Tricky questions
QI elf Anne Miller devotes her life to finding out obscure facts, some of which have found their way into new book, Funny You Should Ask
At QI, we love questions. Over the course of 18 series we’ve posed such conundrums to the panel as ‘ What begins with A, has six Cs and no Bs?’ ‘ What’s even quainter than a model village?’ and ’ Why don’t pigeons like going to the movies?’
Each series of QI is based around a letter of the alphabet and written and researched by a team known as the QI Elves. We’ve just finished recording the R series which is rammed with rabbits, rogues and recycling – though not all in the same show.
One of the questions we’re asked most often is about where we find our facts. We usually start by thinking of all the most intriguing words beginning with the letter we’re working on and then follow our noses to see where the most interesting nuggets are hiding. Often you begin researching one thing e. g. seagulls then end up wildly off- topic reading about libraries in Canada but that’s often where the most fun is to be had. We’re just about to start researching the S series so I’ve already got my eyes on Scotland, space and the sea although one of my fellow elves has already got in early and bagsied a brilliant looking book about seashells so you do have to be quick.
Since the start of 2019 the Elves have been appearing weekly on The Zoe Ball Breakfast Show’s Why Workshop segment to answer questions sent in by Radio 2 listeners. The range of topics is spectacular – we’ve been asked whether farts smell in space ( yes, they do!), whether flashing your lights at traffic lights make them change faster? ( no, it doesn’t!) and why men and women remove their jumpers differently ( this seems to be about the amount of spare room around your arms and involved us spending quite a while taking jumpers on and off to test it.
In our brand new book Funny You Should Ask… we’ve taken our favourite questions from the Why Workshop and added in some others that we’ve always pondered the answers to ourselves. One of my favourite pages was inspired by the movies Ten Things I Hate About You where one of the characters is asked
‘ I know you can be overwhelmed, and you can be underwhelmed, but can you ever just be whelmed?’ Pleasingly, the answer is yes you can and the word ‘ whelmed’ has been around much longer than underwhelmed and overwhelmed. It’s 700 years old and originally meant ‘ overturned’ or ‘ capsized’, before evolving to mean ‘ buried’, ‘ submerged’ or ‘ ruined’. It appears in John Milton’s Paradise Lost, which includes the line ‘ One blow unaided could have finisht thee, and whelmd thy legions under darkness.’ When ‘ overwhelmed’ appeared a hundred years later it took on a similar meaning and the word ‘ whelmed’ dropped out of use.
We’re always looking for fascinating facts and the book includes the gem that the longest word in literature is ‘ lopadotemachoselachogaleokranioleipsanodrimhypotrimmatosilphioparaomelitokatakechymenokichlepikossyphophattoperisteralektry noptekephalliokigklopeleiolagoiosiraiobaphetragano pterygon’.
It was coined by the ancient Greek playwright Aristophanes and is the name of a fictional meal made with dozens of ingredients, including fish, pigeon, crab and rotten dogfish.
And we discovered that ‘ Dad jokes’ exist all around the world. In Japan, they are called oyaji gyagu, or ‘ old man jokes’, while the Korean word for the jokes, ajae, means ‘ middle- aged man’. In France, when a child says, ‘ Quoi? ’ (‘ What?’), any self- respecting dad will reply, ‘ Feur,’ making the French word for ‘ hairdresser’ – coiffeur. In Spain, if a dad sees any soy milk, he will respond with the classic ‘ Hola, Milk, soy Papi’ (‘ Hi, Milk, I’m Dad’).
We also visited classic conundrums such as ‘ How much wood would a woodchuck chuck if a woodchuck could chuck wood? In this case, the most concrete answer we found came from a wildlife expert named Richard Thomas at the New York Department of Environmental Conservation. In 1998, he was so fed up of people asking him this question that he decided to work out the answer and calculated that when woodchucks – or groundhogs, as they’re more commonly known – dig their homes, they move 300kg of soil, so he figured that they could probably shift the same amount of wood.
Sometimes the answers are very straightforward and can be found quickly. For example, the reason that we say ‘ blowing a raspberry’ is because of rhyming slang – a ‘ raspberry tart’ is a ‘ fart’. However, there were some where the definitive answer remains shrouded in mystery. For example, we were asked ‘ Why are dusters almost always yellow?’ and while there isn’t one firm answer there are three plausible theories:
You begin researching one thing e. g. seagulls then end up wildly off- topic reading about libraries in Canada
1. Because of trousers. The 18th- century version of blue jeans was yellow nankeen breeches. These trousers, made from naturally occurring yellow cotton, were extremely popular, and so when people wanted to make dusters, they would often just rip up an old pair of nankeens. The name comes from ‘ Nankin’, an old British name for the Chinese city of Nanjing, where the fabric was made. When dusters were made commercially, yellow was already associated with household cleaning.
2. Because of butter. When butter is made, it is passed through muslin, a process that stains the cloth yellow. And when these cloths were no longer usable in the dairy, they’d be turned into dusters. Again, the colour became linked with cleaning, so manufacturers made their new cloths yellow to match.
3. Because of quarantine. When ships came into port, they would fly a yellow flag to show they needed a quarantine inspection. This link to hygiene may explain why dusters are yellow, but it seems a bit less likely, as a cloth that is yellow, signalling potential disease, doesn’t seem particularly appealing as a household cleaner.
Of course, it could also simply be that yellow is a cheerful colour which also shows up dirt clearly. The real joy of these questions is that you never know where you will end up when you set off in search of the explanation. And, the more you look, the more you discover so while looking up one answer, several new questions always seem to spring up along the way.
For example, the answers to the questions in the first paragraph are Antarctica ( which has no bees but is bordered by six seas). A model village within a model village within a model village within an actual village at Bourton- on- the- water. And because pigeons have better eyesight than humans and observe the frame rate more slowly – so what to us looks like a moving image, to them looks like a slideshow. Now if you’ll excuse me, I’m going to try and work out what sort of film a pigeon might enjoy the most…
Funny You Should Ask… Your Questions Answered By The QI Elves is published by Faber& Faber at £ 12.99. Out now.