No Such Thing As A Fish - 9: No Such Thing As A Word For 'Silent Fart'

Episode Date: May 2, 2014

Episode 9: This week in the QI Office Dan Schreiber (@schreiberland), James Harkin (@eggshaped), Andrew Hunter Murray (@andrewhunterm) and Anna Ptaszynski (@nosuchthing) discuss wig theft, un-claimed elephant sperm, hermits at the bottom of the garden & more...

We run it on QI a few years ago, which was, there's no such thing as a fish. There's no such thing as a fish. No, seriously, it's in the Oxford Dictionary of Underwater Life. It says it right there, first paragraph, no such thing as a fish. Hello, and welcome to another edition of No Such Thing as a Fish, a weekly podcast coming to you from the QI offices in Covent Garden. My name is Dan Shriver. I'm sitting here with three other QI elves, James Harkin, Anna Chazinski, and Andy Murray. And once again, we've gathered round the microphones to share our favorite facts

from the last seven days. So, in no particular order, here we go. James, let's begin with you. Okay, yep. My fact this week is it was fashionable in New York at the end of the 19th century for ladies to wear live lizards as brooches. Wow. Nice. With a pin on them? Well, actually with a small leash, it seems. This was in an article in the Archive of the New York Times about the RSPCA complaining about it. I'm surprised. Yeah, I mean, let me read you a few little bits. The lizards have been sold as chameleons. They were fastened to cushions by means of tiny collars and chains, and they have become quite a play thing with many people. Sometimes

they were worn in the streets by women who had them attached to their bodices. It doesn't really give any more information than that. And was this popular? Did a lot of people do it? I imagine it didn't last for very long because the RSPCA and the New York Times got involved. Are there any other animals that we've known to have worn? Yes, which really recently, maybe you saw this as well, and I don't really know why I don't remember this. Apparently in 2006 there was a fashion designer who designed cockroach brooches. I think mainly because of the rhyming thing, but they became quite a popular thing, and there was a live cockroach on approach. And so they were decorated with like ornate jewellery and painted golden stuff, and apparently they could last about up to a year.

And they just crawl around you. So I think Paris Hilton got one. Women used to keep the small pets in their muffs. They would decorate their muffs with jewels, and they would put pets in there. And for a while it was like a status symbol. The larger your muff was, the more rich you were. So if you get like a horse in there, a 16-hander, then, you know, that's impressive. People are going, she must be a princess or something. She has a muff that fits a horse in. People would be impressed, yes? There was another live animal that people used. Apparently in the Middle Ages, one recommended cure for the plague was strapping a live chicken around the buboes on your body. Oh yeah? That work? No, that's why a third of Europe died. I find that amazing.

They used to think that if you got bitten by a snake, that if you put a live pigeon on the bite at the bottom of a pigeon, it would suck out the venom. That's right. Yeah, and you would consistently use more and more pigeons until the final anus-sucking pigeon didn't die and then you knew you got the poison out. I have a very dim memory of people in China, a thousand or so years ago, keeping something, a little insect in a cage around their necks, which had drunk their lover's blood. Yeah, that would happen in Europe with fleas. Fleas, that's it, but I can't imagine a cage small enough to keep a flea in and stop it from escaping. There's a poem by John Dunn called The Flea, which is talking about how, you know, the flea's bitten her, now it's bitten him

and he's saying, oh, in that romantic, you know, it's got both of us mingled in it. It's a good poem. They all died of the plague soon after that. Which isn't caused by rats, again, right? I know this always comes around. Well, just on that subject of rats and, you know, us wearing lizards, there's a nice little mouse that we've been giving back to, which is a mouse that's going kind of, it's on the endangered list, and all the used balls from Wimbledon have been donated as little houses for these mice. That's very nice. Yeah. Eurasian harvest mice. That's it. Yeah, so sweet. We should put a picture up on the website of them in these little homes. I thought you were going to say the reverse of the lizard thing, is there's an animal that's been wearing a human in some way?

Is that what horses claim they're doing? Yeah, the fashion for humans in tight trousers and long boots remains. I do really like the origin of fashions that are quite normal, though. Like, I didn't know, you know, how people used to wear wigs from the 17th century until the 19th century. That was because Louis XIII had male pattern baldness, and so he insisted on wearing wigs all the time to conceal that. They used to wear really massive wigs, didn't they? Like, really ridiculous with things in the wigs, like a ship in a full sail or a windmill with farm animals around it, and this massive wig. Yeah. Sometimes if there was something would happen in the news, they would wear a wig which reflected what was happening in the news at the time.

No. Yeah. And also, they were quite expensive, these wigs. Like, if you got a really good one, they were really status symbols, and wig theft became a bit of a problem. What they would have is you would walk across, if you were a thief, you'd walk across with a basket, and there'd be a young child inside the basket, and then you would distract him for some reason, and then the child would pop out, grab the wig, pop back in into the basket, and you'd run off. Oh, how many of those awkward moments were there from cartoons where the children grabbed someone's hair and it turned out not to be a wig. And people going, that's definitely my mate, Hindenburg Crash, that you're wearing on your head. One more on wig theft, someone, a lot of people in the 1910s and 1920s,

there were bands on people bobbing their hair, whether that was locally enforced, there weren't any governmental bands on it, but it was very discouraged, it was seen as being far too racy, and at least one girl blamed her haircut on what they called Jack the Clipper, as in someone, someone just leaned out and chopped my hair, so a girl in the Bronx said that a highwayman had grabbed her and cut her hair off. That sounds like someone where they thought of the name of the criminal before. Just speaking of things, a band, one of my all-time favorite QI facts, this is just a sentence, in 1367 the French king, Charles V, prohibited the wearing of shoes shaped like penises. Presumably because they were uncomfortable. What happened was they would, the front of the

shoe would go very long, and then they got longer and longer and longer, and then they got more sticky upy and more sticky upy because it became more fashionable, and then people thought, oh, something long and sticky upy, why don't we make it into a penis, and they did that, and then they had to ban it. It's just one of my all-time favorite facts. Lady Gaga would not have fit in in that court. Okay, time for fact number two, this one's mine, and my fact this week is that the great code breaker, Alan Shuring, lost his buried treasure when he couldn't crack his own code. So Alan Shuring, for those I guess who don't quite know who he is, he is a great mathematician and code breaker from Bletchley Park. He was very instrumental in helping to crack things

like the enigma codes, and isn't he the, he's known as the father of modern computing. The Turing test is named after him. So this is what happened, this was in 1940, Alan Shuring got really scared of a potential German invasion, so he converted all of his life savings into two bars of silver, which at the time were worth about 250 pounds. He wheeled them to some woods near Schenle, and he buried them both under the forest floor, one of them under the forest floor, one under a bridge by a bed of a stream. He then made a code of where he buried it, and then he made a code of the code, and no one knows exactly how many codes are the codes of the codes that he made, but he made a number so that no one... Do we have the codes? No.

Because I imagine it would be X marks the spot, X equals Y. So five years later, he returns with a metal detector in hand, and he goes to where he buried them, and he couldn't crack his own codes, and he kept trying and kept trying and kept trying. He did three expeditions to try and find his buried treasure, and each time he couldn't do it, and on top of it, in those five years the landscape had changed. Someone had knocked down the bridge where he put it near the bed of the stream, and so he never found it, and so unless someone has found it and not told anyone about it, Alan Shuring's silver horde is still buried somewhere in Schenle. But we don't know what his code was, do we? It was probably like, yeah, look at this

bridge, and there's a poppy field to your left, and... I think the man who helped crack the enigma code probably is something a bit more complex than that. He probably took four hops towards the left when you reached the big bridge. It was a double bluff. Three roly-poly's forwards. So simple, it's complicated. That's actually also how he cracked the enigma code in the first place. So do you know who, if you find treasure in the UK, do you know who you report it to? The local coroner. Wow. So all he does is gets dead bodies and treasure reported to him. You know what you'd be hoping for, don't you? In France, you can't metal detect without a license to do so, and much stricter on it than we are. So I don't know whether that means there's much more buried

treasure in France, just because there aren't enthusiastic amateurs going around the country and just seeing what they can find. Yeah, because something like 90% of treasure in the UK is found by people with metal detectors, just amateurs, I think. Do you know how many coins you have to find for it to qualify as like a horde? You know, like he's just like a real horde. He's got a horde I reckon not many, I reckon 20. Yeah, it's two. Two? As long as there are at least 10% precious metal. That's great. Two coins. I've got several hordes in my wallet, though, that's brilliant. Oh, they have to be 300 years old at least, sorry. I'm very thrifty, so I'm very old. So are you allowed to keep a coin, but you're not allowed to keep a horde,

you then have to reach the coroner? Yes. Couldn't you just say, oh, I found a coin, then, you know, walk away for a bit, then walk back. Oh, how nice. It's such a great idea. What a happy accident. I found a coin 50 times. They're going to have to rewrite the law. There's a great story of a book that was published in 1979 in England. It was kind of the world's first global treasure hunt, and it was a book called The Masquerade by Kit Williams. It's only about 20 pages, and it's all illustrations, and the story doesn't really matter. It's the fact that in every single page, there's hidden codes to the location of what the boy finds at the end of the storybook, which is this golden masquerade hair, and Kit Williams buried it somewhere in

the world. He didn't say where, and if you cracked the code of the book, you would find the masquerade hair. Did anyone find it? Someone eventually did, but it really made people go insane in the search for it because they became obsessed with it. It was a really, really hard code to crack. People actually were sectioned for psychiatric help because they were so obsessed, and they were just, yeah, not getting to it. And unfortunately, the code was cracked by a couple, and they wrote the letter to Kit Williams to say that we'd found it, and the day before that letter had arrived, a neighboring person came to the house and said, Kit, I've got the answer. I know where it is, and then dug it up. But they were told by one of Kit Williams' friends the location, so they cheated

in order to get it. So he told his friends the location. Somehow, he must have slipped in the pub or something. I don't know what it was. Damn it. Yeah. The person who did find it then tried to replicate the experience with a computer game, but it became so expensive to make it, and no one understood it once it came out that the company went bankrupt, and he had to put the masquerade hair itself up for auction. It went up for auction in Sotheby's. It was bought by an anonymous bidder, and since it was bought 30-something odd years ago, no one knows its location currently. Yeah. So it's still out there. Exciting. Yeah. Get the car, though. Yeah. Just talking about lost things. People always lose their pin codes on their credit cards and whatever. That happens all the time.

And I saw an article in The Independent from 1996, which thought that in the future, instead of pin codes, people would use their fingerprints to say who they are when they put their credit card in. People obviously are a little bit worried about whether that would work or not, and so they managed to stop any worry by saying, a similar program in South Africa, which distributes payments to 450,000 pensioners, has resulted in only one attempt to use an amputated finger in more than six years. So that sounds pretty safe. Wow. That's just the one they found out about, presumably. I mean, how many people with amputated fingers are there buried in someone's dungeon? It's true. When they had the line up, they were like, points to the guy who did this.

Okay, time for fact number three, and we're going to do you, Anna. Yeah, my fact is that in 2011, the largest sperm bank in the world stopped accepting sperm from red heads. Why? Well, you know, it was a supply and demand issue, I think. It was Krios International Sperm Bank in Denmark. I think Denmark calls itself the sperm capital of the world, because there's... Is that when you ride by the airport? Yes. They're very proud of it. Everyone in Denmark, whenever they answer phone, has to say, welcome to Denmark, sperm capital of the world. That's true. So it was a sperm bank capital. Sperm bank capital, yeah, I don't think they just have really well-interrupted men.

Actually, it's a sperm building society. I think it's more ethical. There's a lovely fact of just the idea of having that logo on at the airport, that in Scotland, they spent... The tourism board spent hundreds of thousands of pounds trying to re-find a great slogan to arrive to for all of Scotland, and after brainstorms that lasted for however long, hundreds of thousands of pounds, they arrived at welcome to Scotland. That's the oldies of the goodies, aren't they? Sorry, Anna, go on. Yeah, so there's a quote from Oli Shu, and he says, there are too many... So he runs the sperm bank in Denmark, Cryos International Sperm Bank, and he said,

there are too many redheads in relation to demand. I do not think you choose a redhead unless the partner, for example, this sterile male has red hair, or because the lone woman has a preference for redheads. And that's perhaps not so many, especially in the latter case. Anyway, it's obviously not fair, because there's absolutely nothing wrong with redheads. Just want to make that clear, as the QI view, and it also... He also stopped accepting Oli Shu, stopped accepting donations from a lot of Scandinavians as well, because they export a lot of their sperm internationally, and there's not... So people like to have children that kind of look like them. Wow, what a weird way of making your country

bigger on the global map. 10% of their sperm go to Britain, in fact, and he just wraps them up in a little package, sends them, you can receive it in the post, and then you can... It's all DIY. Order it online. Really? What? So it comes refrigerated? Or... Yeah, yeah. What customs just sort of wave it through? I believe so. Wow. Yeah. So it's not over the liquid's amount? I don't think so. I know something which is over the liquid's amount, unfortunately. This was in 2011. There were lots of Zerf officials trying to establish a sperm bank for elephants in North America, because there aren't enough elephants, and they're going to start becoming too closely related to each other and weaken the gene pool. So 16 litres of elephant semen were being kept

in South African export office, because American import had no idea what to classify it as. There's a lot of bureaucracy in the USA, so it was just kept waiting there frozen in limbo for ages, and I think it might still be there. That was three years ago. So there's 16 litres of semen waiting somewhere as part of Project Frozen Dumbo, because that's what they call it. Shouldn't have declared. Should have just gone through customs. No, over 100 mils. Very tricky. You'd have to have a lot of tiny bottles of shampoo. Yeah. Did you guys know that 90% of your sperm is deformed? You three specifically. I'm told that all the time.

What do you mean? I didn't know that. 90% of men's, human and sperm has like either two heads or two tails, multiple heads and tails, or like a coiled tail or broken tail. So you mean superhero? Yeah, okay. Superhuman. But a lot of these men actually get the clip so they can't have babies by a notorious villain known as Jack the Snapper. He's killing the superheroes before they're born. For me, when I hear the word redheads as an Australian, I immediately think of our matches, because in Australia, that's the leading brand of matches. They're called redheads. Redheads were originally made in Australia, but then they got outsourced to Sweden, and so they were no longer an Australian product. And we have a guy in Australia called Dick Smith,

and he runs Dick Smith Electronics, Dick Smith Foods, and he's kind of Australia's Richard Branson. And he decided that he wasn't going to allow redheads to become the leading brand of Australian matches. So he created his own brand, which you can buy in shops. I think you can still buy them, and they're called Dickheads, because Dick Smith, Dickheads, and Dickheads became a hugely popular product in Australia. That reminds me a little bit of, do you know about Redhead Day in the Netherlands? It's a summer festival. It takes place each first weekend of September in the city of Braida, and all the redheads from around the world come along and have fun and party. It's very popular, but for the first few years, it wasn't so popular because it clashed with a local pumpkin contest.

Which orange to choose? Is that what they're doing? Why do redheads get such a hard time? I've never understood this. Neither have I. I always wanted to be redheaded. It means you're special. The Irish like redheads. There's a high demand still for redheads amongst the Irish. They're still asking for it. Apparently very popular in Germany as well. There was a sex researcher called Professor Dr Werner Habermell, and he said the sex lives of women with red hair is clearly more active than those with other hair colour, with more partners and having sex more often than the average. I find it quite interesting that the human sperm cell is the

smallest cell in the human body, and a lot of people know the egg, the female egg is one of just the largest, I think, but a blue whale sperm is only a very tiny amount longer than a human's one. So it's completely different by species. Yeah, it's totally random. I don't think people know why. They certainly don't know why the fruit fly sperm is so big, and yeah, why have a small sperm or a big sperm? Is that several times as long as the actual fruit fly, isn't it? 20 times. 20 times as long. Although I couldn't work this out, so the average male ejaculate is half a teaspoon. That's where the ban got its name from. Really? I didn't know that. Brackets, I haven't also heard of the band. It contains 200 million sperm. If you lined up all

the sperm in one ejaculate, it would stretch six miles. So you managed to get your sperm into one line. It's a silly job, isn't it? I don't think so. Maybe if you asked them all to queue up in length order. You need a spatula or something. You with two heads to the back. The man who first saw sperm under a microscope, who was called Van Leeuwenhoek, so he discovered them in 1677. He was very clear whenever he wrote about it or spoke about that. The sperm that I found were not obtained by any sinful contrivance on my part, but were the excess which nature provided me in conjugal relations. One thing I found is that it takes five people to get semen out of a vulture. Right. Is that through first-hand experience? I've got bad news

for you, Andy. There's only four of us. What am I going to do with this guy? No, one person takes the limbs, one takes the head, one takes the wings. A fourth person massages its back. So after the massage, the bird gets aroused and then its cloaca appears, which is like the sexual opening that most birds have. And then so the fourth person then grabs the cloaca between thumb and index finger, at which point the fifth person collects the semen in a glass funnel, or receptacle of their choice. It doesn't, you know, doesn't matter. Once you've gone to that much effort, though, you may as well get a glass funnel. And that's the stag night over. Okay, final fact of the show, and we head over to Andy Murray. My fact is that the English language

has more words borrowed from Hawaiian than it has from Welsh, which is surprising. Yeah, because it's quite a long way away. It's a very long way away. Whereas Wales is quite close. Almost next door. So let me think. So maybe that is because things in Hawaii are more unusual to us. Things that are in Wales, we just use the English words for perhaps? Well, possibly. But there seems to be a theory that it's actually snobbery, that it was Anglo-Saxon snobbery that repressed the Welsh language. And it was suppressed for a long time in the 19th century. So this is a claim made by Dr Philip Durkin, who's the author of borrowed words. And he's also the deputy editor of the OED. So he knows his stuff and he's ranked

a lot of different languages in terms of how many words from them have ended up in the OED. And Latin comes first and French comes second. But Hawaiian manages to beat Welsh, as does Turkish and Icelandic. Hawaiian words that we have include things like hula hoop from hula, the hula dance, ukulele, aloha, and wiki, which means quickly. So wikipedia is very close. If you go to Hawaii, I've been to Hawaii, and if you get a bus from the airport to wherever you need to go, they're called wiki wiki buses because they're quick. There's a bunch of words that I think someone recently wrote a book on words that the English language used to have that we should bring back. But the only one that springs to mind is fizzle, which used to mean in the 15th and 16th

centuries, it was a verb meant to break wind without making a noise, which we don't have anymore. But apparently, yeah, fizzle is where we get the word feisty from. Andy, you, you actually have invented new words, haven't you? For you were one of the kind of silent authors of the new meaning of a Lyft book, after Lyft. It was a book that, what was it Andy? It's a book that... It's a book of things that there should be words for but aren't. So the original one was in the 80s, and it was one of the words, and that was abeline, which is the pleasant coolness on the other side of a pillow, which is lovely. There's no word for that on a hot night when you turn your pillow over. So nice. So all the words in it, all the definitions of real place names from

around the world matched with things that... Experiences that don't yet have a word to condense them into one. Exactly, yeah. So Angram, an amusing anagram you've come up with, which doesn't quite work, for example. Or Danby Wisk, which is the bit of kitchen equipment that you don't know what it's for, but it always means that you can't quite shut the drawer properly, and you have to sort of jam it in. So that kind of stuff. That's great. Going to the Welsh thing, there are several thousand people in Patagonia in Argentina who descended from the Welsh and speak Welsh and Spanish as their two main languages. There are nearly as many Welsh speakers there as there are in Wales. That's bizarre. I really love

it when language gets kind of preserved because you're in an isolated place. I remember going to North Carolina and being right on the coastline, and obviously that's where some of the first people landed from a south-west coast. And everyone there spoke with kind of a really thick Devonshire accent. It's so weird. So you're in North Carolina, and people are talking like this to you. I'm not very good at that accent. I'll repress it. It's a Palmerston island, I think, in the middle of the Pacific, and they all speak with a Gloucestershire accent. Yeah, that's so cool. Everyone on the island. Oh, really? Yeah. My favorite word is grocl, which is a Devon word, which means somebody's not from around here. Yeah, that's good. Very

grocl. The Hawaiians have a word for that, actually, haole, haole, or something like that, which means someone who's not from around there. Oh, yeah. There are some other Hawaiian words which we should probably borrow in a bit similar to what we do with afterlife. These are quite cool words. Maka haka haka is someone with deep-set eyeballs, which is very good. That's me. I've got deep-set eyeballs. Oh, yeah. If you're listening at home, we can barely see Dan's eyes, because they're just so far away. There's another one. It's ulaia, which means to live like a hermit because of disappointment. Wow. That's amazing. It's very specific as well. The fact that you need a word for that implies that there are a lot of people living as hermits because of

disappointment. They should meet up and not be hermits anymore. This is completely off-topic, but do you know that thing about the hermits in the first to the fourth century? It was a fashion for people who were religious to go and live in the desert as a hermit. A few people did it, and then it became more fashionable and more fashionable and more fashionable still, and then you have all these writings of these hermits living in the desert going, I can't move for all these other hermits. It's just totally hermit. I read the other day that one of the things that people used to do to sort out their melancholy, this was the rich backer in the day, is that they would hire a hermit to live on their grounds and they would build a hermitage

and they would go and talk to that hermit and then they would let the problem sit with the hermit and the hermit would then just mull on them on their behalf, but sometimes if you couldn't afford the hermit they would often just build the hermitage. They would leave items in particular positions so they look like the hermit was just, he'd just gone out for a walk. You were showing off to your rich friends, oh I've got a hermit, oh he must be out at the moment. He's out socialising, he's gone out on the town. You don't really need to do that because all you have to do is say, oh he's a hermit, he doesn't like to be dispersed. That's true. I can't believe there was a theory that it might make you less melancholy to go and rearrange the furniture in your fake hermit's

house. It sounds like I would walk out of that house and commit suicide immediately. Somebody from the University of Leicester School of English who was researching the hermit thing said that they would leave reading matta and glasses out, a bit like leaving sherry out for Father Christmas. Yeah, so to look like he was there. I think that's quite charming. And then they'd pretend to turn the pages and like put a bookmark on a new page. The bookmark of it every day. Yeah, oh he's really got a long way with little Dorot. Words that we do get just going back to Welsh because we've gone so far off topic, but words that we do get from Welsh include flannel, flummary, corgi and dad. Dad? That's a pretty big hezza. But not mum. No, not mum. Isn't

ma the universal word for mother as a result of all babies? It's pretty universal. But there is a place and I think it's Georgia or Armenia where the word for mother is dada. Yeah. It's one of very few places in the world. The corgi thing is quite interesting because it means that the correct plural of corgi is corgoun because that's the way the Welsh plurals are made. You have another thing about plurals. One is that whenever I go to a sandwich shop I get very annoyed if I ask for a panini and they only give me one because panini is plural. And I always ask for a panino if I only want one of them. You're going to be perpetually disappointed. You never invite a QIL to any kind of shop. You're just going to be pedantic as hell and

everything. Actually there's no such thing as a fish. Get out of my fish and chip shop. You're one of them QILs aren't you? Do you know what the state fish of Hawaii is? No. I'm going to tell you. It's the humu, humu, nuku, nuku, apu, ah, ah. This is why we took from Hawaiian rather than from Welsh because they've got so many vowels and vowels are really easy to pronounce aren't they? The Hawaiian word who we are, yo we are, meaning certified, has the most consecutive vowels of any word in the current human speech. Wow. Just kind of sounds like they're drunk all the time doesn't it? If you're just aligning too many vowels. It sounds a bit like Cornish. Yeah. Okay we should wrap up. Just one final thing Anna. One final thing,

phonetomology. The first known use of the word abracadabra was from the third century, seems kind of weird to me because he would have thought it was like a modern, I don't know, it sounds like such a weird modern concoction but it was used in the third century by a doctor who prescribed it as an anti-malarial. It's one of the first proposed cures for malaria. To say abracadabra? You actually have to wear it around your neck in an amulet. But I like the idea of someone going to the doctors. It's like oh I'm feeling not very good. I think I've got malaria. Oh I've got the one thing for you. Abracadabra! Abracadabra! Yeah. Thanks I feel much better. Okay that's it for our episode. That's all our facts. Thanks for listening to our show.

If you want to get in touch with any of us about any of the things that we've said you can reach us on our Twitter handles. James can be found on at Eggshade. Andy you're on at Andrew Hunter M. I'm on at Shriverland. Anna is not on Twitter at the moment. Again she is still refraining from joining but we will get her one day. In the meantime she sets up our fantastic qi.com slash podcast page where we're gonna have links and videos and photos of all the things that we've spoken about over the course of this episode. So if you go there and check it out that'd be great and we'll see you guys again next week. So thanks for listening to Know Such Thing as a Fish. Goodbye.