QI

Topics

- The people that struggle to speak to people of the opposite sex are the Ubang people of the Cross River area of Nigeria, as their language has separate versions for men and women. Their creation myth states that the first people on Earth, Ubang and Iwame, and God gave them a language each. The intention was to give all tribes two languages, one for men and one for women, but God ran out of languages or he made one more language than he made tribes. The Ubang do not find the situation confusing at all, although some words are very different. For example, the male word for clothing is "nki" and the female word is "ariga". However, the words for book are very similar, being "koshang" for men and "oshang" for women. The female language is reportedly easier to learn as it involves less puns, but all the children grow up speaking the female language, but by three or four-year-old boys start getting tease for using it, and they will have fully transitioned to the male language around the age of ten. The language also has no gendered pronouns.

- Tangent: About a third of the world's population speak a gendered language, in which inanimate objects are male or female.

- [i]XL Tangent: Gendered language has an effect on how you think of an object. For example, the German word for a bridge is the feminine word "Brucke", and thus the Germans describe bridges using female stereotypes like "beautiful" or "fragile", but in Spanish they use masculine word "puente", so they describe bridges as "strong" or "dangerous". Waterloo Bridge, which was completed by women during the Second World War, is the strongest bridge in London.

- Tangent: While English is not really a gendered language, we use metaphorical genders. For example, ships are often considered female. A survey of people who own robotic vacuum cleaners showed that two thirds assign them a gender, and three quarters of those people called them a "he".

- The sexiest thing you can do with a sausage-making machine is make condoms. The US condom industry began in 1883 with German-Jewish immigrant Julius Schmid. He was penniless, hobbling around on crutches while working in a sausage-making factory, and to make some some money he started selling animal intestines as condoms. In 1890, he was arrested as selling contraceptives was illegal, so he changed the name of his products to: "French goods and medicines". In 1918, condoms were legalised, and by then he was already the dominant figure in the industry.

- Tangent: In the 18th century, condoms were made out of sheep gut, soaked for a few hours before used, tied on with a ribbon, then washed, dried and used again.

- Tangent: Other uses for condoms include opening stuck jars, keeping your hands dry should drop something into a toilet, sneaking in booze into places as a good condom will hold six pints, and using it to cook a meatloaf, akin to a boil-in-the-bag meal. Things that are rumoured to be good replacements for condoms include clingfilm, sandwich bags and crisp packets.

- Tangent: The shrink wrap effect is when something looks more skeletal because the wrapping hides away any bulges. This was observed in 1995, when the Reichstag was wrapped in 100,000 square meters of silver fabric for two weeks by married artists Christo Javacheff and Jeanne-Claude Denat de Guillebon, better known together as Christo. When artists draw dinosaurs, they tend to draw them as skeletal, despite some having feathers. People rarely draw fat dinosaurs. The book All Yesterdays has pictures of modern-day animals if we only drew them based on the skeletons, showing how skeletal hippos and swans look like.

- Elon Musk sexed-up the spacesuit by getting a Hollywood costume designer to create them. Jose Fernandez, who worked on The Avengers, Germlins, Batman, and also made costumes for Daft Punk, was hired by SpaceX to make the suits, but he thought SpaceX was a film, and the goal was to make the suit look more like a tuxedo. Fernandez used his Daft Punk helmet designs to make the helmets for the suit.

- Tangent: One problem with spacesuits is that they are normally designed just for men, with only medium and large sizes. When NASA sent their first female astronaut into space, Sally Ride, in 1983, all the engineers worried that she would need a make-up kit designed for her, and before going into space for seven days, they supplied her with 100 tampons. Alan Shepard, the first American in space, was given a spacesuit that was not designed so he could use a toilet, as he was only in space for a brief period. Because the launch was delayed by five hours,, the first American in space did so in a suit full of their own urine.

- XL Tangent: The earliest forerunner to a spacesuit is one made for sea floor scavenging. It was a diving barrel created in 1715 by John Lethbridge. It particularly considered of just a barrel with some sleeves, and a bubble of air is trapped inside the barrel. Lethbridge could reach depths of 22 metres for half-an-hour. By the end of his life, he recovered so many valuables from shipwrecks that the total amount of money raised would be worth £20million today.

- Your mother-in-law would give you a lumpy potato to see if you would make a good wife for their son. Pusi qachun waqachi is a potato from the Cusco region of Peru, which in the local language means; "make your daughter-in-law cry". Mother-in-laws give these potatoes to their future daughters-in-laws, and if they can successfully peel them then she will be a good wife.

- XL Tangent: Of the 4,500 varieties of potato, 2,500 are in Peru, and 25% of the Peru's agricultural GDP comes from potatoes. The Inca language has the expressions: "hok wayk-oy", meaning, "I apologise", which translates as: "one cooking", and "hok yanoy chika", "one cooking so much", which are both units of time, as the Incas used the length of time to cook potatoes as their version of an hour.

- XL Tangent: In Lima, a restaurant called Central has 50 different ways of preparing potatoes. There is a Danish method called 50-50, which is 50% potato and 50% butter, mashed together.

- XL Tangent: Some old recipe books have spells in them, the belief being that by the time you have said the whole spell the ingredients are ready.

- XL Tangent: In the 13th century, the Peruvians and Bolivians were able to naturally freeze-dry potatoes, by leaving them outside, exposing them to warm and then freezing temperatures, and stamping out the water in between. It works as a form of instant mashed potato which can be stored for years. While she was a student, Sara learned that Smash instant potato goes black when it rots, because she, "was a very dirty girl at university, and also poor". 100 million packets of Smash are sold annually.

- Someone who could not perform without an audience was a monarch wanting to consummate their marriage. Henry VI and his wife Margaret of Anjou took over eight years to produce an heir. Recent evidence suggests that people had to accompany them to bed to make sure they had sex. Thus the Chamberlain to Henry VI stayed in the room when the king and queen were in bed together. They did have a baby, Edward, but he was thought to be either a bastard or changling, and Henry had a nervous breakdown. Margaret was left to rule the country herself for the next few decades, which was significant because her decisions led to the Wars of the Roses. Henry and Margaret were married for a year before they met, as his advisor, the Duke of Suffolk, went to France in 1444 and married Margaret in his place in a form of proxy wedding.

- Tangent: Sandi once did a show with Helen Lederer and Tony Slattery, and the only person in the audience was Sandi's mother-in-law. Sara once did a fundraiser for some firefighters, which was in a field near the fire station. No-one was in the tent, so Sara was forced to start in an empty tent, and when anyone looked inside they just witnessed Sara talking to herself, with no-one staying behind to watch her. Sandi and Alan were once at Latitude, when Sandi went to the toilet in an empty field, and when she came out the field was full of people.

- Tangent: Sara tells Sandi about camming, the practice of pay people to do things via a webcam, often sexual. Sandi had never heard of it. She also told her son that she could never see porn on the internet, so he told her to just type the word "porn" into the internet. When Sandi replied that she could not be that bold, he said: "Maybe it's not for you." In order to see porn, you have to actively look for it first. Ahir's mother is a retired primary school teacher, who tried using an interactive whiteboard to teach her class about the Victorians, but she made the mistake of going onto Google Images and searching for "Prince Albert".

- Tangent: Mary Tudor, the sister of Henry VIII, had her marriage to Louis XII of France consummated by proxy. The Duke of Longueville, a French hostage in England, acted as a stand-in for Louis. Many spectators watched Mary taking off her clothes, climbing into bed, then the Duke took of his stockings from one leg, put his naked leg under the bedclothes, touched her, and then everyone applauded. This was enough to be considered consummation.

- You would stop halfway through sleeping with someone because centuries ago people used to sleep in two spells. In medieval times people had two-phase sleeping patterns, waking up around 2-3am, would spend that time either praying, eating, having sex,, studying etc. This is partly due to the fact that people worked so hard during the day, it was only at night when you had any free time. "Split sleeping" was also common between the 17th and 19th centuries.

- Tangent: Polyphasic sleeping was created by the architect and inventor Buckminster Fuller, who used to reduced the amount of time he slept to two hours in every 24. He did this by having a half-hour nap whenever he got tired. During the 1940s, Fuller believed that if people slept less, it would shorten WWII because thinkers would be able to spend more time constructively. Fuller also had a system called "Dymaxion", a portmanteau of "dynamic, maximum, tension", which related to his ideas. This included the Dymaxion car, which was designed to be streamlined as possible and maximise efficiency, but he gave up after two years.

- Tangent: Salvador Dali did not want to waste time napping, so he would sit in an armchair with his arms of the sides, holding a heavy metal key in one hand, and had an upturned plate on the floor. Thus, if he fell asleep, he would let go of the key, which hit the plate and woke him up, giving him more energy.

- XL Tangent: Alan likes the idea that the reason why we suddenly feel a jolt while sleeping is that it dates back to when we slept in trees and we would grab a branch so to prevent ourselves falling out. When Alan was at Latitude with his children, all three of them fell out of their bunk beds within 20 minutes of one another.

- Tangent: Rene Descartes would always sleep until midday. We now believe he had a delay sleep phase type, a sleep disorder that throws off your circadian rhythm.

- XL: Sex does not sell. A 2020 study in which 200 Italian men and women watch ads to see if sex selled, and apart from a very small group of men who were identified in further analysis as having, "higher hostile sexism", the participants showed that people don't respond better to sexualised ads. Women reacted negatively and were less likely to buy the products, and the men were unaffected either way. The brain is instinctively distracted by the sexualisation and does not pay attention to what is being advertised. (Forfeit: Yes)

- XL Tangent: The Cadbury's Flake adverts used to highly sexualised, and were stopped in 2010 because the adverts were polarising opinion. Janis Levy, a former Flake girl, hit the news again in 2008 when it was reported that she had died and had her obituary published, when in fact a different Flake girl, Marilyn Crossley, had in fact died.. In Alan's first ever stand-up set in the 1980s, he took a Flake out of the wrapper and put it in a condom, then wrapped the Flake back up. He then went on stage and opened the wrapper, showing a Flake in the condom, which got a laugh, but then Alan tried to eat the Flake and condom, which did not go down so well.

- XL Tangent: Abercrombie & Fitch used to have a topless man outside their shop to try and help them sell, but these adverts are now being phased out. They also had people dancing in their shops who were not allowed to speak to the customers. Austrian economist Joseph Schumpeter said that a picture of the prettiest girl in the world will, in the long run, prove powerless to sell a bad cigarette. Abercrombie & Fitch have falsely claimed that their Hollister brand was named after founder John M. Hollister, an adventurer who settled in California and created the label in 1922. The whole company actually did not start until 2000. Similarly, Moleskine notebooks, which claimed to sell books to Hemingway, Picasso and Chatwin, did not start as a business until 1997. Häagen-Dazs is a made-up name created by New Yorkers living in Minneapolis, the name being made to sound Danish, but the Danish language does not use umlauts on the letter "a".

- XL: The thing that is so special about your bottom is that it is unique. Scientists at Stanford University have developed a smart toilet which can work out who is sitting on it by taking scans of the bottom. It scans the anal lining, known as the anoderm, and it is useful because if the toilet knows who is using it, it can analyse the excretion and can detect the health profile of each user.

- XL Tangent: Sandi was once staying at her father-in-law's house, when she went to the toilet at the middle of the night, and she discovered he had set up disco lights in the toilet that change colour. Sandi has since installed disco lights in her toilet.[/colour

- [colour=#000080]XL Tangent Tokyo's Advanced Institute of Industrial Technology is developing car seats that recognise the driver's bum print, and the car won't start if the print does not match.

General Ignorance

- The things to avoid before taking part in a big sporting event are drink, drugs and staying up late. The idea that you should not have sex before your performance has no evidence to support it. It probably makes you more relaxed. However, they have only studied male athletes. The key thing is to be well rested. Casey Stengel, manager of the New York Yankees, said: "It's not the sex that wrecks these guys, it's staying up all night looking for it." (Forfeit: Have sex)

- Tangent: Snooker player Paul Hunter was once down in the interval of a final of a major tournament, but recovered afterwards after he did Plan B during the interval, to win after being far behind. Hunter and his fiancée later revealed that "B" stood for "Bonk", and during the interval they had sex.

- Tangent: In the 2016 Olympics in Rio de Janeiro, they gave away 450,000 free condoms to the athletes.

- The first same-sex unions in England occurred in the golden age of piracy. In the 17th century, "matelotage" was a union between two male pirates who would share their wealth. The often exchanged gold rings to symbolise their union, and they would put a clause to pass all their belongings on to their partner if they died. On paper, it look like it's about economics, but according to the book Sodomy and the Pirate Tradition by B. R. Burg, the relationship clearly has homosexual characteristics, despite the fact the death penalty was in place at the time for homosexuality. One example, John Swann and Robert Culliford, who said under Captain Kidd, were in such as a relationship and eventually settled down in neighbouring homes in Madagascar.

- The British were not introduced to the idea of clean-shaven nether regions by any foreign group. When Julius Caesar invaded Britain in 55BC, he said the inhabitants were completely clean-shave from the head to toe, save for the head. Clergyman and historian Gerald of Wales wrote in 1188 wrote that Britons shaved like this so they could run more freely in forest groves, and that the Welsh in particular were most keen on this practice. As previously mentioned on QI, the Brazilian wax was invented in New York in the 1990s. (Forfeit: Brazilians)

- Tangent: Gold and copper razors have been found in Egyptian tombs.

- Tangent: In 2018, razor company Billie made news by featuring the first women's hair removal advert to show actual body hair being removed.

- Tangent: Cyclists should be careful when it comes to removing body hair, because the hair protects against friction and helps to remove sweat.

- Men think about sex 19 times a day on average. Ohio State University carried out a study in 2012 involving clickers, which participants clicked on one button if they thought about sex, another for food and another for sleep. In comparison, men think about food 18 times a day. Women on average thought about sex 10 times a day and food 15 times a day. The best predictor of who logged the most frequent thoughts about sex were people who were the most comfortable with their sexuality. In Germany, male and female participants in a study were texted seven times a day what they had been recently thinking. In the daytime, people thought about coffee, checking emails, and watching TV much more than sex. Sex only became a dominant thought somewhere around midnight, and even then it came second to wishing they were asleep.

Scores

- Sara Pascoe: 8 points
- Ahir Shah: 7 points
- Suzi Ruffell: -6 points
- Alan Davies: -16 points