QI

Sandi Toksvig, Nabil Abdulrashid, Bill Bailey, Victoria Coren Mitchell and Alan Davies are all in it together for this United episode.

Topics

- The most undesirable of all the Uniteds is Dundee. "Dundee United", or sometimes just "Dundee", is Nigerian slang for an idiot. Dundee United did a summer tour of West Africa in 1972 where they played local teams. However, it was a total disaster for the team, losing among other games 4-1 to Stationery Stores FC. When the team went back home, one headline just read: "Don't come back." Dundee United had just given the job of manager to Jim McLean, who blamed the team's bad performance on injuries, poor quality playing grounds and the heat, but McLean did eventually go on to become the club's longest serving and most successful manager. Many Nigerians however, do not know the origin of "Dundee United" as a phrase, and when they are told there is a team with that name, they react by asking why they would name themselves after such an insulting term. (Forfeit: Manchester United)

- Tangent: A "Leeds season" is a South Korean term, pronounced, "lijeu sidae", for the bygone years when you were more impressive and attractive than you are now. In the early 2000s there was a player called Alan Smith, who originally played for Leeds United and was seen as a rising star. In 2004, Leeds was relegated and he moved to Manchester United, but never reached the same career heights. The consensus was that he peaked at Leeds, and in South Korea, the phrase caught on. Smith once blocked a shot while playing for Manchester United, but the shot was so hard that his leg broke, with the bottom end of his leg hanging in the sock. It was so shocking that cameras filming the match pointed away. Smith eventually recovered, and now teaches children football in Florida.

- People root for underdogs because of hormones. If you support a sports team, you become hormonally bonded with them. As you watch a match, you go through very similar hormonal changes, getting spikes of testosterone, adrenaline and dopamine. Both the players and the fans get this. Fans of the winning team will continue to experience a testosterone spike of about 20%, and the fans of the losing team will have a similar drop. The drop of hormones following a loss does not stop people from being loyal fans. Sports psychology has several teams relating to this: "BIRGing" is "Basking in reflected glory", the high you feel after a victory; "CORFing" is "Cutting off reflected failure", where you distance yourself from that one game you just lost; "BIRFing" is "Basking in reflected failure", where you take pride in losing; and "COFFing" is "Cutting off future failure", where you try not to get too worried about future loses.

- Tangent: When Victoria was at primary school she was in "Scott House", named after Scott of the Antarctic, who famously failed and died in his mission of being the first to reach the South Pole. Sandi was in "Livingstone House", named after David Livingstone and later she found out that he died of burst haemorrhoids. This was on the banks of the Zambezi, where years later Sandi made a documentary where she canoed the whole of it, and during the trip she tried to see if there was a specific spot where Livingstone died.

- XL: Sandi asks if trade unions really just a bloody circus. They are in one way, in that the official banners used by many British trade unions were also designed by someone who originally did circus banners, named George Tuttle. Both banners use a similar style to make them eye-catching. In 1837, workers were beginning to unionise and Tuttle spotted a gap in the market. In the 19th century, 75% of all the banners for trade unions came from Tuttle's workshop. However, Tuttle himself refused to allow his company to join a union, and workers were not allowed to unionise until 1934. The company carried on until 1967.

- XL Tangent: The first recorded strike of workers in history was in Ancient Egypt. Workers building tombs in the Valley of the Kings staged a sit-in at the temple because they were being paid late. Local government officials sent them pastries to try and calm them down. They used the offer and the strikes went on for three years, and there were many more strikes across Egypt.

- XL: After this, Sandi asks about upper class unity. This relates to Unity Mitford of the Mitford Sisters, who was amongst other things a fascist and supporter of Hitler. Unity was born in London in 1914, but she was conceived in the Canadian town of Swastika. Her middle name was Valkyrie. She hated her communist sister Jessica so much that they drew a chalk line down the middle of their bedroom, where on Jessica's side there was communist regalia and on Unity's there was Nazi regalia. As a teenager, Unity would gate-crash communist meetings, heckle speakers and do Nazi salutes. Even Oswald Mosley, founder of the British Union of Fascists and husband of Diana Mitford, thought Unity was a bit much. Unity shot herself in the head when the Second World War broke out because of her love of Hitler, but managed to live for another nine years.

- XL Tangent: Sandi once attended a literary festival with Debo Devonshire (the youngest of the Mitford Sisters) and Robin Askwith. Sandi says it was the strangest lunch she ever had.

- XL Tangent: Bill was once in a school production of The Resistable Rise of Arturo Ui, a play which is an allegory of Hitler, in which he played the lead. For the part he died his hair black and combed it in the Hitler style. When his mother first looked at him after he did this, she said how lovely Bill looked.

- XL Tangent: Nancy Mitford popularised the terms "U" and "non-U" relating to the way the upper classes spoke differently to the lower and middle classes. For example, the middle class would say "ee-ther" and the upper class would say "eye-ther".

- XL: Sandi gives Alan a toy jack-o-lantern and asks how it would destroy him emotionally. In Ukraine, women give men pumpkins to insult them. No-one knows exactly why, but some people think that it used to be thought that pumpkins were good for virility. Thus, if you give a pumpkin to a man, you are suggesting that he needs some help in the bedroom. Up until the 20th century, it was a tradition that if a man asked a woman to marry him, but she was not interested, she would give him a pumpkin. Often men would propose at night because they did not want to be seen in the village carrying a pumpkin home. This tradition is no longer practiced, but there is a phrase: "Daty harbuza", meaning: "to give a pumpkin", referring to rejection. In 2013, a group of about 50 Ukrainian women deposited a pumpkin at the Russian embassy in Kyiv.

- XL Tangent: In Miriam Margolyes' autobiography, she wrote that where she was going on University Challenge as part of an all-women team, on the train ride there a man in the next seat got out his erect penis. Miriam wrote: "My masterstroke was to offer him a peppermint, whereupon he rapidly detumesced."

- XL Tangent: A similar pumpkin expression is also found in Spanish. "Da calabazas", meaning "to give pumpkins", is a phrase telling someone to get lost.

- XL Tangent: There is a Ukrainian wedding tradition where the groom used to go and collect the bride from the house, and then had to pay a ransom or the bridesmaids would not release her. If he did not pay enough, they would give him a different woman. Meanwhile, in South Korean weddings, the groom is bound at the ankles, laid on his back, and slapped on the feet with a dried fish.

- XL Tangent: Bill got married on a remote Indonesian island. It was a three-chicken wedding, with locals saying they never had such a wedding, as they normally kill just one chicken for weddings. In 2010, a Swiss couple had a wedding in the Maldives and asked to be married in the local language. The couple enjoyed it and uploaded the wedding onto YouTube. After this, the Maldivian Foreign Minister had to issue a public apology because the celebrant took the opportunity to shower the couple with extreme sexual slurs. Among the things said were: "You are swine. The children that you bear from this marriage will all be bastard swine. Your marriage is not a valid one. You are not the kind of people who can have a valid marriage." At Sandi's wedding, as she walked down the aisle to be given away, her mother stepped in front of me and said: "It's not too late to find a nice man."

- You can while away an hour or two with a grasshopper and a paintbrush by turning the grasshopper into a locust. Locusts are not born, but are made. They are migratory grasshoppers that enter a swarm mode. If enough of them gather together and rub against each other, they change colour, grown stronger, and become gregarious locusts. You can turn a grasshopper into a locust yourself by tickling them with a paintbrush. In 2009, scientists at Oxford University conducted this as an experiment to see how locusts come about and how to stop the destruction they cause. Tickling grasshoppers for five seconds a minute every four hours triples the amount of serotonin.

- Tangent: As a child, during the Nigerian rainy season Nabil would catch locusts to eat. Sandi ate locusts in Lagos, and says no matter how well you cook them, they still crawl down your throat. Nabil says that while swarms of locusts are seen as a biblical omen, in Nigeria you take locusts with a pinch of salt.

- Long haul flights cause marital discord and often divorce because you get lost along the way, if you are a bird. While birds normally mate for live, they can "divorce" when a bird replaces its life partner even though they are both still alive. One of the biggest causes of this is mass migration, and the divorce is more likely to happen in longer trips. Great blue herons for example migrate over 3,000km and have a 100% divorce rate.

- XL Tangent: The Laysan albatross of Hawaii are famous for being committed to their partners, but since 1919 people have noticed that they often have two eggs in their nests, despite the females can only lay one. A scientist called Brenda Zaun DNA did tests and discovered that in many cases the birds were both females looking after an egg they laid each. On the Hawaii island of Kauai it was discovered that the females are more adventurous than the males, with the females being the only ones to have flown to the island, resulting in a shortage of males there. Thus, about 30% of the albatrosses found female partners and the island is full of lesbian albatrosses. Usually just one of the two eggs hatch.

- 1st May is International Workers' Day, but the 135ft object that Charles II erect in time for 1st May 1661 was a maypole. The pole was about the same height as Nelson's Column, and erected on the Strand in London. A previous one had been torn down by Puritans as they saw them as signs of wickedness.

- Tangent: Victoria still thinks of maypoles as being slightly wicked, as being a bit Wicker Man. She says she is always fine if she thinks she can get to the car faster than a cow could get there. Her husband, David Mitchell, is a keen walker, and recently they tried going for a walk together. She assumed it would be along the road, but there was a bit where you had to go across the fields. Nabil asks Victoria if she is sacred of all fields, to which she says she is. Nabil compares her to Pythagoras, who had a hatred of beans so great that when he was fleeing from his enemies, he came to a field of beans, stopped because he refused to cross it, and was killed. Nabil claims that Pythagoras and his hatred of beans was more rational than Victoria's fear of fields.

- Tangent: 1st May as a day for workers' rights comes from the USA. There were a series of protests in the 1880s where workers wanted to bring in an eight-hour day. On 1st May 1886, in Chicago, about 400,000 people were striking in support of this, and someone threw a bomb which killed a policeman while this strike occurred. Four workers were hanged for it, and since then 1st May has become the day for worker's rights.

- XL Tangent: Nabil grew up on a farm where at one point the chickens stopped laying eggs. His uncle came around and suggested that the best way to get the chickens to lay would be to feed them ganja, so Nabil saw what both chicken and rabbits look like when high, as well as getting "fried" himself.

General Ignorance

- When you are struck by lightning, the lightning enters your body via your feet. Most of the time the lightning is going to hit something nearby and bounce off in some way. Only about 3-5% of injuries are caused by a direct hit, whereas the most common injury comes from ground current. Most of the injury comes from something called "flashover", when the lightning makes contact with something like rain on your skin, sweat, or any other kind of moisture. It turns the moisture into steam, expanding it massively, and it can literally blow your clothes off. Lightning can reach 50,000 degrees Fahrenheit, which is five times hotter than the surface of the sun. (Forfeit: Through the head)

- Tangent: Roy C. Sullivan, the man who got struck by lightning more than anyone else, one spotted a cloud coming and got into his car and drove off. However, he still got struck because he forgot to wind up the car window. Alan knew someone who was walking in a lightning storm, when the lightning hit a manhole cover in the road, flew up, and landed on his head.

- XL Tangent: Men are more likely to be struck by lightning because they to work outdoors more than women. 80% of lightning strikes happen to men. In 1999, two British women were killed when lightning was conducted through the underwire in their bras, but Sandi says the claim has not been upheld.

- Fake leopard skin first became fashionable in Ancient Egypt. A stone from 2,500 BC depicts a princess named Nefertiabet shows her wearing leopard skin. They would paint leopard spots onto linen, and weave rosettes into woollen garments to look like the spots of an animal. Tutankhamun's tomb has a robe with sequins sewn onto it in order to resemble leopard spots. (Forfeit: 1980s)

- Tangent: Fake leopard skin was also fashionable in Europe in the 1700s. The panel are shown a portrait of John Campbell, Baron Cawdor, wearing a leopard patterned waistcoat, most likely made of velvet. Campbell was an art collector, benefactor of the poor, and in 1797 he commanded the Pembrokeshire Yeomanry, repelled the very last foreign invasion on British soil (at time of recording), when the French tried to invade Fishguard.

Scores

- Victoria Coren Mitchell: 6 points
- Nabil Abdulrashid: -7 points
- Bill Bailey: -18 points
- Alan Davies: -23 points