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QI XL S23E13 - Wordmongery

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00:30Good evening, and welcome to QI, where tonight we'll be weaving a web of words.
00:37Let's meet our cunning linguists, the wryly articulate Michael Oduwale.
00:44The widely read, Callie Beaton.
00:50A winsome windbag, it's Giles Brandreth.
00:56And words fail me, it's Alan Davis.
01:00CHEERING AND APPLAUSE
01:02There, brothers tonight, are wordly, wibbly, wobbly Michael goes...
01:07Do-a-biddy-dum-biddy-doo.
01:11Yeah.
01:12Ali goes...
01:13Do-a-biddy-dum-biddy-dum-biddy-dum-biddy-dum-biddy-dum-biddy-dum.
01:16Giles goes...
01:18Do-a-biddy-dum-biddy-dum-biddy-dum-biddy-dum-biddy-dum-biddy-dum-biddy-dum-biddy-
01:31So talking of silly words, what's the worst thing to wake up to, is it a wobbulator, a wood pussy, or feeling absolutely womblescropped?
01:35up to is it a wobbulator a wood pussy or feeling absolutely womblescropped wow yeah wood pussy that
01:44sounds like a like a ethical sustainable sex toy that got rejected do you know the name havelock
01:51ellis he was a pioneer sex oh yes of course he was the sex therapist 1897 he wrote a big book
01:58about homosexuality and a couple of years later he wrote a book about auto eroticism
02:02in which these three words feature the wobbulator yes was to assist you uh the wood pussy was to
02:10inspire you and the womblescropped is how you felt afterwards
02:24josh i think you need an oly fence i mean that was
02:26yeah it's educational i have to say the whole lot sounds a bit like menopause as well and
02:32midlife dating yeah wood pussy sounds a bit not not lubricated doesn't it
02:38wood pussy is a word from 1899 it is north american slang for a skunk okay
02:46oh is it trying to pretend to be something else yeah i think so giving a signal i think so either that
02:54or it's being beamed up by an alien an alien ship run by tiny rodents from another galaxy
03:02i love that what if that was the case so what what the aliens who come to earth in ships are tiny and
03:08furry and really really small and they're not interested in all the big mammals only the tiny ones
03:14they only want the skunks and they're off being probed and no one cares have you have you recently
03:20incurred a knock to the head so i grew up in new york and we had these striped skunks they're very
03:31common in north america it comes from an algonquin word meaning urinating fox and that's because of
03:36the extraordinary way it sprays this stink behind anybody know what you do if you've been sprayed by a
03:41skunk tomatoes is what everybody thinks it is and it it doesn't work um so people used to take a bath in
03:49tomato juice but in fact it's just that it smells stronger briefly than the skunk and then once
03:54the tomato juice wears off links i mean i'm going to give you a point because that is so true let's
04:09come on to the next word what about wobulator what do we think about wobulator i do know this word i think
04:15oh dear god i think it's going to be a word to do with the early days of radio and trying to get
04:23the waves working properly how are you doing on the wobulator you are correct wow
04:36in the very simplest terms it is a gadget that is able to make noises so it looked like that but
04:42these modern times we have created our own which now looks like this what it can do is it can send
04:47out infinite sound frequencies within a certain range so it can make very low sounds it can make
04:52very high sounds and every sound in between so i just turn it on here so then you can make these
04:59oh doctor who is arriving well funnily enough do you want to have a play darling yes i do i thought you
05:06might the bbc sound department used this for entertainment purposes and used it to create
05:13the doctor who theme tune oh did they yeah so the woman in this photo that's delia derbyshire
05:17she produced the doctor who theme tune in 1963 that's her working at the bbc radiophonic workshop in
05:23maida vale in london and she is the mother of electronic music influencing pink floy the chemical
05:28brothers paul mccartney lots of people fabulous woman this is a reproduction of the wobulator which was
05:33designed by the technologist nina richard for the delia derbyshire day charity for doctor who's 60th
05:39anniversary don't ever bang on that what i don't know about playing with a little switch on a board
05:46how familiar are you at your age with radios yeah i'm familiar you are familiar they are like yeah
05:51but i'm aware of them yeah because you probably haven't ever tuned a radio you've just gone on your
05:57phone yeah yeah i just kind of used i've never really tuned one no no no siri tuna radio
06:04on my radio i can still get the light program and the home service oh you don't even know i don't
06:10know what that means i was just i was happy for you though he's easily pleased i had a crystal radio
06:17when i was a little boy fantastic and i had a torch with three colors oh that's cool happy days happy days
06:24red yellow and i wonder i wanted to frighten myself i put on the green
06:33anybody got a follow-up anecdote okay let's move on to womble scropped i love the wombles
06:41is it to do with the wombles it's nothing to do with the wombles who was your favorite or inoko oh yeah
06:47because he's an idiot they're wumbling free in wimbledon still yeah the wombles are the wood
06:52pussy of our generation that's really i understand like one in three of your sentences
07:05no here's the thing michael if you want to sit closer to me that's fine
07:10i spent five years doing a podcast with susie dent ah yes and she loves these old words and she
07:16would say oh i'm feeling a bit womble strumped this morning and i said that mean you're feeling
07:21a bit queasy and she says yes probably more indigestion than being hungover yeah it is
07:27absolutely correct darling you do get two points for that
07:33i will send them to susie dent and i'll show you a picture of her later
07:39so it's indigestion but particularly after drinking after excess can i just tell you about one of my
07:44favorite studies this was one of last year's ig nobel prizes so it was for womble scropped worms and
07:50it was the chemists at the university of amsterdam and they figured out if you flush worms through a maze
07:57the drunk ones take longer to escape
08:02i wonder why this happened in amsterdam so these are sludge worms and they're found in the sediment of
08:07lakes and rivers and so on and what they found is that the drunk ones initially would go limp right and
08:12they'd be less resistant and they would float through the maze but it turned out that they got
08:17stuck on corners and pillars along the way a bit like drunk people latch onto lamp posts
08:27and so they took longer let's look at some other words anybody want to pick a word from there
08:32i quite like woodner is that like an edwardian viagra what is that that's very good uh any thoughts
08:39well daddy wooden top was woodener than mummy wooden top yes wooden top when i'm telling you later about
08:47i'll show you i've got some lovely old wooden top annuals okay michael
08:52say no i'm just asking for angela
09:10oh it worries me that you know that no so no it's a knockout punch uh a woodner so it makes the target
09:18seem to be like an unmoving plank it's from the early 20th century i would know michael pick one
09:23uh wee quashing okay what do you reckon is it toilet based no it comes from one of the algonquian
09:29languages so that's north american like cree or blackfoot or delaware or something does that help you
09:34me quashing like like a like a tribe yes darling like a like a native american tribe okay yeah so it's a
09:40native american tribe it's the spearing of eels from a canoe by candlelight oh wow that sounds like
09:51it's making it disproportionately difficult so unlike a fish spearing where you actually tab the thing
09:57the eel spears are designed to hold the eel between the times wow you can see how havelock ellis would
10:03have been interested in all this sort of stuff what other words have we got alan do you want to
10:09choose one a weeple is a wonky steeple it's a wonky something is it a dyslexic nun's wimple
10:19there was this dyslexic nun it's the beginning of a barry crier joke i like that something man-made
10:25is it a garment no it's a very feeble whistle a weeple weeple yeah it's 18th century you know about
10:34jiminy cricket give a little whistle can you do a proper whistle no no so you are in fact a person
10:45who does a weeple so the people most prone to weeple apart from michael are astronauts in 1999 the nasa
10:51astronaut daniel barry discovered he could not whistle in a space suit because the air pressure
10:57inside is three and a half times lower than normal atmospheric pressure on earth and so there's not
11:01enough air molecules to blow through the lips so you just do a weeple i never could whistle until
11:06i got a dog and i love my dog so much that i realized another range of communication would be
11:11denied between us if i didn't learn to whistle so my weeple turned into a whistle because of a little
11:16wirehead dachshund oh i love that and if the dachshund could speak it goes shut the fuck up yes
11:23i had longer legs it would go like that
11:32i think we've got one word left on our list giles well where you go nimble is it a kind of jack
11:38and apes a where do you go nimble it sounds like a victorian hen party after a where are you going
11:42and balls well after you've been to a hen party you might have this it is um it's a loosening of the
11:47bowels oh what sort of hen parties have you been going to it's diarrhoea basically one of my worst
11:54things oh i love it yeah just one of your worst things yeah one of my worst discharge is it
12:00oh it's not one of my worst charges not even in the top three
12:10i don't know if you two might discuss that later
12:14right moving on what is the use of handwriting now that we've all got computers everything okay
12:19i mean this seriously okay you can't write a love poem on a computer
12:24if you want something from the heart it has to come through the hand
12:27i really believe this but i don't think you're far off giles because the thing is that
12:31the movements that you do in handwriting require you to process information actively
12:36and that means there are many more links between regions of the brain which process information
12:40and the ones responsible for memory for example so i think you're right
12:43i think there is an unlocking of creativity when you use handwriting do you hand write
12:47anything michael yeah i mean i like uh you know like love notes yes you know exactly you up you
12:54know send that by
13:08how old were you when you first began to practice your autograph
13:14must have been about four i suppose but not because i thought of it as my autograph oh didn't you
13:18develop it most people i think will have developed their autograph over the years worked out how
13:22the full name for an allen one l two l's all this no no i feel the male psyche is fascinating
13:28i know isn't it i was always writing people i fancied names that's what i was doing yeah i
13:34spent lots of time doing that did you practice michael did you practice my autograph just like
13:38normally like in detention you know just being right were you a naughty boy a little bit he's
13:44getting more exciting by the minute
13:49practicing my signature came into its own when i signed the largest check in the history of this
13:55country when you were the lord commissioner of the treasury i was a lord commissioner of the
13:58treasury and i signed a check for 137 billion pounds what did you buy social security payments
14:06first quarter uh every bit of government expenditure has to be signed off by a treasury minister and
14:13i was the junior treasury minister the lord commissioner of the treasury who had to do this
14:17they explained to me with these big checks the billion pound checks you'll be doing them with
14:21the head of the treasury i said who's that they said it was the queen so i would go down the mile
14:25with the government checkbook to sign these huge checks with the queen our signatures together
14:30and the first time i did this i wasn't sure what the etiquette was you know i didn't want to
14:32patronize her because she was a woman saying after you oh and he'd pull rank because i was the elected
14:37one anyway she was she was holding the pen and she seemed to think she should sign first so i let
14:47her big loopy handwriting elizabeth r and then i put mine underneath almost as big but i know my place
14:54and the last time we did this this was the check for 137 billion pounds it was she who told me it was
14:59the largest check uh she had ever signed and she said you know the way the government insists on the
15:03two of us signing these checks i can't help wondering which of the two of it is the government doesn't
15:08entirely trust now somebody dies without making a will what's a fun way to decide who gets what
15:26the race yeah that's a good idea the money's over there go go what's your rank i don't know whoever
15:37whoever loved him most and then you just kind of go from there you've had no dealings with the law have you
15:44i feel very bad about this oh do you well because over the years i have inadvertently killed a number of people
15:50i have just realized the queen is no longer with us
16:06when i was a child i was in the choir at holy trinity brompton and we were paid a shilling a
16:13week for services two shillings for weddings but five shillings i'll tell you what they are later five
16:18shillings for funerals yeah so we wanted funerals we were little boys who wanted death in our midst
16:25so we would during the prayers we would eye up the congregation as we were praying through our hands
16:31like this and we'd focus on the frailest looking member of the congregation and then we would all
16:38simultaneously pray for this person to die
16:47and god loves a young entrepreneur
16:52because week after week these old buggers fell off the fact
16:57many of them unfortunately dying intestate because without a will without a will so that is the point
17:03so i feel guilty that people don't die without needing a will but if they were old and frail
17:08by then they really should have had wills they should have known better they weren't like if michael
17:12didn't have a will it would be more understandable than no offense if you didn't have a will
17:20i've got stuff i've got like tamagotchis so i can give
17:22valuable stuff have you made a will i've not made a world no but in the uk if you die without a will
17:30your assets automatically will go to your spouse or your to your civil partner or you know a portion
17:35to your children if you have any so we're going to south america in the indigenous communities like
17:39the aimara people of the andes so ecuadorian salascans the canelos they traditionally gambled
17:46for the deceased's possessions in a game with dice called juero so they use dice which look like
17:53this made from the bones of donkeys or llamas or oxen and so on and what i like about this they play
17:58the game at the wake right yeah so the person's died there's no will and then they play with these
18:05dice to work out who's going to do so they put the coffin beside the players and it's believed that
18:10their spirit will reach out to affect the game to affect the roles and so on and that means that their
18:15intentions will be honored even if it hasn't been written down i think this is a fantastic way of
18:21doing it if somebody from the salascan community dies without getting married what they do is they
18:25place a chicken or a cockerel by the coffin to stand in for the would-be spouse and the dead person's
18:33hand is made to touch the chicken so that they're married and the idea is that then have a companion
18:39in afterlife and afterwards the chicken gets to live with the bereaved family and then it gets a funeral
18:45of its own when it dies yes i know aren't we weird we're ahring a chicken it's so they let the
18:51chicken die of like natural causes yes they don't eat it they don't not fried no no no add some seasoning
18:56yeah yeah i mean suddenly you're making it sound very tempting yeah it does sound good in india there's
19:02a group of people who uh eat their own relatives they eat well actually eat their grandparents
19:07um when they've died i don't know what to do with that i'll be honest what happens is this you see
19:20they actually they when the grandparents die they put them into the river yeah and then the fish eat
19:25them and then the children and the grandchildren eat the fish it's to carry on michael you don't have
19:31to have to believe all of it stay away from the man it's gone to one in five i understand yeah
19:38what do we think a holographic will is oh it's like in star wars perry fisher comes up yeah i'm
19:46leaving you half the house you're getting maybe it has a bit of pointing you're getting nothing you're
19:55getting nothing doing it all to the cat so a holographic will is one that's written entirely
20:01by hand and it can be problematic because it doesn't have the right terminology there's a very
20:06famous court case uh it's called thorn and dickens in 1906 and it was a three-word holographic will and
20:12it just said all for mother okay and it's often used as an example of the importance of clarity in
20:18documents the man's widow claimed that mother referred to her that they used to refer to each other
20:23as father and mother and his actual mother challenged it but in the end the court ruled in
20:29the wife's favor but you can see how it's complicated right you just think what does that exactly mean
20:34what words spring to mind when you think of a steamy blowing room full of male strippers members of
20:40parliament
20:46it's a question about weaving weaving yes these are all terms from victorian cotton mills
20:51how does that help anybody at all can you say the sentence again the steamy blowing room full of male
20:57strippers a spinning jenny it's the only thing you know about weaving that's it what is a spinning jenny
21:05something about a loom you didn't have to do it yourself because you've got jenny to do it
21:14there's steam in the room there is yes so here's the thing about cotton is that you need to keep it
21:19artificially hot and moist in order to keep the threads from breaking this is very very important
21:24and it's one of the reasons why lancashire for example was very famous for cotton weaving because
21:28it often rains and the air is very damp but first of all they have to smooth the raw cotton by
21:33perhaps passing steam through it so this is in the blowing room then there is the carding room
21:37and then there is drawing and roving this is what's happening here but you mentioned male strippers
21:42and these are girls yes so stripping was seen as a man's job because it required more strength and the
21:46women on the whole did the weaving but why do you think there was so much kissing going on
21:50kissing it's bored in it yes it's a technique it's a delicate technique for plucking of
22:02something that needed to be plucked i mean you're heading in the right direction so i don't know if
22:05you've ever seen a shuttle i do a lot of weaving myself and i have many of these old you do a lot of
22:10weaving i do darling and so you get an old shuttle and the thread has to go through the eye of the shuttle
22:15and so the easiest way to do it was to suck it in and it was called kissing the shuttle when your
22:20wife said let's do some kissing the shuttle she didn't think you were going to get a loom sandy she
22:27she's from lancashire i didn't understand anything she was saying
22:31but once industrialization kicked in then kissing the shuttle became incredibly unhygienic the government
22:36set up a shuttle kissing committee in order to deal that it had to be banned because it was unhygienic but
22:42the machinery was so loud in order to get their point across to each other they would exaggerate
22:48the mouthing and the miming and the lip reading and it's known as me-moing me-moing me-moing yeah
22:53and every mill had its own dialect even though this is your mouthing words and people were able even to
22:59have private conversations by holding their hands over their mouth like that and i know this because
23:04my wife's family oh me-mo and i went to a party at a working men's club and it was a bingo
23:10and karaoke night and the bingo and the karaoke was happening at the same time
23:16and they were all having these long conversations but they were me-moing to each other you have married
23:21very well haven't you they're absolutely the most glorious people and uh debbie's auntie betty came
23:27up to me and she looked at me and she went which was you're off the telly but we get a lot we get
23:35a lot from weaving the word rocket that we use comes from weaving it means the bobbin it comes from an
23:40italian word rocchetto it's the cylindrical shape and shuttle we use the shuttle like trains for example
23:47so things are going very fast what's the biggest thing you've ever woven i once did a complete
23:53tapestry of the story of the wizard of oz what the buyer of oz who was with william wordsworth when
24:03he wandered as lonely as a cloud in a field of golden daffodils alan titchmarsh
24:11wandered lonely as a cloud there's stuff about that isn't there there was jiggery pokery around how
24:16that got written and when well some people think he originally wrote i wandered lonely as a cow which
24:20i rather prefer yeah but who do you think he was with giles knows i think i do know yes darling he
24:28was with his sister he's right yeah he was always with his sister okay even when he was with his wife
24:35he was with his sister it's quite a strange relationship his sister was the meaning of his
24:40life in many ways they were brought up i think separately yes and when they came together they
24:46really became almost inseparable they loved one another i think in a perfectly lovely way they
24:51loved gambling across the moors together the hills it's all happening in cumbria lake district and then
24:57he got married and that created a bit of tension his wife was called mary is that right yeah so she's
25:02called dorothy and mary became a friend of dorothy um but in a nice way he got a better artist to do
25:11his drawing yes but it is quite a strange relationship the night before he got married to mary he allowed
25:18dorothy to wear the wedding ring and in the morning he took the ring off dorothy's finger she refused to go
25:25to the actual ceremony and when she learned it was done she became as they say insensible and she never
25:31married that dog's got stories to tell hasn't it but so the story of the poem they were exploring
25:39ullswater together dorothy and william 1802 so this is the lovely footpath from galbarrow down to
25:45ullswater isn't it beautiful and she wrote about it in her diary which he would have read because he
25:50was this way he did his sister is that what we're saying
25:52if that's what you're into what you need to know about is lord byron okay
26:05this is especially this subject well lord byron i think possibly did have it away with his
26:10half-sister who was called aurora there's no evidence that the act of darkness took place
26:16between dorothy and william but what you should know is all of these poets they were constantly
26:20bickering with each other because you mentioned lord byron william once bad-mouthed the works of
26:23alexander pope who was another poet and he was seriously admired by lord byron and byron was so
26:29angry he renamed william wordsworth william turdsworth so but she talks about the fact that they were
26:36in galbarrow park and saw daffodils close to the water so it was definitely a thing that they did
26:42together which i he becomes quite a grumpy old man because originally look at this place it's
26:47fantastic and when he was young he said everybody must have access to this place equal access to
26:53nature and so on and he wanted the lake district to become a sort of national park and everything
26:57but then as he got older he got very cross with the working class invading the place by train
27:03and also he'd become a sort of tourist attraction people used to go and knock on his window when
27:06he was sitting and they want to go hi you're willie wordsworth hi but anyway wonderful poet if you
27:13haven't read it the prelude oh oh it's magnificent it's one of the greatest poems ever this poem basically
27:21it tells the story of his poetic awakening and it's almost the story of his life and he and the people
27:27around him they really invented our modern view of the world our view of childhood and nature would you
27:32not agree i would i mean the way he talks about nature both being in awe and in fear of it is just
27:37magnificent but did he write that or did dorothy i mean that's a very good question and we'll never
27:43know but the opening of the prelude is so beautiful it talks about a pinnace which is a kind of ship
27:48she was an elf in pinnace lustily i dipped my oars into the silent lake and as i rose upon the stroke my
27:55boat went heaving through the water like a swan isn't it magnificent wonderful or filth
28:02she rose upon the stroke
28:15my whole career trying to get us back on track
28:19now for a question about some very famous books with no words i'm going to show you a picture of
28:24our live studio audience let's settle this once and for all where is wally one point to the first
28:30person who can spot him on the panel alan was first have you seen him can you yeah you see him in the
28:35hat put your hand up there he is okay okay how did you discover him i mean you were the first it was
28:41quickest right happy top but also i'd spotted him before you asked i thought why why is that man
28:48wearing a hat how annoying for the fellow behind him you can take it off one of our wonderful elves joe
28:58these are these books they were published in 1987 where's wally and it's uh books by an illustrator
29:03called martin hanford but what i love is that somebody has done a mathematical calculation as to the
29:07the quickest way to find wally and it's the optimal search path for where he is going to be in any
29:13picture can we put the graph over the top so that we can see it's a wow looks like the way to uranus
29:22it has sold more copies these wears wally books than winnie the pooh has it i know and in the beginning
29:27there was no wally in them okay there was i know it was just something that was added in to give the
29:32reader something to do did you have these books when yeah i caught them nobody asked how is wally
29:36so you're making sure you're you're good you're good one yeah i love a whole book of wally's thoughts
29:44jesus i can't i can get no peace
29:48every time i go he's in it's wally
29:51i just came out for some fags
29:53no one gives a shit about me no one literally no one cares only michael the first person who's ever
30:07thought of how well he is so this is the optimal search path if you have a look that has been
30:14calculated by data i love this a data analyst has sorted this out randall olson the white line
30:19is an approximation but these books called swarming picture books books with lots lots of pictures
30:24full of movement they've been really popular since the 16th century and probably the most famous of
30:29these women builders is hieronymus bosch's the garden of earthly delights painted in the early 1500s
30:36and if we zoom in to the bottom right hand corner one of the hidden features of the painting is a
30:42naked woman with a small piece of written music across her bottom that's cheryl cole
30:49the earliest tattoo they're right that's the girls allowed
30:55but what i love is that somebody thought oh i'll see if i can play that
30:59yeah there's a woman called amelia hammerick she's a student from oklahoma christian university and she
31:04recorded it on a combination of lute harp and hurdy-gurdy and she called the piece the 500 year old butt song
31:10from hell we don't have a copy of it but apparently she described it as not very good
31:20we have these books in denmark but everybody uses a different name so where's waldo is the american
31:24version that's the american version so in denmark it's finn holger so holger is the person in finn to
31:29look for willie in norway charlie in france apparently waldo in the united states it was changed
31:34because wally the publisher thought it sounded too much like wallace simpson yeah yes and for a
31:40while the first where's waldo was briefly banned in the united states because one page had a topless
31:45sunbather she now wears a bikini oh that's martin hanford who did all the drawings he's right there
31:52are you going to share with us the myth or is it the truth about the origin of the phrase where's
32:04wally are you talking about the story from the 1970 isle of white festival yeah is that not true
32:08well i mean it's such a good story that i think it probably could be true so during the 1970
32:15isle of white festival somebody called wally got lost in the crowds there are people who say it was
32:19actually a dog called wally anyway either way people started calling wally during the festival
32:24and it began sort of resonating through the festival and people took it up and it became repeated at
32:28british festivals for years afterwards because there's nothing we like better than an old joke we love
32:33an old joke i am sparticus yes exactly that you're supposed to say that after me anyway then go on
32:40i think you're fine yeah honestly we don't really know and i think the potential for altered minds at the
32:48festival may mean this is misremembered funny that they always draw glasses as if the whole eye
32:55yes right in the middle does homer simpson have that i imagine that oh no he what he put glasses on
33:01with eyes on yeah but he could sleep when he was on jury duty and he looked like he was awake you have a busy
33:09life don't you and now for a question about about oh what the hell is it called do you know when you
33:17what's the thing when you can't remember a word uh tot what tip of the tongue yes tip of the tongue
33:22syndrome what's it called in sign language
33:24i mean that almost looked offensive um top tip of the finger syndrome
33:35really tip of the finger syndrome oh it's lovely do you ever happen to you it's really it can't i mean
33:40it's i i think it might i can't remember what i'm trying to say what's the question
33:45at this stage in life the brain fog they say it's the nouns that go first i forgot the word for
33:51polyamory today the other people in the bed didn't care
33:58i did care but i had to get up
34:01there's a very right down the bottom
34:05there's the most most wonderful old barry cryer joke there's two old men sitting chatting at the
34:10kitchen table and the and the wives are just uh obviously busy washing up and the bloke says to
34:15the other bloke he says oh it's the most fantastic restaurant last night and he says oh yeah what was
34:19it called he says oh what's the hell was it called what's that thing what's that lovely smelling flower
34:25with thorns and he goes rose and he goes yeah rose what's the name of that restaurant
34:36anyway people use placeholders when they can't remember a word so there are some fantastic words
34:40that have been used over many many years washicle which is like what shall we call it yeah that's good
34:46there is a wang doodle oh a wang do dingum thingum is very good from 1684 thingum thingum
34:52uja capivi do you think uja capivi he said that in quite an italian way i did ah yes did you read
34:59about the lady who had a stroke and woke up speaking with an italian accent there's a black lady on tiktok
35:04yeah really now we're talking now exactly if i may say so you up yeah yeah i don't think that one
35:16no not two of you the chemistry's right then you know but yeah okay go on
35:23do you not up no you know stay down stay down
35:28this is great dutch ones actually what are these mean these are all sort of place words that you use
35:32when you can't think of a thing uh so samazingo is turkish i like dinskirchen it's german for
35:40you forget a place and it just means thing church you know what's the name yeah what about the remote
35:46control would you call the remote control for the television just call it remote control or do you
35:50have some thingamajig sometimes i call it that yeah yeah which one do you want i mean there are
35:56several normally lying around the house there is that tv licensing in 2016 did a survey and they found
36:00that people in the uk have over a hundred words for the remote control after remote the second most
36:06common was doofer zapper clicker flicker thingamajig and whatchamacallit in oxford it's the thing in
36:13wales they call them panic buttons and all the hanton the turny over machine
36:21in holland lots of the houses have floor to ceiling sort of glass um windows so like big glass and there's
36:27a tradition you don't shut your curtains in the evening and one of the things that the youths
36:31of the neighborhood used to do where my parents-in-law used to live is they should just go by with
36:35remote controls and change the channel now it's time to horse around with some general ignorance fingers
36:42on buzzers please what feature can bbc viewers turn on to let them read exactly what i am saying
36:48subtitles i'd assume so subtitles translate speech from different languages right so you can be
36:58watching a korean program and then you can uh watch it in english or you can read it in english what is
37:04the thing if i want somebody who speaks english to exactly see written down what it is is it closed
37:11captions it's closed captions you're absolutely right don't trust them michael okay because they're
37:16often done by a computer yes i know this because when i was watching the replay of margaret thatcher's
37:22funeral yeah um when i was watching this it had these closed captions and when they got to the bit
37:34where the voiceover was i read it it said the archbitch will now speak
37:39that was an error that was an error okay yeah how long ago do you think that they were able to
37:49put written speech onto a film oh 1970 long time ago this is a long time ago yes no i'd say but
37:56i'm going to say the 1930s or something no 1903 1903 yes before my time i mean just um
38:04um uncle tom's cabin 1903 edwin porters had inter titles between the scenes and then his 1907 film
38:12college chums he managed to i have to say this is really impressive this is 1907 look at that
38:17embedded into the picture don't you think that's like a wes anderson doesn't i think it's really
38:22impressive what's he saying darling don't darling me oh that girl you were with in the park today no
38:33what was the problem with using text in in pictures like this in 1903 going international maybe yes the
38:41high degree of illiteracy yeah it was a serious issue i'm just worried the first ever dick pics about to
38:45fly across the screen it was 1909 that they very first were put at the bottom of the screen that's
38:52when we get the closed captions the words on your screen are captions subtitles are subtly different
38:57now you may know that frankenstein is not the name of the monster but the person who created it victor
39:01frankenstein what qualifications did he have was he a butcher do you know of all the things we thought you
39:08might say i remember years ago going to see edna average live and she said to somebody in the
39:17audience what color is your house darling and the person said beige and there was a really long pause
39:22and she went yes you forget about beige don't you don't have to get a joke for every single color
39:31not that i've got nothing for butcher nothing nothing at all well it's not going to be doctor is it no it
39:36isn't doctor we don't get him to be a doctor until he's first portrayed in a romantic clay it has
39:42no qualifications whatsoever oh he's an influencer so mary shelley wrote the book in 1818 can i just say
39:58this is one of my favorite stories of all time about misunderstanding something so part of her
40:02inspiration for frankenstein came and this was in her own introduction to the book from a belief that
40:08pasta could come to life pasta yes so she discussed an experiment which was performed by erasmus darwin
40:16who was joss darwin's grandfather in which and this is quoting her preserved a piece of vermicelli in a
40:23glass case till by some extraordinary means it began to move with a voluntary motion
40:28and she had misremembered the word erasmus darwin claimed to have reanimated
40:33vorticelli which are tiny wriggly worm-like creatures and not vermicelli which is pasta
40:42during the gold war if you cross the berlin wall
40:45coming from east germany which country would you end up in west germany
40:50you're going to be in west berlin right yes and the thing about west berlin wasn't legally or
41:00constitutionally a part of either west or was it in the soviet union at that sort of weirdly wasn't
41:05anything so you get the partition of the city it's divided between the us the uk france and the
41:11soviet union by the yalta conference in 1945 but the west was run by france britain and the united states
41:17as a completely independent territory it wasn't officially part of any country it was sort of a
41:22no man's land i wish i'd known you were bringing this up because i've got at home a bit of the
41:27berlin wall oh so have i a little fragment yeah did you go i took we took our children thinking this
41:33was going to be it was too important not to go and we went with our children and we helped there were
41:37lots of east germans and west germans were helping pull it down and so there are lots of souvenirs
41:42everywhere and each of our children took a souvenir home that was extraordinary 1990 it was i'm glad
41:47we've kept our bit because they may be putting it up again soon and we could take it back
41:53there's technically a bit of east germany that still exists anybody know where it is
41:58it's in cuba 1972 fidel castro gave one of the cuban islands to east germany as a gift for their
42:04communist alliance and it was called cayo blanco del sur and castro renamed it ernst talman island
42:11so ernst talman ran the german communist party in 1925 to 1933 and when the berlin wall came down
42:19nobody mentioned the island so strictly speaking still east germany michael you have been just
42:26wonderful i just want to apologize for the seating arrangements this is my best friend now
42:35now i'm afraid the writing is on the wall as we come to the matter of the scores our winner tonight
42:40well i'm lost for words six whole points it's kelly
42:48in second place as good as their word with four points it's michael
42:53in third place on the streets with one point alan
43:00in last place oh dear it's a complete write-off minus one it's giles
43:08so thank you to michael giles cali and alan and i leave you with the last words of the poet dylan thomas
43:17i just had 18 straight whiskies i think that's a record good night
43:30so thank you
43:33so thank you
43:35so thank you
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