No Such Thing As A Fish - No Such Thing As Ancient Roman Pictionary

Episode Date: November 25, 2016

Dan, James, Anna and Andy discuss the wisdom of Wisden, life in an elephant's footprint and why to strive for that 'classic poo look'.

Hello and welcome to another episode of No Such Thing as a Fish, a weekly podcast coming to you from the QI offices in Covent Garden. My name is Dan Schreiber, and I'm sitting here with James Harkin, Andrew Hunter Murray, and Anna Chisinski. And once again, we have gathered around the microphones with our four favorite facts from the last seven days. And in no particular order, here we go. Starting with you, James Harkin. Okay, my fact this week is that the word wow. was popular in Scotland for 400 years before it caught on in the rest of the English-speaking world. You were so waiting for one of us to go there, won't you?

Oh, hang on. Wow! Wow! I'll edit that in the right place. Yeah, isn't that crazy? It's first use, 1513. This is according to the Oxford English Dictionary, in a translation of the Aeneid by G. Douglas, whoever that was. Was it the original author Virgil? Virgil. Yeah. You're right. But G. Douglas was a Scottish person, and he said, out on their wandered spirits, wow, thou cry us. And then the first time it gets used really in the English-speaking world is about the 1890s.

And Burns uses it and a few other Scottish writers used it as well. And it was in that context, it's meant as an exclamation. It looks like it, doesn't it? Wow, thou cryest. Yeah. You're crying. Wow. Yeah. So why was Scottish people keeping it to themselves?

Like a secret for 400 years? Maybe the only exciting things that happened in the world. were all in Scotland. That's true. They were ahead with inventions and the Enlightenment. There was much more to say wow to than there was necessarily elsewhere. Yeah. So yeah, Andy brings up a good point.

How is it that we must have been, people were communicating, obviously, from Scotland and England and Ireland and further places. Would they have been saying it to their face? Do we know? So you think that when the English went back down south, they go, wow, what a bunch of minutes. Wow, thank God he's gone. well we don't know basically this is as with all of these citations this is the evidence that we have so the only evidence that we have that it was spoken by anyone or written by anyone was in scotland and then when the evidence for it being spoken in england and the rest of the world comes in that's all later on

okay but it seems like they were deliberately keeping it secret from everyone i guess as soon as an english person comes along they all had an agreement to shut up um do you know another very old Scottish word first used in Scotland is boo. Really? B-O-O. Boo. Same meaning? Yeah, it's a word that's used in the north of Scotland to frighten crying children.

So they're already frightened in crying. But does that frighten them out of their tears? It does sometimes with children, doesn't it? I've tried it. Does it? Yeah, just on rounds. You can sometimes make it worse. I think it's 50-50.

It's definitely worth a try, though. It's quite fun. But then you might try it like eight times, and by then it's like, you know, you do it once and it gets worse, and then you do it again thinking, I'll bring it back to the last time. It just gets worse again. It's a slippery slope, is what you're saying? So another early reference, this might give more of a guide to what context it was using, was used by Sir Walter Scott in 1830.

And he used to write papers on the esoteric, on the paranormal. I had no idea about that. So he wrote a paper on, it was called Letters on Demonology and Witchcraft, and that was from 1830. And the sentence he had in it was, we start and are afraid when we hear one cry, boo. But he's spelled it B-O-H. So sorry, is he claiming that ghosts shout boo?

Is that where we've got the original idea that ridiculous ghost shout boo? Yeah, I guess so. The ghosts don't say boo. Ghosts go woo-woo, which in comics they say boo. They say boo. Do they? Yeah. It depends on the kind of, it's a lot like Scottish dialects.

I think different ghosts from different places have different ways of speaking, don't they? Different pronunciations. Yeah. So the Scottish also have, Scots has 4211 words for snow, which is so I think a lot of people used to say that Scandinavians had thousands of words for snow Eskimos yeah Eskimos and they don't but the Scots do so they've got these amazing words for snow and this is taken from all the Scottish dialects so there are a lot of Scottish dialects from all around the country

and that's different to Gallic and there was a study done a couple of years ago by a Scottish thesaurus compiler that found they have words specific to snow like Sneezel which is to begin to rain or snow Skelf is a large snowflake Fukta is to fall lightly and come down in odd flakes Fokta It's really fuktering out there That sounds very Germanic

Germanic Fokter It does a bit but it also sounds a bit Scottish And it obviously is a Germanic language The thing with the Eskimos I think is that You could technically say that they do have 100 words for snow

But the way it is They have one or two or maybe four or five roots Which kind of means snow and then the rest of them you can just put like a prefix or a suffix after it to make another word which means this type of snow or this type of snow. So it's snowing a bit or is snowing a lot or 98 other variations. So like we would, it counts heavy snow and light snow and, you know, fuck to snow. All this one.

Just in this study that they did, the caesaurus, they also looked at words that Scottish people have for sports. They figured there'd be a lot of sporting words as well. And they assumed that football would have the most. words that I used to refer to it because football's popular sport. And actually it turns out that the sport of marbles has many more words specific to that the sport of football. Yeah, so Marbles has things like it had 369 different items of vocabulary linked to it in Scotland. Have you got any? Yep, there's Run Tit, which is having lost all of one's marbles to one's opponent. There's a need, which is a method of a cheating in delivering the shot by advancing the hand too far. I remember

having that done to me when I was a kid. Wow. So Marble's actually more popular in Scotland than football in some ways. And are these, these are words from Scottish dialects or are they Gaelic words? There are words from Scottish dialects. Got it. Ah, okay.

And I think you mean Gaelic. I think I mean Gaelic. Oh my God. Guys, we've just spent the last 50 minutes before this podcast arguing about this. Yeah. That was an act of war that Andy just pulled out there. All I'm saying is what my Glazwegian father has said, and now I think of it. I'm not certain whether he said Gallic or Gaelic, but I'm pretty sure it was Gaelic.

So. Please write in. in your hundreds. Sorry, is Marbles competitive on, like, is it... It's extremely competitive. No, but as in, like, you know how we have darts on TV here? Is there Marbles on TV in Scotland? Yeah, the Marbles Channel.

You're kidding. Oh, you are kidding. I am. I'm kidding, yeah. No, I think it's just like an old-fashioned game, isn't it? Like, for instance, Skittles or something like that. Pogs. It's not one...

It's a bit more old-fashioned than Pogs. Older than Pogs. Hogs go back to the Roman. The Romans had 500 different words to describe Pugs, didn't they? So there is another word which McMillan's open dictionary took in August.

So some dictionaries have an open section where anyone can submit a word. And then it's like a holding pen for words and then they take the words that they can find actual evidence for. Very few of them, I imagine. Yeah, very few. Well, actually, they say

about three quarters fall into the disallowed sections and they said that those are words that you or your friends have invented, obscenities, the names of people you dislike and what you would like to do to them. But with me, all three of those are just one word. Can you share that? Or we'd have to edit that out with me?

We'd have to let Andy out of the room. But the word that they took in August was ball bag. Oh, yeah. After Hurricane Barbag. After Hurricane Borbag, which was a storm in 2011. All the papers, it was so annoying that all the papers called Hurricane Ballbag. For Ballbag. Yeah, but with a W, ball bag.

And when Nigel Farage visited Scotland, in 2013 he was greeted with cries of Nigel, you're a ball bag. Was that a reference to the hurricane of political activity that he engendered a secret? I can only assume that it is. I can't think of any other reason why people would compare him to a ball bag, yeah. Is there a picture of him next to that word in the dictionary? I don't know. They don't really go for pictures in the dictionary, but maybe in the children's edition,

they'll have a picture of it. It's weird that that's a saying, actually, isn't it? If you look up stupid, there'd be a picture of you. Because as you say, the dictionary is a book that does not go in for pictures at all. They should say, if you look down, stupid in the dictionary, there'd be a lengthy verbal description of you. However, if you were to look it up in the children's dictionary or the picture dictionary, there would be a picture of you.

Can I just on... Or in pictonary. Sorry, you're still going. What is pictional? That's a game, right? It's a game. It's an ancient Roman game now. It dates back to earlier than Pogs.

Impossible. Just on Scots dialects. So there was a census in 2011, which asked Scottish people if they spoke Scots. and there was a website that were set up to help people out with this in case they didn't know if they did because it's dialects. A lot of Scottish people might speak a dialect but think they're actually speaking just kind of bad English. And so there's now a website called I-Can, A-Y-E-C-A-N,

which is really fun. And it plays the dialects from all the different regions of Scotland and if you can understand them, it shows that you speak that dialect. Does it also play bad English just in case that's what you speak? Yeah, that's actually become a Scottish dialect now in its own right. What they should do is put bad English. at the top and so you click on that and it's bad English and you're like okay I definitely don't have any of the rest rather than going through all of the dialects and get into the end they're going

no it was bad English after all I don't know if you go through all because if you're from Glasgow for instance it's very unlikely that you'll speak the Shetland dialects unless you've in Shetland they spoke something very similar to Old Norse for a long time yeah Norn yeah until only like two or three hundred years ago yeah yeah it's clung on because it came because Norway owned Shetland didn't it what's Clamont sorry is that the name of it It clung on. Sorry, that's just my bad diction. You've got bad English.

I've got bad English. So I found another Scottish word, which is glamour is Scottish. Okay. Which I didn't know. Because I've heard of that in English as well. Yeah. Well, we use it now. It's passed onto us.

Yeah. But I just assume glamour meant someone who looks very glamorous. As someone who's dressed very well in high fashion. But the definition of glamour, at least the original definition, is magic, enchantment. spell. So whenever a magician says my glamorous assistant, he's actually saying my magical assistant. Is that really true? Yeah. As in that's why he says, oh, I see. No, I know. I'm assuming that must be the origin of why that can't be an amazing coincidence. That's not why all magicians say my glamorous assistant is said. Glammer meant something astonishing, like magical, and then it meant something

beautiful and then it was used by magicians and then Dan made this connection. Yeah. That's how that's worked. Okay. Well, what a beautiful connection to me. That's nice. They might be saying my magical assistant. So the Collins English Dictionary, they have a Scottish wing, and they recently added, so they have words of the year, which we've discussed on the TV show as well. So they added things like... What TV shows are that? There's no such thing as the news.

It's the BBC 2 TV show. Wednesday on? It's on Wednesday night, it's on BBC 2 after news night. Okay. They added words like, um, Neverendum. I've heard of this, which is just, you know, this debate about the referendum and about Scottish independence. That thing that ball bag was talking about the whole time.

Yeah, exactly. That just keeps going on. also added nickel abillia. Any guesses? Is it a lot of things that you collect that are made out of nickel? No, not bad. That's been all the rage this year.

James's desk is piling up. Is it not, is it like loose change? Because that's like nickels. No, think of the Nicola bit of Nicola bilia. Nicola sturgeon. It's merchandise. She collects nickel?

No. It's merchandise featuring the face of Nicola Sturgeon. Oh, okay. And I'm unsure about how much this is used. haven't phoned up my relatives. Right. And asked them. I've just got a couple more things on exclamations.

So one that I use all the time is Holy moly. And I assume that I got that from the early Batman series. You know, Holy Molly Batman. So there's actually a Wikipedia article where they've listed every single Holy something that Robin has said. And there's hundreds of them. And I've just picked out a few. Holy bank balance.

That's one. Holy contributing to the delinquency of miners, Batman. and holy priceless collection of a Truskin snoods, Batman. In context, they might make sense. I think it was plot point explaining. I think it was like he was just trying to remind you that we're looking at a Truskin snoods here. Holy Crobar Batman. But weirdly, the one missing from the list, holy moly, not on the list,

because it's a catchphrase that's owned by Captain Marvel. You were saying, holy, that's what kind of a lot of altar, aren't they, the kind of things against the church. Gosh means it's another way of saying God. Gadzooks. God's hooks. But when I was looking up gosh, I found out that people used to say Losh,

which was like short for Lodd. Yeah. In the 18th century, Losh. Oh, that's really good. That isn't it? Yeah, I really like that. Just on Fuddle Duddle, another exclamation, that's got a more recent history.

Do you know where that came from? Faddle Dottle, no. Yeah. Fuddle Dull Dull that thing we say all the time to exclaim. That comes from Pierre Trudeau. So, you know, Justin. Trudeau's dad, who was Prime Minister of Canada in the 70s. He was in a parliamentary debate when he was Prime Minister,

and the opposition says something he didn't like. And he mouthed what the opposition then went out to journalists and complained looked a lot like a word beginning with F, then a word beginning with O. So they said, what were you thinking when you mouthed those two words? And he said, well, what's the nature of your thoughts, gentlemen, when you say fuddle-duddle? So he sort of claimed it was fuddle-duddle, and then that's caught on in a way. And they all went, fuck off. And then actually recently last year, Justin made a speech where he did admit that his dad hadn't in fact said faddle doddle.

Right. Yeah. Scandal. There was an Israeli guy. He was 90 years old and he said he was in the news about five or ten years ago saying that he invented have a nice day. And he was like, I don't know what I was thinking. It just came into my head and I just said have a nice day. And then before I knew it, everyone was saying it.

Okay. It is time for fact number two and that is Anna. My fact this week is that at least 61 species live in elephant footprints. That's so cool. It's so cool. So exclusively live in? No. So this is a paper that was published a couple of months ago.

I read about it in Scientific American. And they've just studied the mini ecosystems that are elephant footprints. And they found 61 species in them. And that's they're only studying a few. So all these creatures are living in elephant footprints. But they make it their permanent habitat because they're, they looked at older footprints and they found that they'd have much many more animals in them and that's because you know dead leaves have fallen into them and things like that so it's become

a bit like richer environment for them but yeah you get you get tadpoles in them swimming around you get mites mayflies leeches gastropods none of the big hitters you don't get any shrews they don't get dolphins in there don't they know cheaters they can hold 200 litres of water isn't that amazing what yeah maybe Maybe a liter is less than we think it is. Yeah. How much is that really? Oh, well, this is an African liter, which is five miller. No, I don't know. I think it's, yeah. If you had to express that in something that I'd understand, how big is that?

It would be, you know, nearly 400 pints. Wow. In one footprint. Yeah, I think that's, I was so skeptical. But I guess in mud, then they'll sink very deep, won't they? Yes. So that can really feel that. Does that count as a footprint then?

If like your leg is in? You think it's a leg print. That's a leg print. It's a full elephant print. if he just gets completely stuck in. But the other thing I do is they hop from footprint to footprint. What, elephants?

No. I read they can't even jump. They call them stepping stone habitats. And apparently, because during the dry season, it's really important for animals. And if the elephants weren't walking through this area, they would disappear during the dry season. Certain other species would not be able to live in these areas.

But they, I mean, this is, this raises more cause for concern at elephant poaching, obviously, because it looks like these elephants and footprints are preserving a lot of these creatures. Massive housing crisis. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. I mean, I was already quite concerned about elephant poaching,

but now I hear that tadpoles are involved. I'm breaking it. Well, the thing is, like, with all this kind of thing, the elephants, you can be concerned about the elephants, but actually it's the fact that their top, you know, species in an ecosystem. And actually it is. There's hundreds and hundreds of different species that rely on them. So, like, if you want to save an elephant,

it's mostly the other animals you should be worried about, really. They don't look as cool as an elephant, do they? It's true. But also, is it not that they loads of plants, that they disperse their seeds through the poo and stuff? They really do. Who do, sorry? Elephants. So people, they're called ecological engineers because they properly create habitats for other animals to live in, don't they, by knocking down all the trees.

Yeah, so they're good for lions. Right. Because they knock down trees as they move along and they convert forest to scrubland, which means you get smaller animals living in the scrubland, which means that lions prey on the smaller animals. So not so good for the smaller animals then. No, but great for the lions. And apparently they have 96 species of seed a day on average in their poo, which they disperse across the areas they're moving through. They're like large insects, really, aren't they?

They're like big bees. No. Spreading seeds. They are. They're almost like pollinators. They're so unlike insects. They spread the seed of plants. I mean, in that one incredibly specific respect, they're quite like insects.

And they've got six legs, is that right? So just to get my head around it These animals, they're most found there? Where else would they live, if not in the footprints? In ponds and stuff. So there are a few of ponds around, especially in the dry season. So they'll find this kind of footprint which has turned into a pond and they'll live there.

If it wasn't there, they'd have to try and find another pond. But the more ponds there are, the more places they can live and the better their species will do. Okay. Okay. I've got it now. Do you know one amazing use for elephant poo? If you're dying of thirst.

Oh, no. Yes. You can squeeze it together and wring a few drops of water out of it. Yeah, Barrett Grills does that, doesn't he? I think he did it with camel poo as opposed to elephant poo. I can't remember it. Maybe it was elephant poo, but yeah, you can see footage of that. There's not much bacteria in there.

Botswana gets 650,000 kilos of elephant droppings on the ground. That's Botswana alone every day. Wow. It's so much. Yeah. They poo a lot. It is a lot. No one's denying it.

All right, but I'm waiting for one of you to try to deny it. it's not that much it is that much so I was I was looking into other odd places that you find species living in that aren't necessarily natural

to their habitat there's researchers have been looking in a specific African cave because they found out about this group of crocodiles who live in this cave and it's really rare

because they're out of sunlight for most of the time they feed off bats that live in the cave and so on and yeah they have just a totally different eating habit. The thing is they do go out though, so they're not going to go blind. They're not going to adapt to nighttime. Because they're going to need the heat because they don't

make their own heat. Yeah, exactly. But they do spend a lot of time there. And one thing they noticed, they did think for a while, at least to begin with, like, wow, I wonder if this is a completely different species or subspecies of crocodile because it was orange. And they were like, what's going on here? And it turns out that because of the water that they're in in the caves, there's so much bat poo that goes into the water that it's colored the crocodiles into a different color. So they come out and they're like, whoa, what's this weird color? And it's just bat shit. Do you think that's where the phrase bat shit crazy comes from?

Because they look so crazy. They've turned orange. And the other crocodiles are going, you look bat shit crazy. It could be, yeah. I don't think so. There's actually this other amazing cave that has its own ecosystem, which I found out about. So this is called the Sandun Cave in Vietnam. Apologies, if I've mispronounced that.

This is the world's largest cave. And it was discovered in 2009 by a British guy. So that's when it's reported it was discovered, even though I think the people in Vietnam knew about it. But it's this huge cave. So it has a jungle in it, if you go into it. So it's got a jungle with, you should honestly look up, look up pictures of this place. It's extraordinary. The trees. Come on. And inside the jungle, there's a desert. Inside that there's an ocean. Why won't you believe me? Where at the bottom is another massive cave. It's the Russian doll of caves. There's a jungle with trees that are 30 meters, 20 meters,

It has its own river. It's got a centre park. And all these new species have been found in it anyway. So, yeah, honestly look up pictures of it. So they found a new type of gecko, a tree frog, a new type of striped hair, living inside this cave completely underground. The main cavern of it is so big, it has its own climate. So it has rain clouds, which I imagine means it actually rains inside this huge cave.

Where is this again? It's in Vietnam. Can I just say one last thing? As I read this the other day, I haven't got the full details here, but there's a species of crab and they're polygamous, so the males have sex with loads of different females and vice versa. If these crabs find a turtle shell with just the right gap between the shell and the bottom of the turtle that will fit two crabs in,

then a male and a female crab will go and live inside the turtle shell and they'll have a monogamous relationship, and they won't have sex with anyone else, and they'll just live there. But anywhere else they live, they'll have loads of partners, but if they find that little niche, then they'll kind of stay together. It's like a suburb. Yeah. It's right.

If you move into the perfect house, then your relationship can be repaired. Absolutely, yeah. That's the lesson here. Okay, it is time to move on to fact number three, and that is my fact. My fact this week is that the original edition of Wisden's Cricketer's Almanac was 112 pages long, and, because the author wasn't sure what to put in it, was patted out with accounts of the tribe. of King Charles I. So if you don't know what this book is, this is published annually,

and it is the ultimate cricketers book. And the current edition, the 2016 edition, is over 1,500 pages long. And so it's a huge book, it has nothing but cricket. But the very first edition, Wisden was like, I don't have enough cricket to put in this, but I need to make it worth buying. So he added the accounts of the trial from King Charles I. He also put in Battles of the English Civil War,

and also Britain's Canals, the Scycalfe. size of them in length. And also the rules of quiting. Yeah, what is that? Quiting is where you, I think you have a quoit is like a kind of a circular thing, a bit like a horseshoe, and you throw it to a stick, and it goes around the stick. And if you get it round the stick, you get points. It's based on pub garden games, quites.

We should actually not only explain what quiting is, but probably for our American... Well, explain what cricket is. I think so. It's like baseball only a lot slower. Okay, that'll do it. And there are tea breaks. And I still find that insane. So I didn't know that because I didn't really follow cricket.

But halfway through a day of playing cricket, they all stop to have cups of tea. You have tea as in food. You would have like sandwiches and stuff. Yeah, see, to English people who know about cricket, that seems like the most normal thing in the world. Yeah. I mean, you go for five days.

I should know that in theory. Yeah. Well, actually, do Australia play cricket anymore? Ouch. Interesting fact about the cricketers almanac. Yeah. Really interesting fact. Get ready.

Hold on to your seats. So it's been published every year since 1864. And for the first six years it was published, it was Wisden's Cricketers Almanac, but for the subsequent however many years, it's been Wisden's Cricketers Almanac with the apostrophe on the other side of the S. Which S? Wisdens or Cricketers?

Cricketers. Yeah, there's only ever been one Wisden. So it's always been from one wisdom, but originally it was for only one cricketer. It was for one cricketer for the first six years. It was just aimed at one cricketer. No one knows who that cricketer is. But John Wisden, the founder, was quite an interesting guy.

He was a cricketer, and his nickname was The Little Wonder, because he was five foot nothing, and he weighed seven stone when he started his career. I mean, he was tiny. And yet, in one match in 1850, he bowled out all ten of the opposite team in a single innings, which I think it's written online that this is the only time that's ever happened in a first-class match. So they were all bowled out as in he hit the stunts rather than then being caught out or, you know, got out another way. There are about ten ways you can be got out.

That's great. Yeah. Well done him. Yeah. On page 657 of the year 2000 edition, the Lester spinballer Matthew Brimson exposed himself, and nobody noticed at the time, and it went into the edition.

And then about six days after it had been published, someone wrote in and said, this guy's middle stump is in this picture. Matthew Engel, who was editor at the time, wrote about this, and he said, in the 2000 Leicestershire photo, one of their most obscure players was laughing. Oh, having chosen,

to expose himself to the camera, his only contribution to cricket history. The Leicestershire squad was large, the page was small, so was our editorial team, and so was the appendage. Okay, this guy got slammed by the same. Yeah, absolutely. It is kind of embarrassing that nobody noticed for a week. Yeah. And then when he was asked to apologize and he didn't.

And apparently he said, well, he said it was the editor's fault because they should have spotted it. And Engel said, oh, do you think we need to, we need to employ? a full-time penis spotter then. So, did you know, the first cricket balls were rolled along the ground? That was the first way you bowled in cricket. Really? This is very early.

Yeah. So it was more like croquet? Kind of, yeah. Except you're allowed to roll the balls along the ground. And the idea being that it was still trying to hit stumps behind... Yeah, yeah. So there's, is it French cricket where you throw very, very low? You aim for someone's legs.

Yeah, yeah. You're hanging around, basically. So instead of having wickets that you aim for, you aim for that. their legs. Yeah. So, but one, and this is very exciting. So one of the first bowlers to pitch was a guy called Edward Lumpy Stevens. Lumpy was his nickname.

And there's a book, The author's... He got that nickname after he exposed himself. There's a book called The Authors 11, and it says, the name Lumpy may have come either from his ability to pitch the ball on any protrusion on the pitch or his fondness for eating a whole apple pie at a time. Oh, dear. You know, in all the kind of, if you read, you know, amazing things about Wisden's Cricketers' Almanac, one of the claims they make is that both P.G.G. Woodhouse got the name Jeeves from Wisden Cricketers' Almanac

and Sherlock Holmes was named after a cricketer as well. Conan Doyle used to read Wisden's Cricketers' Almanac. I can't see any evidence that that's true, though. So I think that's one of those myths that's been going around, that that's where they got them. Because you do have quotes from PG-Woodhouse saying that he knew Jeeves the cricketer, and he was a big fan of his, and that's where the name came from. So presumably he didn't need to discover that in a book. He already knew that. That reminds me that Blofeld, the bad guy and James Bond, is named after Henry Blowfelt's father, I think.

Oh, yes, he is. Who is a cricket commentator? Yeah, Henry Blowfelt's a cricket commentator. We met him last year. He came on our radio show, Museum of Curiosity, and he told this story about how Ian Fleming was in a gentleman's club in London and was looking through the members list and saw Blowers his father in there and decided to name him after that.

Wow. Was there beef between them? No, I don't think so. Because he named Goldfinger after the architect Goldfinger who he didn't like at all. And he tried to sue him, didn't he? Like he was very... Goldfinger tried to sue, yeah. Goldfinger was very angry about that.

Yeah. The most famous copy of Wisden is a 1939 edition belonging to E.W. Swanton. He was a cricket writer, and then he was taken prisoner by the Japanese in the war. And it was so popular with all the other prisoners of war that everyone was. used to borrow it and he had to turn it into like a library book so people could take it at different times and then it became really really thumb through it was stamped not subversive by the japanese little did they know all the subversive political undertone to those extensive scorecards and now it's in the museum at lords it does show how poor the reading material was for prisoners of war

because it is not an interesting book it's a thick book whoa whoa whoa whoa you can recreate an entire cricket match just based on a few numbers and names That's incredible. That's true. And you could picture it in your head probably as going along. Right. Yeah. It's like saying that...

If you've got a good imagination, then anything's interesting, I suppose, guys. But it is a lot of a list of scores. It's like saying the score of an opera isn't an interesting read. Come on, Anna. When was the first edition? 1864. It's been in print every year since it's a good book.

Yeah, but I bet not that many people buy it. Have you ever read it? No. Loads of people buy it. More than you like 50 shades of gray and stuff like that. Oh, come on. You can't compare like for like with... Well, I'm comparing those two now,

and I'm saying one of them is probably a better read than the other, and it's wisdom. Do you know who invented bowling? This is really interesting. Edward Lumpie Stevens. Sorry, do you know who invented over-arm bowling? The theory goes, it was invented by a woman. So Women's cricket has a really interesting history,

but this is the claim that a woman called Christina Willis used to bowl over-on to her brother, John, who played for England. This was in the early 19th century. and she did it to avoid getting tangled up in her skirts when she went underarm, and he took it to the matches he went on to play and realized it was much more effective than underarm. But yeah, women's cricket was really popular in the 19th century. So there were matches played all over England that would get crowds of 3,000,

which is quite large for just an amateur cricket match. There are pictures of women playing cricket that go back to medieval times, and women were the first people to have not red balls. And the reason was, in the late 19th century, balls were turned from red to blue for women, because it was worried that lady cricketers would swoon at the sight of a red one. And just one last thing we said at the top that Americans won't really know what cricket is, but they do have a cricket team that does play internationally, and they're called the Compton cricket team.

So straight out of Compton, we know from MWA. It's about cricket. Yes, Ice Cube was actually an umpire. And yeah, Compton cricket team, they say that the aim of playing cricket is to teach people how to respect themselves and respect authority, so they stop killing each other. and the homies mission is to curb the negative effect of gang activities and they've been over to the UK a bunch of times playing exhibition matches with UK teams so yeah so cricket is starting up there first ever international game USA versus Canada

no way yeah Britain toured to the USA in the mid 19th century and it would have become massive if it wasn't for the civil war yeah oh which you can read about in the original edition of it's a different civil war oh okay Okay, it is time to move on to our final fact of the show, and that is Andrew Hunter Murray. My fact is that fossilized poo is worth more if it has what one collector calls the classic poo look. Describe that. Well, I think we all know what the classic poo look is. So this is the fact that the Guinness World Record has just been announced for the largest collection of fossilized poo.

It's a man called George Franson. He studied paleontology. much lumpy franson um he owns 1,277 pieces of fossilized excrement uh 12777 he's been collecting it for nearly 20 years so and he says that the classic Poo-look makes it more valuable along with you know distinctive uh ripples and of size the bigger the better bigger the better always yeah yeah just what is a distinctive rip is that like if someone's name is written in the ripples or that would be very romantic I think yeah it's so And they all had to be examined by a professional paleontologist.

All 1,277 pieces. They're paleoscatologists, aren't they? Are they? People who study them, yeah. Well, because the problem is a lot of people like to buy coprolites, as they're called, online. But most people can't really tell the difference between a real one and a fake one. So a lot of people are just buying rocks. And they just think they have it, but it's just a rock.

Yeah. And they're called pseudo coprolites. Yeah. And there's real controversy about the biggest one ever. you know this? No. It got sold in July 2014. It was auctioned off.

It was 40 inches long. Oh yeah. That was quite a famous one, wasn't it? Very famous. It got sold for $10,000. And the auction said, The passer of this remarkable object is unknown and all this, you know, stuff. But it came from a place called the Wilkes Formation,

which is where there was a swamp. And there is a theory that actually it's plant material and lumps of mineral because sometimes things get, lumps of ash, get turned into clay and they get squeezed through not holes in trees. I mean, how is, it's not that much different than a poo, is it? Exactly. It's basically, yeah, it's basically being pushed through like a tube of toothpaste. So there is a theory that's there. But you'd have to cut it in two to take a slice because there'll be organic material in there if it is a coprolome. I found a really good

website called the Poozeum. Did you guys see that? No. Did no one see it? I've seen the Poozeen. Isn't it great? I didn't look at the website I saw it referred to and I thought that's a funny name. Exactly. So it puts you off to look at it because you think this is a silly name. it's not going to be good. This is a guy who much like the person you've just said with the largest collection has dedicated his life to understanding and cataloging and reporting on copper lights. And it's fantastic. It's an incredible website.

It's got pictures. It's got all the latest news stories. Honestly, I highly recommend Poozeum. Give us an example of a brilliant Poozium news story. He was telling you how you can make your own. I know how to take that. I've been dedicating my life to making my own. How you can make your own poo fossil in terms.

time. So he says you, and this was done in an interview that he reposted on his own site by Jason Rosenfeld on Silicon Exit, which is a website, did this great interview with him. So he said that the way that you can make your own copperlight is that you start off by eating a bunch of corn and peanuts every few days. And that will give the copperlight interesting inclusions and make it worth more money when someone finds it a special treasure, because that's easier to tell if something is genuinely poo because it has little bits sticking out of it of insects or whatever that helps them identify it. And then you dig it in it in. into a very deep hole and then put the soil over immediately so nothing gets to it.

That in theory is how you make your own fossil poo. If someone wants to start going on that. Unbelievably weird thing to do. Or you poo in a lake. How come? It sinks through the water, right? And it gets to the bottom. And there's much less oxygen down there for bacteria to eat it.

So the hope is that over time, anaerobic bacteria gradually replaced the matter with minerals. But for best results, you have to poo in the lake. You have to get in the lake. do the poo, get out of the leg. Okay. I mean, there are other ways to make your mark on this earth. It's true. It's very unreliable because, you know, the world will be covered in poo if they all survived. So in fact, it's a really valuable substance, right?

Because it used to be important as fertilizer, coprolite. And so when they discovered this, then it became something that people mined. And there are various places in the UK where coprolite mining was an important industry. So one of the main centres of this was a place called Shillington. in Bedfordshire and this was in the mid-19th century its population doubled

because loads of people flocked it was a bit like the gold rush it was the UK equivalent of the gold rush people flocked America's always better isn't it we've had a turd rush

America if you go to Bedfordshire all the streets are paved with shit so the brilliant thing about this place is it had this big boost to the local economy

and it was actually a bit of a problem because these pubs multiplied because Coprol like Niners were paid. People desperately to drink away the memories of what they spend their day doing. Well, they had quite a lot of fight, so there was tension and everything.

I mean, exactly at the gold rush. Can I just say, in the gold rush, people used to go to the pubs and pay for their drinks with, like, little bits of gold that they found. Do you think people used to just go with a, and they're like, this isn't an ancient one? Forgeries from half an hour ago. The great thing about this place is, it's called Shillington, but its name is, it's named is actually changed in the 1880s because it was worried it was going to offend Queen Victoria because it was called Shittlington. Really?

Yeah. Schillington was the heart of shit mining. Wow. That's amazing. Hello to anyone living in Shillington. Who's learning that for the first time. Is that a coincidence? Coincidence.

Like glamorous assistant. Like it's a total coincidence? It's a coincidence. Yeah. Wow. They only discovered the turd seam in the mid-19th century and it had been around for hundreds of years before that. They call it the treacle mines locally.

Yeah, they used to, yeah. That's the worst euphemism I've ever heard for anything. It's horrible. It's weird that there's a seam, isn't it? You would think that they'd be scattered fairly evenly. But actually, it all comes from a time when the south of England was covered in hundreds of meters of water, flooded, and all the land animals died. So there's a lot remaining from that period. Yeah. So, Andy, the whole idea of copper light selling more if it looks actually like a poo.

I was reading again in this interview from Poozyum that the reason that's so precious is actually most fossilized poo. The reason it doesn't retain the shape of a poo is that most animals will do it from a height, obviously, and then it experiences what he calls the splatter effect. So it's very hard to get a poo-shaped fossil because most of it has splattered once it hits the ground.

Get in the lake. Get in the lake is the answer, yeah. Slow it down on the descent. Absolutely, yeah. You say they're so precious. This guy, George Franson, his most valuable coprolite is called precious. Just to make him a tiny bit more creepy the idea

for sitting by it going, my precious. I wonder, because this splatter effect thing I just said was he's talking literally about precious in this sentence. Is this the same guy? Does he run Pusium? I don't know.

I think that your guy runs the Pusium. I've just checked it. That's a great sight. The guy knows what he's talking about. Sure does. Something related to coprolites are regurgitolites, which is, well, what do you think? Fossilized vomit? Correct.

Wow. Yeah. Really good, because often this will be something, if you've got fossilized poo and you can see what someone's eaten, but it's obviously been through the digestive system. If it's fossilized vomit, then obviously not been quite as far through the digestive system. So you can see a lot better what these things have eaten. So there was a bit of vomit coughed up by an ikfiosaur 160 million years ago, and it's still got little bits of the like Ammonites and stuff that were in there.

That's amazing. It's a shame for the Aetheosaur who vomited and thought, God, I hope no one remembers this moment. And 160 million years later, they're still reminiscing. There's an even more embarrassing thing. We think we have a 300-year-old piece of bishop's excrement. Wow. This is in the news this week.

So there's a Danish bishop. In the news. It is. I didn't see on Pazian, so I don't think it's credible. There's a Danish bishop called Jens Burtur. and he lived in a city called Alborg until 1708. And 80 years ago, archaeologists found in his private midden a lump of stuff.

And now it's been analysed. And they think it's Bishop's Pooh. It could be the Bishop's wife. What? He married a Poe? 18th century, Denmark was a very liberal place. No, one professor said this is a way of making history through the back door. through the treacle mine

and they're going to put it probably in the local museum it's so embarrassing no I think it's good to be proud of it so there's a village called Bassingbourne hello to those in Bassingbourne as well which was another home of coprolite mining

and they wanted to erect a statue as a monument to their village's great history in 2005 and there were some contenders so they could have had a heron there are lots of beautiful herons there they thought about having a Second World War bomber because they had a strong Second World War history and then one of the suggestions was a large poo and the village voted and they voted for

the poo. So they've got... Don't let the public vote on things. Okay, that's it. That's all of our facts. Thank you so much for listening. If you'd like to get in contact with any of us about the things that we have said over the course of this podcast, we can be found on our Twitter account. I'm on at Shreiberland, James. At Egg-shaped. Andy. At Andrew Hunter, Em. And Anna. You can email podcast at QI.com. Yep. Or you can go to our group Twitter account, which is at QI podcast or our website no such thing as a fish.com where we have all of our previous episodes. You can also go to no such thing as the news.com which has all of our TV show episodes, a topical look at the world week by week. We will be back again next week with another episode. We'll see you then. Goodbye.