosterone as they’ll have in their teens, though this reduces to barely detectable levels by four to six months.

  In 2004 Donatella Marazziti and Domenico Canale of the University of Pisa measured testosterone levels in two groups, each composed of twelve men and twelve women. The ‘Love Group’ consisted of people who had fallen in love in the previous six months, and the ‘Control Group’ were either single or in stable long-term relationships. The study found that men from the Love Group had lower levels of testosterone than men in the Control Group, while women from the Love Group had higher testosterone levels than their Control Group counterparts. The researchers theorised that, in the falling-in-love stage of a relationship, this apparent balancing act may serve to temporarily eliminate or reduce emotional differences between the sexes.

  Testosterone is a hormone. Hormones (from the Greek word for ‘impulse’ or ‘attack’) are chemicals released by glands in one part of the body that use the bloodstream to transport messages to, and have an effect on, cells elsewhere.

  Progesterone, a hormone associated with pregnant women, is also present in both willow trees and yams, which suggests it has a role that predates the evolution of modern animals.

  Oxytocin is a hormone associated with maternal bonding, affectionately referred to by biologists as ‘the cuddle chemical’. It can reduce fear, anxiety and inhibitions, and promotes social and sexual bonding as well as parenting. Neuroeconomists (who combine psychology, economics and neuroscience to study how decisions are made) have experimented on subjects participating in a game called ‘Investor’. They found that a squirt of oxytocin up the nose doubled levels of trust among players.

  After a disaster, what’s the greatest threat to the water supply?

  No, we thought that as well – but it’s not the dead bodies. It’s the survivors.

  The World Health Organization (WHO) states unequivocally:

  It is important to stress that the belief that cholera epidemics are caused by dead bodies after disasters, whether natural or man-made, is false.

  Cholera is an acute diarrhoeal infection, caused by the bacterium Vibrio cholerae. It is transmitted from infected faeces to the mouth, or by food or water that are contaminated. It kills through dehydration and kidney failure. In Europe in the nineteenth century, cholera was so common that it proved a great boon to unscrupulous heirs. People poisoned by means of small quantities of arsenic – known as ‘inheritance powder’ – were often assumed to have died of cholera, which
has similar symptoms.

  It can take mere hours to incubate – which is why it spreads so rapidly, overwhelming attempts to contain it – and can kill a healthy adult within a day. Although around 75 per cent of people infected with cholera don’t develop symptoms, the germs can be present in their faeces for up to a fortnight, thus helping to spread the disease. People with damaged immune systems – through malnutrition, for instance, or HIV – are the most likely to die.

  Most horribly of all, the perfect situation for cholera to spread is a refugee camp, where survivors of disasters are huddled together with inadequate supplies of clean water, and where human waste isn’t safely processed. The same applies to a city where the infrastructure has been damaged by, say, an earthquake, a flood, or a ‘humane intervention’ with so-called ‘smart bombs’.

  Dead bodies don’t come into it: cholera pathogens in a corpse rapidly become harmless. Yet the myth that the disease is caused by ‘bodies piling up’ is almost universally believed, with even the most respectable news outlets repeating it every time there’s an outbreak of cholera following a disaster.

  Perhaps the greatest tragedy – or disgrace, depending on your point of view – is that cholera is far from incurable. Effective treatment – a solution of sugar and salts taken by mouth called oral rehydration – is simple and cheap. Given promptly, it saves the lives of more than 99 per cent of sufferers. And yet the WHO estimates that 120,000 people die of cholera every year.

  Not that we want to alarm you, but we feel you ought to know: the seventh cholera pandemic in history began in Indonesia in 1961 – and it’s still going on, having spread through Asia, Europe and Africa. In 1991 it reached Latin America – which hadn’t seen cholera for more than a century. It is, by some margin, the longest of the cholera pandemics so far, probably because modern transport spreads infected people and foodstuffs with such rapid efficiency.

  A pandemic is a worldwide epidemic. Pandemics generally end when there aren’t enough people left to keep them going – because they’ve developed immunities, or been vaccinated, or (if you’ll pardon the expression) died.

  What positive effect did the Great Fire of London have?

  It gave Sir Christopher Wren the opportunity to rebuild St Paul’s Cathedral. What it didn’t do was clear the city of plague.

  No one knows what stopped the Great Plague of 1665–66, but despite what generations of schoolchildren have been taught, it definitely wasn’t the Great Fire of September 1666.

  The plague flared up in early 1665, probably carried on ships bringing cotton from Amsterdam. It was the first major outbreak in thirty years but, by the beginning of the following year, it had already begun to die out. In the last week of February 1666 there were only forty-two plague deaths reported in London, compared to more than 8,000 in each week of September 1665. The king had returned to London on 1 February 1666. Although it killed an estimated 100,000 people (20 per cent of London’s population), the plague crisis was over six months before the Great Fire in September.

  Also, the areas of London that burned down in the fire – the City, mainly, where 80 per cent of property was destroyed – were not the areas where the plague had been at its worst, which were the suburbs to the north, south and east.

  No one really knows why the plague stopped. Perhaps it was spontaneous. That’s how epidemics often end: by burning themselves out because they spread so quickly, and have such a high mortality rate, that they have nowhere left to go. It’s one of the reasons the Ebola virus hasn’t killed more people in Africa: a high (99 per cent) mortality rate means a quicker burn out.

  Another possible reason for the disappearance of the plague in London was that the ancient method of barring the houses of known victims was policed much more aggressively. Doors were locked from the outside for twenty to twenty-eight days and guarded by watchmen. It’s a fate that doesn’t bear thinking about.

  Even more difficult to comprehend is the story of the small hamlet of Eyam in Derbyshire. In September 1665 a bundle of infected cloth arrived from London for the local tailor. He was dead within a week. As the plague began to rage, the villagers (led by the Anglican vicar and the Puritan minister) voluntarily cut themselves off from the rest of the world so that it wouldn’t spread elsewhere. When the first visitors were finally allowed to enter a year later, they found that three-quarters of the inhabitants were dead.

  The disease had struck viciously, but apparently at random. Elizabeth Howe never became ill, despite the fact that she had buried her husband and their six children. Another survivor, against all probability, was the man who helped her do it – Marshall Howe, the unofficial local gravedigger.

  Can anything live forever?

  Yes.

  Introducing the Immortal jellyfish …

  The adult form of the species Turritopsis nutricula looks like any other small jellyfish. It has a transparent bell-like body, about 5 millimetres (⅕ inch) wide, fringed with eighty or so stinging tentacles. Inside is a bright red stomach, which forms the shape of a cross when seen from above.

  Like most of the Cnidaria family (from knide, Greek for ‘stinging nettle’), the tiny Turritopsis is predatory, using its tentacles to first stun plankton and then waft them up through its mouth-cum-anus. The females squeeze their eggs out through the same passage, after which the males spray them with sperm. The fertilised eggs fall to the ocean floor where each one attaches itself to a rock and starts growing into what looks like a tiny sea anemone: a stalk with tentacles called a polyp (from the Greek poly ‘many’ and pous ‘foot’).

  Eventually these polyps form buds that break off into minute adult jellyfish – and the whole process starts all over again.

  Reproduction by budding occurs in thousands of species – including sponges, hydras and starfish – and has gone on with few modifications for half a billion years. What makes Turritopsis nutricula so special is that it has evolved a skill unmatched, not just by other jellyfish, but by any other living organism.

  Once the adult Turritopsis have reproduced, they don’t die but transform themselves back into their juvenile polyp state. Their tentacles retract, their bodies shrink, and they sink to the ocean floor to restart the cycle. Their adult cells – even their eggs and sperm – melt into simpler forms of themselves, and the whole organism becomes ‘young’ again.

  Newts and salamanders can grow new limbs using this cell reversal process, but no other creature enjoys an entire second childhood. Among laboratory samples, all the adult Turritopsis observed, both male and female, regularly undergo this change. And not just once: they can do it over and over again.

  So although many Turritopsis succumb to predators or to disease, if left to their own devices, they never die. And, because individual specimens haven’t been studied for long enough, we have no idea how old some of them may already be. What we do know is that, in recent years, they have spread out from their original home in the Caribbean to all the oceans of the world, carried in the ballast water discharged by ships.

  It’s an extraordinary thought. All other living things on earth are programmed to die. What does the future hold for a species that isn’t?

  A life-form in which each individual has the potential to found colony upon colony of fellow immortals …

  THE USES OF INTERESTINGNESS

  There are books in which the footnotes, or the comments scrawled by some reader’s hand in the margin, are more interesting than the text. The world is one of those books.

  GEORGE SANTAYANA (1863–1952)

  We think all books, even the ones that are handsomely bound and come with an index, are still works in progress. If the pursuit of interestingness has taught us anything it is that there is no final word on any subject. For this reason we encourage you to scrawl furiously in the margins of this book or, better still, visit our website and pick up the conversation with us there. The address is www.qi.com/generalignorance. We’ll happily share our sources and correct any errors we have made (and there are b
ound to be some) in future editions.

  QI books are the product of long months of research by many people. The one you hold in your hands would not have happened without the first-class input of James Harkin, Mat Coward and Andy Murray, who researched and wrote the early drafts of many of the questions. They, in turn, relied on the work of the extended Elven family: Piers Fletcher and Justin Pollard (QI’s Producer and Associate Producer respectively), Molly Oldfield, Arron Ferster, Will Bowen, Dan Kieran and the members of the QI Talkboard.

  In the fourth century BC, Euripides, the great Athenian playwright, wrote that ‘the language of truth is simple’. He didn’t say it was easy. What success we have had in making complicated things seem simpler is due to the clear-sighted editing of Sarah Lloyd.

  As for book-making, no one does it better than the team at Faber. Special thanks must go, once more, to Stephen Page, Julian Loose, Dave Watkins, Eleanor Crow, Hannah Griffiths and Paula Turner.

  In a low moment the Victorian aesthete, John Ruskin, once complained: ‘How long most people would look at the best book before they would give the price of a large turbot for it?’ It’s a good question. As we write, the wholesale price of turbot is about £9 per kilogram. We will make no further claims, except to say interestingness lasts longer and contains no bones.

  The Two Johns,

  Oxford

  INDEX

  absinthe 1, 2