No Such Thing As A Fish - No Such Thing As An X

Episode Date: August 24, 2023

Dan, James, Andrew and Susie Dent discuss algorithms, calculations, 'X's and 'Oh No's. Visit nosuchthingasafish.com for news about live shows, merchandise and more episodes.  Join Club Fish for ad-free episodes and exclusive bonus content at apple.co/nosuchthingasafish or nosuchthingasafish.com/patreon

Hey everyone, Dan here. Welcome to this week's episode of Fish. Before we get going, I just want to let you know about today's guest. Joining us this week, we were so excited to be joined by someone who is genuinely British nerd royalty. It is, of course, the lexicographer, the star of dictionary corner from Countdown, and eight out of ten cats does countdown, and that is Susie Dent. Now, Susie Dent is someone that we, you know, we basically monitor her Twitter account on a 24-hour basis. She's just always pumping out incredible words with these definitions, and you've never heard them before, and we've never met her before. So this was such an exciting moment for us, not only to be able to meet her in person, have a nice chat, but also to sit down with her on stage in front of a crowd and dork out with her. So, yeah, I really hope you enjoy the episode. We absolutely loved it. And outside of that, I just want to quickly mention that you need to get your hands on Susie's two new upcoming books. The first one comes out September 28th, and that one is called Interesting Stories About Curious Words. So it's sort of all those phrases that we know, stealing thunder, red herrings, but what do they actually mean? So this book is going to be looking into all those phrases and terms on your behalf so that you now know who was Sweet Fannie Adams,

why are circles vicious? All those questions that you might have had, she's put it into an ultimate compendium to explain it all. So that's out September 28th. But then on the 5th of October, she also has a book coming out called Roots of Happiness. A hundred words for Joy and Hope, and that is a book for kids. Basically, Susie had the idea when looking through a dictionary that there's far too many negative words in there and that we should be highlighting the more happy ones, the more uplifting ones. So, reading directly from a blurb here, it's going to lift you out of your mubble fubbles,

which is a slightly sad mood, make you grin like a giggle mug, which is someone who never stop smiling and have you feeling for bliss extremely happy so do pick up both those books but until then enjoy susie here live at the soho theater with no such thing as a fish on with the show and welcome to another episode of no such thing as a fish a weekly podcast this week coming to you live from the soho theater in london my name is dan schreiber i'm sitting here with james harkin andrew hunter murray and susy dent and once again we have gathered around our microphones with our four favorite facts from the last seven days, and in a particular order, here we go. Starting with fact number one, and that is Susie. Okay, Samuel Johnson, in his dictionary of the English language

from 1755, decided that he would not include any words beginning with the letter X because he said, thus begins no word in the English language. That's my fact. And is that true? Were we xylophone-lis at this point? Yeah, xylophone was a century later. But also, he was quite, Quite picky. You know how lexicographer is today? We are really careful about not giving any opinion whatsoever. Even with words like Trumpariness, which is my favourite, meaning something completely showy but utterly worthless. We're not allowed to say anything. But he was notoriously rude to the Scots, you know, about Americans. So I think he probably didn't have much truck with anything from Greek. Okay, right. But we did have X words at the time. We had a few X words, but a lot of them came later. Lovely words. All for you. from Greek, like Zenium, which is a gift to strangers, which I think is really nice. But what's lovely is that it came from the Phoenicians, and they had a letter Samek, which actually gave the letter S, we think.

But that meant fish. So you could say there's no such thing as an X. Oh. That's quite cool. Well, that's the title of the episode. Exactly. Yeah. It's like the quickest we've ever got our title as well?

Definitely. Wow. Did they have xenophobia in those days? They have a xenophobia. xenophobia, I think most phobias are based on Greek, but we kind of made them up a little bit later, but we based them on classical things. Like coolrophobia, fear of clowns, which I have.

They didn't have clowns in ancient Greece, so they chose the word for stilt walker. Oh, did they? Yeah, it's quite cool. And are you also afraid of them because of the sort of knock-on? Well, no, I like stilts. Oh, okay. Yeah.

But yeah, clowns definitely not. Really? No. Have you seen the new, is it the smiler? The horror? No. Okay, don't. Wow.

The reason I ask about xenophobia is because Johnson, as you say, probably didn't like the Scots very much. No, didn't like the Americans. Didn't like the French, for sure. He predicted that he'd write the dictionary in three years. And then when someone pointed out that it'd taken the French 40 years to write their own dictionary, he said, well, this is proportion. 40 times 40 is 1600, as 3 to 6.000.

1600s, so is the proportion of an Englishman to a Frenchman. Yeah. Right. Yeah. Wow. So 42,000 words made it into this first dictionary that he did, right? 42,000 definitions. And he had self-deprecating jokes that he kind of included in there, which is quite fun.

So, yeah, the word for dull, the description for the word dull. He explained, to make dictionaries is dull work as part of his description. And then also the definition of lexicographer. he wrote a writer of dictionaries, a harmless drudge. Yeah. Oh look, you know it by heart. Yeah, Susie.

That's incredible. And also he was quite, he would never admit that he didn't know a word, which was quite funny. So, or the origin of a word. So spider, I loved, he couldn't quite get to the root of spider. So he just said,

is this not the insect that spies from a door? And everyone said, it's not an insect, mate. It's no rat did. Exactly. It just feels like such a... Like the any old bollocks era of study. Just feels like such a great time to be alive.

Dan, you would have absolutely... I would have been... Thrived. I would have been king back then, yeah. Yeah. That is true. He was one of the last people in England to be touched for scrofieler.

Oh, yeah. So cool. That's such a horrible word, scrofula, isn't? Scrofula, yeah. And it's just a skin condition and the monarch would touch people and effectively cure them, ineffectively cure them,

of Scrofieler. And Sammy Johnson's parents took him to London from his hometown when he was three years old. You know, your local parish would maybe club together, raise the money, they'd send you off and the queen, the monarch would touch you.

Big cues as well, right? Huge cues. Charles II, I thought, we might have mentioned this before, he touched something like 2% of the population of England. Wow. Wow. Yeah. Steady. It was a different time, wasn't it?

It was a very different time. And Johnson had a gold coin. He had a queen. The touch piece, which is the sort of... It didn't work, though. And actually, he's quite disfigured his face through scrofula, which is very sad. Yeah, yeah.

Yeah, and there's some really weird but lovely etymologies in there. So tarantula is an insect, he does say, call it an insect again, whose bite can only be cured by music. Because it was thought it could be cured by the Tarantella at the dark. Wow. Was that proper doctor's advice at the time? Yeah, that was the belief. Really? Wow.

Is there a doctor in the house? Dr. Johnson? Yes. Get a herdy-gurdy to this woman now. And then he had retromingency, which means pissing backwards. That's how we're to find out. When you say pissing backwards,

you don't mean sucking it up into your body, right? Oh. Is that possible? I hope not. I think it's like some animals, their penis points backwards, right? And so a retrimingent mammal, it pisses on the back of its feet.

It sounds cool. Is that right, I think? This is a bit like Roy Keen saying, shove it up your bollocks. He's like, shove it up your bollocks. But it does feel sometimes when you need to pee

and you don't want to that the hold has a suck action to it as well. Does... Am I alone hearing that? I rather think you might be alone in that. No, no, no, but properly think about it. You're kind of like, I really need to pee

and you're going, you are, I am. I am. There's word for that as well. If you are holding on so tight, It's piss you pressed. And what does... It's in the dictionary. That means desperate.

It's used of forces mostly. It's kind of desperate to pee, but holding it in. Piss you crest. Piss you press. It's like piss suppressed. Ah, that's possible. But don't do it, Dan. Skip for the car.

Ticobrihi supposedly died from doing that, didn't he? Oh, yeah. He was at a dinner. He was, yeah, famous astronomer, and he was at a dinner, and he was too polite. Yeah, and his bladder exploded. Oh. So don't do that, Dan. Well, he, I imagine Johnson would have had to pee a lot,

because supposedly he could drink in one sitting, 25 cups of tea in one go. No. He loved his tea. He loved his food. Boswell wrote about this. Boswell would say that to watch him eat was like watching the most intense thing ever.

He would not have any conversation. He was just rampaging through his food. The veins on his head were like pulsating. He was just a man obsessed with needing to get the, and he did that with reading as well. He would just have to read really hard. And 25 cups of tea is what I read as well. Wow.

That is amazing. He lived at the same time as Francis Gross, who really was gross by figure. Yeah, right. So Johnson always chose the classical references for his dictionary. He was quite a purist originally anyway. And then Francis Gross went to the brothels and the taverns and picked up all the street slang. And I don't know if they ever met.

But they would have had a good dinner party. They would have known about each other, do you think? I think they would, yeah. So while he's sort of harmlessly drudging away, he's thinking of this other guy who's going to have... fun. Having fun, yeah. Must have been terrible.

Yeah. I like some of his definitions. So the word etch is a country word of which I know not the meaning. The word defliction. The definition is a defliction. That's a real Friday afternoon word, isn't it? I got to get to the brothel. 25 cups of tea waiting just across the room.

Oh. That's great. A sock, something put between the foot and the shoe. It's good. Lunch. This is good. Lunch, as much food as one's hand can hold. Oh, there is a word for that.

A gaupin and a yepsen. So a gaupin is as much as you can hold in a single hand. And I think Yepsen is two hands. So biscuits, good for biscuit measurements, I think. That's brilliant. I've got a couple of X-word things. Oh, yeah? Yeah.

So the word x-ray. Do you know what the X and X-ray stands for? Unknown? Unknown. Just X. He didn't know what it was. I'm just going to put X here for now. When they work out what it is, we can change them.

It just hasn't been changed. Maybe called Rundken rays. That would be a nightmare. Is that who? It was a child. Runken, he was called from Germany, wasn't he? So, yeah, runken rays. Runkn-rays.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Maybe you know this one. The X-Men. Why are they called the X-Men? Oh, I don't know idea. Is it because they spend all their time on Twitter? Yes. Yeah.

Well, I thought it was because Professor X, Professor Xavier, Professor X, X, X, X, The X, yeah. But no, it's Extra Power, which was said in a comic book. Oh, really? Yeah, and just while we're, if you insist, we continue on X-Men, just discovered an amazing character from X-Men today that I've never heard of before. So did you know that there's a character in X-Men called Forget Me Not?

No, I didn't know that. You don't, because they don't either. Because if he is out of your sight, no one can remember him. Amazing. So the first time we meet him is someone from X-Men going, hey, how you doing? And he's like, I've been here six years.

And no one can remember this guy. That's a great superpower. Not if you want to be part of the team. Yeah, but for robbing a bank. Yeah. Go in, you rob a bank, you leave. That's true. They just carry on with their day.

I think that's a really good superpower. I think the superhero. I think the superhero. generally aren't robbing the banks. But Professor X, the only reason he knew he existed because he set like an alarm on his iPhone or whatever to remind him every so often, like, forget me you're not, the character in our comic book.

Oh, okay, cool. Wait, Professor X isn't aware that it's a comic book that he's taken part of it. I was just, yeah, I was leaving. I broke the fourth wall there for him. Anyway, I don't know, all right. Thanks for letting me get that out. I've got another X for you.

Oh, yeah. X when you watch things like at not the normal speed Like one point... Times two times one point five. Yeah, exactly times, yeah, yeah. Okay, just a quick show of like, who here regularly watches things sped up? Who regularly listens to podcasts sped up?

Who? Okay, that's really interesting. I know, our voices are probably like, why are they talking so slow on stage? Hello, I'm welcome to another episode, yeah. Does anyone listen to our podcast sped up? Slow down. Slow down.

Slow it down. Slow it, slow it, right? Yeah. Good. Do you follow an etiquette for your exes on messages? Because I was having this conversation with brilliant Greg Jenner, the historian. Oh, yeah. And so he said ex has only just been kind of okay in the last 10 years.

He put on a platonic text, you know, between friends. XX is more romantic. And he would never put three X's. And I said, why? I put three X's to my best friend all the time. He looked up on his phone, all porn. I didn't realize. Did you realise that?

That might be saying something about Greg's phone. No. No, three X means love, right? Yeah, you think so. But the interesting thing about that is the first use we have of adding X for kisses or a greeting like that is from 1763 and they did seven X's.

Wow. That's a lot, isn't it, to just go straight in with seven. Whoa. Yeah. Yeah, that's intense. That's huge. According to the OED. Because I thought it's like a Christian X. Well, yeah, they think that it was like a blessing.

because it was like the cross. Yeah. But yeah. Oh, I heard, well, this is in relation to X-rated, that it was based on the skull and crossbones, maybe. Oh, really? Yeah.

It was exclusively films which featured pirate activity. Yeah. Do you know why Blue Joke is called Blue? Sorry? Do you know why Blue joke is blue? No. No.

Because censors used to have a blue pencil and also sex workers in prison had to wear blue gowns. Oh, really? That's great. Blue gowns? Blue gowns, yeah. Are they prisoners in this?

In prisoners. Sorry, I thought they were like visiting. Blue uniforms. Uniforms. Got it. They weren't. They weren't free things. Imagine you've got to visit your friend.

Sorry, we've run out of the white for visitors. Do you mind wearing blue, Andy, while you... No problem. What a visit I've had. Good Lord. We just lost the cocaine. Sorry. Too much?

It is time for fact number two and that is James. Okay, my fact this week is that in 1986 a group of maths teachers organised a protest in Washington, D.C., against the use of calculators in schools. Their protests failed because they couldn't get the numbers. That felt a bit ironic.

At that moment, you became a dad. That's such a good fact. Yeah, I just thought maybe time for a numbers round, see the Susie's here. Yeah. I bet you're the first person to make that connection since 1986. I bet no one even did at the time as well.

Do you know what I think? Well, it was a math's, it was a gathering of 6,000 maths teachers that they were at protesting about calculators. It wasn't a massive story in the newspapers, I must admit. But it was in the newspapers, and like you say,

it was the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics, so they were all maths teachers, There were 6,000 of them there, and there were about 15 of them, we think, who had placards and songs, and they were protesting against calculolics because they thought that these kids,

because they were using calculators, they wouldn't be able to do normal maths. They would just kind of rely on them and they wouldn't be able to do any kind of multiplication or anything like that. Yeah, it was a simpler time, wasn't it? It was. Oh, no, our kids in their screens.

What sort of terrible stuff are they doing? Typing in boobs upside down. It was a more innocent time. Yeah. Yeah, their slogans are amazing. The button's nothing till the brain's trained. And they chanted calculators later, we shall not be moved. Calculators later is good.

They interviewed them in the newspaper I was reading. They interviewed the leader, John Saxon, who organized this whole thing. And they said, well, Mr. Saxon, why are there no teachers? You know, why have you only got 15 people? And he said, teachers don't like to demonstrate because they are shy. Fair enough. I guess mental arithmetic is an important thing. I read something about you, Susie.

I want to know if this is something you still do. But according to an interview you gave, every single morning you do your 75 times table. I think I was being a little bit whimsical. No, it's because for a very, very long time, if 75 came up on the countdown board, I just gave up. Because I can't do, 575s, I have to write it down. I don't know what it is.

And the more I struggled with it, the worse it got because I became fixated on it. So that was probably where it came from. I don't know why. It's stupid. It's not your job to get the numbers, though, is it? Like, you can just let Rachel do all that stuff. No, no, I really do try.

And she's very good at giving three different tips. 375. Thank you. Well, well, well, you can't see it at home. Is Andy's got a calculator? Yeah, and that we've edited this. That took him 15 minutes to get to it. The guy who listens to it slowed down is not going to get to it.

for half an hour. But I love all those old calculating methods, because calculators from calculus little pebble, because they counter with stones, and then they had abacuses, didn't they? It is a political hot potato, though. Calculator? Well, yeah, so

for example, does it harm whether you can do mental arithmetic, if you use a calculator all the time, in your opinion? Yes, probably. Okay, well, you're in good company, because in 2011, there was a British MP who led public concerns on this and said, I would describe this country as in love with the calculator

from a very early age and so that too easy access to calculators is available in local schools. Oh wow. And that MP, Liz Truss. Oh. Whose command of, like, large numbers, is unparalleled? So, Susie, you're a great company.

Oh, lovely. Lovely. That reminds me of the petition to get rid of all French words from the British passport. And it went online, it got quite a few without realizing that passport is French. Most of the words on there were French.

Hiding to nothing, I think. Human calculators are amazing. People who can do incredible something in their head. I was reading an interview with the 2020 World Champion, who is an Indian guy who's called Nielakantha Banu Prakash.

And he got to it quite an interesting way. He was confined to bed as a child for a year. And loads of people who were amazing at mental maths have either been confined to bed or they've been in solitary confinement or something's happened where they've lived in their imagination

for a long time. So all the way through school he would spend six to seven hours a day practicing mental arithmetic, just doing that. When he was interviewed by the BBC, throughout the interview he recited his 48 times table, and when he's talking to someone,

he will count how many times they blink just to keep himself engaged in the conversation. Wow. Yeah. That's amazing. That's cool. Yeah, there's been loads of them over there. In fact, one of the things

that you have to do if Guinness want to find out if you're the fastest at working things out, is they'll give you a 100-digit number and ask you to work out the 13th route. So the square root is two things that you times together to get to that number. So imagine then a cube route is three things

you multiply together to get to that number. You have to go all the way down to 13. So it might be 37 times 37 times 37 times 37-13 times. The answer to the power of 13 is the number they give you in the first place. That's right. That's the question. I'll be honest, I don't think you're going to trouble the Guinness Records people. Even you describing this has put me into a sort of defensive crouch position.

Okay, so the 30throod. Yeah, and I was reading about a guy called Vim Klayne, who was the record holder. This was in the 80s. He must be still quite close. He managed to do it in one minute, 28 seconds. But his tactic was to mutter in Dutch while he was doing the calculations, and he would only mutter swear words. So imagine I'm done, she'd be like, fucking out. Fuck up, fuck, fuck, fuck.

And they go, 263. And it would be right every single time. But there's so much science behind swearing, lowering your cortisol levels and raising your serotonin levels. And you know that experiment when you dip your arm in ice cold water? And you can hold in twice as long if you're shouting bollocks and if you're shouting bust. So, and there's a little lalo chiesia is exactly it.

So that's what he was doing. Wow. So it works. Yeah, yeah. Okay. Would it help doing this podcast if I just said bollocks all the way through? Because that's what Dan's been doing for the last 10 years.

You wouldn't say that if we lived in the time of Samuel Johnson, may. Here's the thing you have to do at the Mental Calculation World Cup. Just another example of what. So the calendar, there's the calendar round. This is an exciting round. You get given a list of dates from 1,600 to 2,100, the years. And you're given 60 seconds to name the day of the week that every one of those dates happened on.

Okay, so you get it, right, you get a minute to do it, okay? Yep. And this great long list of days, like, 24th of February, 16-03. Monday. Right, okay. You're going to say Monday to all of them, aren't you? Have you got the answers? No.

It's pointing his quiz. I can't disprove that it was a Monday, but the point, like, oh my God, that's so like, the point. Well, then, Dan. No, no, no, he didn't. He may have got it right, that's true. But what I'm saying is... Next question.

There are people who can do it even more effectively than just randomly guessing incredibly rapidly. So the record, the record winner in 2012 was someone called Nafumi Ogasawara. Okay, they got 57 in a minute. Wow. They weren't old Monday though, were they? They were all Monday.

That was the trick that year. That is amazing. That's incredible. That's going down the list. Monday, Thursday, Tuesday, Saturday. I think there are tricks, aren't there to mark it out? Really? I've met some.

who can do that. It takes them a tiny bit longer, obviously, but we're talking about a champion here. Yeah, but you can say any day and they go, and they work it out. There are tricks. You can marker history in certain ways to get you to that day.

Well, like what? I don't know. Like a Civil War broke out on a Wednesday. Therefore, three and a half years earlier. Who knows, yeah. But there was, when there used to be people who would go on stage and you would ask them to multiply two numbers together

and they'd just be able to do it, and that would be their whole act. Pretty good. It's pretty cool, isn't it? for everyone in the crowd as well. That's true. But that's good. Oh no,

because if you've got someone on stage who's doing the S-um while they do it, then they turn the border out. They would be able to do it much quicker than that, for sure. But so you're right, it would be quite unverifiable. But the tricks that they used to use, basically there's loads of math tricks like you would see on countdown.

It's like your nine times table is one way of doing it or removing things or writing things to 100, all these different tricks they have. But the way that they would mostly do it is someone would ask you to multiply this by this and then you would go, okay, what were they again? And you keep stalling a few times,

but you're already doing it in your head. And then you would multiply all the numbers. And if I multiply two numbers, I would always start from the digits and work my way up to the highest number. But they would always start with the highest number. They might say, 17 million, and they're working out the next ones as they go along,

but they haven't even got there yet. Wow. And so they would be able to say, like, I can answer the question immediately, but actually they're kind of working out as they went along. It's pretty clever, isn't it? I once got brought up to the front of my school

when I was a teenager in high school and told on the spot, Daniel has achieved the top percentage of people in New South Wales, Australia, for mathematics in the recent exam that we took as part of the thing, and it was a multiple choice exam. Oh, no. Monday, Monday, Monday, Monday, yeah.

I literally guessed every single answer because I knew nothing about mathematics, and I just happened. through fluke to get it right. And I still have a certificate at home for being one of the greatest mathematicians in New South Wales of my period.

Did they sort of say, well, this is great because we've been wanting to put someone up for the junior profession. Come on, Daniel. Get your big old award. I was like, I was an idiot. No, it was humiliating. I still got the certificate. That's amazing.

Yeah. It is fascinating watching Countdown. And I know that you're saying that you like to do it as well. But watching Rachel be able to get to those sons is, it does feel like magic, doesn't it? Yeah, it really does. The camera crew, who've been with us for such a long time as well,

they're also very nerdy. So they give nods of approval for two things. One is when I ever mention an orphaned negative, which is when you have things like Ruelly, gruntled, well, shevel doesn't exist, but Ruthful, gornful, stuff like that. Whenever I mention an orphan negative, they go. And whenever Rachel says,

yes, that's the sum of two primes. Wow. Wow. That is how... Here we are. Do the cameramen, like, play along with the game, do you think? I think they do, yeah. I think there are lots of camera women as well, but they're all brilliant. Oh, gosh. Sorry. Yeah, James. Sorry, I wasn't ticking you off.

But, yeah, I reckon they do. I reckon they do. Quite a lot of them get the conundrum. Not the women, though. May I'm more often than you would think. I've got a quick protest thing, another protestant to just chuck in here quickly. Is it the process waiting for James outside the hood? Camera folk of the world? We have so many camera women.

It would be really bad of me not to mention them. But I honestly wasn't having a dig. They're called cinematographers, James. Oh my God. So the thing I want to mention about protests is one of my favorite things I've learned recently. In 1966, the procrastinators Club of America held a protest against the war of 1812. And they made signs and everything. They were protesting it.

And the club newsletter that came out after it announced that the protest had in fact been a success because a treaty has now been signed. So good on them. That's so good. Okay, it is time for fact number three, and that is Andy. My fact is that for 30 years, Tibetan Buddhists have been saving fish from certain death and releasing them back into nature. Unfortunately, it turns out they have unwittingly been feeding them all straight to the local otters.

So there's this ritual called Fangshank. It's very, you know, ancient traditional thing. It's called life release is what it means. You get animals that were destined for slaughter, and you sort of, you free them, and it's your way of paying a debt back to the universe, it's that kind of thing. And since the 1990s, there are lots of Buddhists in Tibet

have been buying up fish from fish markets, live ones, and releasing them into local rivers, thousands of them every year. And unfortunately, there's a recent scientific report which has looked at the state of the nearby rivers because, I mean, it's not a great thing to do in terms of ecology. You know, lots of, that's really invasive species risk, and it'll completely mess up the local ecosystem.

Anyway, turns out that there are almost no fish left in the rivers and the otter feces are full of the fish that have been released into the river. So they have been kind of helping nature in a way in that they've got a lot of very, very fat, happy otters on this river, yeah. And the otters are stopping the non-native fish from destroying the ecosystem. So in many ways it's a happy story. But not for them if they realized what they'd been doing, right?

No, no, no, nor for the fish that get released, confused. and immediately. And no calmer for the Buddhists, or what do you reckon? Above my pay grade, I don't know. There's a German word for this, which is, I don't wonder if you've heard it, Susie, is Verschlimbesserun.

Yeah, and the definition... It's an attempted improvement that makes things worse. Yeah. Oh, that's a great word. I can't believe you just knew that. I mean, I did see you peek at my notes here, but...

No, she didn't. No, she didn't. But yeah, now the... this whole industry, isn't there, of people capturing animals so that they can then be released, I think. And obviously it is quite bad in lots of places. And they looked in Singapore and in Southeast Asia and they're just finding all of these lizards and stuff which shouldn't be there. And yet they are. And so the Singapore Buddhist Federation is saying that maybe you should just, maybe just not eat meat instead. Or give some money to animal shelters.

Just anything other than doing this thing, which is inherently quite. But it's slightly messed things up. There is something to be said there, but if you go to a restaurant, I speak as a veggie here, but you go to a restaurant and you see a tank full of lobsters. I mean, that's just, I would do anything to rescue those things. I probably would go and dump them in the local loch. Yeah. I can see why.

I can see what they do. No, I definitely understand it, yeah, for sure. You get in Shanghai, what happens is that, again, when the people turn up to carry out the Fangsheng ritual, a lot of people turn up selling them live turtles at very inflated prices. They've created a secondary market in turtles at this point.

But then there are also fishermen waiting... Sorry, fisher folk. Anglers. Waiting with net... But literally 20 metres away. So, yeah, yeah. It creates a lot of... It's interesting from an economics point of view.

Yeah, but also like the temple ponds tend to be full of... turtles because people just shove loads and loads of them in and obviously you can only have so many turtles living in a pond before they have a bad time of it yeah so these fish were carp weren't they uh yes they will have been yeah why do you know i was just sitting here in there that i'm thinking why do we carp on about something and whether that's got anything to do with the fish but i know that is from aladdin we're willing to pull to pieces likewise carpet is sort of like tufts that you kind of pull but i don't think it's got anything to do with fish what about

do we say that carpon i thought it's harp on you can harp on as well so what's harping on versus carping is just endlessly playing the same note on a heart. Oh, right. And to carp on is to criticise and just kind of constantly have a go. Stop carping, you know, that kind of thing. Yeah, yeah. Oh, okay, that's good. I don't have anything to the fish.

I've got a question. Yes. Is carp pulling something apart related to carpal tunnel syndrome, the wrist condition? Oh, that's interesting, yeah. Oh, maybe. I don't know is the answer. That's a very good one. Yeah.

I think it's related to carp. My favourite fish is the corp. because cod meant scrotum and the fish is supposed to look, sorry, sorry James, we're back to take a bit of your beer. I'll have the haddock, yeah, yeah. It's because it looks like a bag, apparently, the fish. What? Yeah, and a cod piece was a piece for yours, Grotum,

and brackets go back to a Spanish word, meaning cod piece because they're a bit of support. So architectural brackets, but also they kind of support a bit of your sentence. That's lovely. Yeah. Well, it's not that lovely. lovely, Andy. I don't know if you heard the start of the... Grotal.

I know it's Grotel, but I think that's nice that you think of your scrotum as a sort of set of brackets. Yes. Gently supporting the things that need... Keep going. But it's a weird word otherwise, isn't it?

Cod piece. Yeah, I thought about that. I wonder if you cod someone, because a cod is a practical joke as well, isn't it? Isn't it? I'm kidding. But I'm not, I'm codding. Yeah, I'm codding.

I wonder if I've got... something to do with you talking balls or something, I don't know. I'm so sorry I bought this tone. No, no, no, I just... I've never heard of carping. I've never heard of codding. I've never heard of cod either, no.

Yeah. To cod. To cod. I think it might be Irish, I'm not sure. And codswallop is completely different. We're learning a lot tonight. That's amazing. That's not getting to cods wallop.

Do you know, Gary Larson, the far side, the comic books? He was someone who was also into saving animals and sort of playing. So when he was a cartoonist in his early days, he was being paid, but it wasn't a lot of money, so he needed to get a secondary job.

So he applied to be an animal cruelty investigator for the Seattle Humane Society. But he never ended up doing the job because in the car, on the way to the interview, he hit a dog. And so he thought, that's a bad start. The dog was fine, but he didn't end up doing it as a result. I was reading a bit about reintroductions,

You know, because this is about reintroducing an animal, maybe where it should be, maybe it shouldn't. And, you know, like, Britain is kicking off beaver reintroductions, which is very exciting because they, they, beavers are a bit controversial, but basically they do do a lot of good in a lot of places. They create wetlands, and wetlands store carbon, and they're more resistant to fire,

and, you know, they're very, like, wetlands themselves are endangered. Veevers help bring them back. So this year, North London got two beavers called Sigourney Beaver and Justin Beaver. Oh, my God. Lovely. Did we literally only get two because they were the only puns we could think of? Yeah, yeah.

That's all. That's sort of coming back. But anyway, like I say, it has caused some controversy. So there was a headline from the Daily Mail earlier this year. Could rewilding animals turn Britain into a modern-day Jurassic Park?

With beavers. Well, firstly, exactly. Yeah. Peavers. And secondly, Jurassic Park is set in the modern day. Oh, here we go. Ah, yeah. All right.

Sloppy headline writing. There's a problem in America. You know, when, if you go to the coast, often there are baby turtles that are born and they might wander into the city because they see the lights. Yeah. You often get people going to the beach

and they see these turtles and put them in, into the water. But the problem is that in those areas, especially around Florida, there's also a lot of tortoises around there. And people don't know the difference between turtles and tortoises. One difference being that one

can swim and one can't swim. No. So number one, don't go around grabbing turtles anyway, because you know, there are people who'll do it who know what they're doing. But secondly, tortoises have toes. That's the way to tell. Oh, that's good. Public

service. Turtles, tappers. You got it, because they like swimming. Let's call them toe turtles. Oh, yeah, that'll do it. It helped me. Don't touch that. It's a tootoral. It's hard to

say that's probably why it didn't happen. Loads of red kites near me though. Red kites they've really done well with. Yeah. Yeah. And the kite that we play with is from the bird. So nice. Yeah. They're beautiful. They're gorgeous. Yeah, they've done amazing. They're everywhere.

Wildcats might get new wild cats in Devon and Cornwall. This is exciting. Great. And you don't need permission to introduce them because there are already a few in Scotland. So if something is non-existent in the UK like a wolf, then you need permission. from the Environment Secretary and very boringly they are not allowing us to have wolves everywhere. So could you and I just drive up to Scotland

grab a few wildcats, drive down and just set them free? It doesn't sound like it's allowed, it would be allowed, would it? It feels like we'd be a hell of a car ride. The thing is we both have electric cars as well so we have to stop about five times before we get there. I don't know if it would. And I'm sorry to rain on your parade, James.

But the problem is the wildcats in Scotland, they get described as functionally extinct. So this is weird. They are real. They exist. But they're also extinct. Because they, there are a few hundred of them left only. And basically, they spend all their time shagging domestic cats.

To the extent that the gene pool is just completely... Like, scientists have studied lots and lots of dead cats from about the last hundred years. And they found that you need a particular kind... Like, wild cats are quite a specific thing. They're Randy, and they will just... Do wild cats, are they really vicious, wild cats? Or are they just quite cute?

A bit of a loaded way of describing them. They're just doing what they do. I don't know. I don't know what... No, no, but I assume they are. Yeah, yeah, yeah. They're not massive either. They're sort of two cats, the size of two cats, I would say. Okay.

Roughly, a cat and a half, two cats. They're not... I don't think they're not. No, no, I think they very rarely take a human young. But, I mean, domestic cats are quite vicious, aren't they? They kill a lot of birds and stuff like that. And I think wild cats are quite similar. I just think it must be a pretty exciting day

if you're just a normal domestic cat and a wild cat comes in town. Ah, wild. It'd be like John Travolta and Olivia Newton-John, wouldn't it? It would just be like the leather-bound dude walking in. It must be like if a Yeti was to approach you and have sex with you, Dan. Because it's bigger, it's hairier.

It's a slightly different species, but still recognisably humanoid. Yeah. And it's on. And it's on. Yeah. That is? My wife and I have an agreement.

We are completely monogamous. She's got a list of celebs. She's got a Yeti. Jobab. Yeti and Brian Blessed. Those are the two that make it in. It is time for our final fact of the show, and that is my fact.

My fact this week is mathematician David Cox has two things named after him. a geometric coordinate ring and an algorithm that he invented with Stephen Zucker. They are known as the Cox ring and the Cox Zucker machine. So what's particularly exciting about this

is that in the 1970s, Cox and Zucker met each other and went, oh, we've got to write a paper. The invention came after the juvenile dream of having a coxucker paper. So then these things, the coordinate rings and algorithms, as the greatest mathematician New South Wales has ever produced, could you explain perhaps what they are?

Yes, I would, James. Because I have a maths degree and I fucking can't. Is it complicated? I really tried. I really tried to understand it. When I say really tried, I just knew I was going to throw it to James, and if he can't understand it, I feel fine. It's, yeah, no, it is really, really.

complicated. The second thing that he invented was not an invention. It was attributed to him by two other students because he was the inspiration for it. So the Coxring was inspired by his earlier work and they thought, let's play into the gag here. But they came up with it and then

they named after. Yeah, and it's just this wonderful thing about academics having a sense of humor. This is something, this is interesting. There's a thing called Stigler's Law of Eponymy, right? And what it states is that no scientific discovery is actually named after the person who discovered it in the first place. So like Pythagoras' theorem,

named after Pythagoras, not discovered by him. Hallie didn't discover Halley's comet had been known about a bit earlier. And so this is the Stigler Law of Economy and it was coined by a sociologist who was called Robert Merton. Who named it after someone else. And these two guys, when they did this, by the way,

they were studying at Princeton University. So the reason I came across this fact is because I found out that you studied at Princeton University. You studied German there. I know. I'm weird. No, that's very cool. Was it a good degree or was it

for Schlim Bessel? No, it was brilliant. I mean, German is just so it just gets given such a hard rap and it is honestly the most lyrical, beautiful. We're just used to people shouting orders in more films but it is really, really beautiful.

But people always say, why isn't there a word for this in English? And then they will always say, I bet there's one in German. And they usually is. Because it is quite like Lego, isn't it? You can just pile. Have you ever had Ben Schott on your show? Love to.

He wrote this brilliant book called Schottenfreude, which was basically finding as many gaps in English as he could find and then getting a German translator to make up a word. My favourite one was Deppenfarer be oigung, which is the compulsion to stare at the person you're overtaking in your car. Just perfect. That's wonderful. That's really good.

Yeah, well, and that was him. It was very good. These people, Cox and Zucker, I was looking at some other people with similar kind of names that are, what we call that, double barrel names. If you go on the internet, you can find loads of examples of people who got married and had quite unfortunate names. I'm not sure all of them are true, but I have looked at them all in the newspaper archives and found some that are definitely are true. And I'm going to do a little quiz. I'm going to tell you the name of one of the people in this relationship and you can see if you can guess the name of the person they married. So this is an easy one.

Elizabeth MacDonald. John Haddaferb. E-I-E-I, no. John Hade-Farmer. No. You can get this. Elizabeth MacDonald married. And they double-barrel the names.

Takeaway? Burger? Burger. Joe Burger. They didn't necessarily always double-barrow. But when you have the newspaper things, it says this person married this person. call it the McDonald's Burger

Wedding. Beautiful. Okay. So, I can pull this back. You've got it, right. You can do this, Andy. Amy Wide. Wide.

Wide. Wide. W-H-Y-D-E. Stephen Fanny. Sorry. Birth? Birth is good. Byrd.

That would be great. You were closest. It was Alexander Hole. Hey. So, Amy and Alexander White Hole. Gosh. Joe Looney. Joe, what, Looney?

Luney. Judy Toonie. Tune. Ben? Ben, no. Tune. It's quite a normal surname. Matthew Tick.

Looney Tick. Looney Tick. Looney Teg, very good. Shelby Ward. Looney Ward. One final one. Teresa, come on. Michael England.

Tim, Michael Tim. Michael Tim. Come on, Tim. Arnold, my back. Down, down. Come on. So, Mr. I, David Eileen?

No. Anyone in the audience? No. It was Theresa Come On and Frankie Topomy. Oh, and I should also say that I was reading the Reddit of Jill Stein, you know, the Green Party leader in America. Yeah. And she did an AMA, so it was like, ask her anything. And the second most popular question they asked Jill Stein was,

Dr. Stein, have you ever thought about it? marrying Senator Al Franken and hyphenating your last name. Very good. That's so good. There's only one street in the world named after John Major, and he didn't know it was named after him, and no one told him they were naming it after him. It was going to be Sir John Major Close, which sounds menacing.

But it was going to be called Sir John Major Close. But then the London Fire Brigade said, that's a bit complicated, we might get confused if someone rings up And so they just called it Major Close. They just cut out the Sir John. And then when he was asked about it, he said, I think it's most unlikely they'd name a street after me. And he just hadn't been told.

No one informed him. Margaret Thatcher has loads of stuff. Margaret Thatcher has a peninsula named after her. Anyway. That's quite interesting because in Europe, for every 10 streets that are named after a man, there's only one named after a woman. It's much more likely that you would be named after a man if you're a street.

Which woman is it? Well, interestingly, okay, taking that in mind, the most popular person in European streets' names is a woman. So can you guess who it is? In European Mary. Elizabeth? No, Andy's right, it is the Virgin Mary. Oh, okay, right.

In Europe, of course, so lots of, you know, Catholic communities and stuff. Yeah. Do they actually have Virgin in the names, or is it just Mary? No, it's usually just Mary Road. Yeah, and it's usually named after the church, you know, where it goes to. So, yeah. Or Santa Maria. Santa Maria.

which I would argue is named after Santa and the Virgin Mary. So we should lob those off her numbers. That's a dumb fucking joke. I love it, love it. Tortory is another religious one. That isn't eponym because Tordery comes, you know, if something's Tordry, it's really shoddy. And that goes back to St. Audrey. She was an abbess and eventually a saint.

And she wore lots of kind of necklaces in her youth. and then as a nun she got throat cancer and she thought this was revenge because she would just wear such frippery. But anyway, lace, such as the one that she wore around her neck, was sold at fares, and it was St. Audrey lace. And then it became tawdry lace, yeah. What was it about being 55 minutes into this show

that made you think of the word tawdry? Nothing. It was the religious side of things. You know the Chippendales, the dance troupe? Yeah. You know what they're named after? Thomas. and yeah.

Oh, no. I was thinking of Thomas Chippendale, the person who made all the furniture. I was thinking of the children's cartoon. I was like, Christmas time. That one, you know. James is right. James is right.

I'm just going to put you out of your misery. James is right. They were named after the furniture in the club where they performed. That's designed to look like classic Thomas Chippendale furniture because they were kind of, you know, like muscular.

I guess they were sort of muscular and, you know, impressive looking. So were the chairs. Oh, I think they do sit on stage and you sit on their laps, right? Sure, do you. I think so. Wait, have they become the chairs? I think so, that's what I'm saying.

They are. Oh, don't protect you. Oh, I think. This is from the man who suggested, come on my back a few minutes ago. I was looking into just a scientist who have humor. I like it when it makes it into a paper and I just found a couple of papers

that have been published that I really like the titles of. So a couple of them, here they are. The mouth, the anus, and the blasterpour, open questions about questionable openings. Another paper, the effects of having Christmas dinner with in-laws on gut microbiota composition. And then the third one,

head and neck injury risks in heavy metal, headbangers stuck between rock and a hard base. That's a good one. I'm gonna have to wrap us up. I said, guys, we've got to the end. I was just looking at very unintentionally, like unintentional, because this is about something

where it was intentionally very rude. Yeah. I was trying to find examples of things that were unintentionally rude. Okay. Just a couple of very tiny quick ones. So Yolo Williams, Welsh naturalist. Okay. He was a co-presenter on Spring Watch.

In 2016, he was discussing diving sea birds with a female conservationist, and they watched one plunge into the water in front of them, and he just turned her and said, so, is that the deepest jag you've ever had? She got to say, no, we have had deeper than that. And I feel like we should end with it Like some of you will have heard this before I know the all-time classic Harry Carpenter

After the Boat Race, 1977 Was reporting it live on TV And said, Ah, isn't that nice? The wife of the Cambridge president Is Kissing the Cox of the Oxford crew Can I just do one more? I know that's really good

But in 2012, Pfizer, The drug company, came up with a new drug for osteoarthritis in dogs called Rimmodil. I went on to the newspaper archives for the adverts for this. This is genuinely true. There was an advert that said Pfizer Animal Health

the manufacturers of Rimmodil have launched a program available only through veterinary hospitals. Register online at rimmerdog.com. Okay, that is it. That is all of our facts. Thank you so much for listening. get in contact with any of us

about the things that we have said on this show, we can be found on what of the fuck he's decided to call it this week. But for now I'm calling it Twitter. I'm on at Shreiberland, James. At James Harkin. Andy. At Andrew Hunter.

And Susie. At Susie underscore then. Yeah, or you can go to our group account, which is at No Such Thing. Or you can go to our website. No Such Thing isafish.com. All of our previous episodes are up there. You can also find links to Clubfish,

which is the secret members club. Any Clubfish members, in the crowd tonight. There we go. There's the six of them. So do join that. It's really, really fun. Check out all the merch.

Check out everything else. We'll be back again next week with another episode. Soho Theater. Thank you so much. That was awesome. Say thank you to Susie Dent and we'll see you again next time.

Goodbye!