Pod Insights No Such Thing As A Fish No Such Thing As A Ham Bag About this episode Susie Dent joins Dan, James and Andy to discuss mums, tongues, Tods and Boz.
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Transcript 10,573 words · 7 speakers
0:00 Speaker 00 Hi everyone, welcome to this week's episode of No Such Things As A Fish, where we were joined by the lexicographical legend that is Susie Dent. Now, for people in the UK, Susie needs absolutely no introduction. She is a bona fide national treasure. She has been on my TV, in my living room, every tea time for as long as I can remember, in her position as Chief Wordsmith on Channel 4's Countdown, as well, of course, as Eight Out Of Ten Cats does Countdown, the comedy show with Jimmy Carr. She has done so much other stuff. She's written loads and loads and loads of books. They're all fantastic. We have read most of them, I would say, in the QI office.
0:45 Speaker 00 The best thing you can do really about Susie's books is to just go to your book repository of choice and ask them for Susie Dent books, because every single one of them is an absolute banger and you will find so many facts in there. She has also written some novels. She's written one called Guilty By Definition, which is out in the bookshops now. There is also another one upcoming called Death Rite Large, which I dare say you will be able to get on pre-order. Susie is also on tour right now. She is going around the UK telling people loads of facts and loads of amazing anecdotes about words. They're going to be absolutely fantastic shows, I'm certain about it. So if you live in the UK anywhere, then just go to the internet and search for Susie Dent
1:30 Speaker 00 Tour. You could go to nothird.co.uk, N-O-T-H-I-R-D.co.uk, but I've just tried it. If you go to Google, search for Susie Dent Tour, you will find information there. One more thing to say, of course, is to remind you about Club Fish. Go to patreon.com/clubfish to find out more about that. In the Plenty More Fish tier, you can hear more from Susie in our extra-long episode, but there's so much more stuff on there. I'm not going to go into it all now. We've said it enough times. There is stuff for free there, there is stuff for paid. It's supporting the podcast. We appreciate if you do it, we understand if you don't. Don't worry about it. The podcast, as we always say, will always be free. And speaking of said free podcast, it's time to get on with it.
2:13 Speaker 00 So, no more to say apart from on with the podcast.
2:32 Speaker 01 Hello and welcome to another episode of No Such Thing as a Fish, a weekly podcast coming to you from the QI offices in Hoburn. My name is Dan Schreiber, I'm sitting here with Andrew Hunter Murray, James Harkin and Susie Dent. And once again, we have gathered around the microphones with our four favourite facts from the last seven days. And in a particular order, here we go. Starting with fact number one, and that is Susie.
2:56 Speaker 02 My fact is that the original Todd in the phrase "on your tod", died on his tod.
3:05 Speaker 02 So this was James Foreman Sloane, but Todd Hunter was his middle name. And the Todd bit was a bit of a cruel nickname that his father had given him because he was extremely small and he was originally called Toad by his father. And he was a jockey because of his small stature, that was the one thing that he was hugely successful at. And he was the toast of society in the US. He was incredibly successful jockey. And then, yeah, he came over to England, he rode for the Kings, he rode the King's horses. But then he was accused of insider betting.
3:44 Speaker 01 Yes.
3:45 Speaker 02 Which he was later exonerated of, actually. But he was effectively cancelled in today's terms. And he wrote a kind of autobiography which talked about him basically being on his own. But he did very much died, a sad death from cirrhosis of the liver, in fact.
4:05 Speaker 01 He was, it wasn't just a celebrity jockey for the fact that he was great at his sport, he was quite a socialite as well, wasn't he? He sort of was all over at parties, he was hanging out with the rich and famous. He did a pretty special thing, which is that he opened a bar in France. It was called New York Bar. And he basically bought an existing bar that was in New York, put it in boxes, brought it over, and he opened it up in Paris and it became Harry's Bar. Which is the famous bar which Hemingway used to go to. Ian Fleming has James Bond visit it in one of the novels. Like it's an iconic bar during World War One.
4:41 Speaker 03 Yeah, I mean, yeah, we all know.
4:44 Speaker 00 So he was a great jockey. I'm more interested in the horse racing side of it. He said that his biggest trick in horse racing was that he would whisper in the ear of his horses and ask them to run faster.
4:55 Speaker 01 Is that the insider betting?
4:58 Speaker 00 It was rumored that he was giving his horse some substances that makes him run faster.
5:04 Speaker 03 In the ear?
5:05 Speaker 00 Not in the ear.
5:06 Speaker 03 Sorry.
5:06 Speaker 00 Probably. Usually it happened up the bum.
5:08 Speaker 02 He was pretty close to them because he pioneered the monkey crouch position, didn't he?
5:12 Speaker 00 Yes, that was an amazing thing. So he would sort of crouch on his horse and ride it. And when he first came to Europe, everyone took the mick out of him. They were like, oh, what are you doing this? You look like an idiot.
5:22 Speaker 03 What were you, what were people doing before that?
5:24 Speaker 01 Sitting on the horse, maybe?
5:25 Speaker 02 Sitting back like a.
5:26 Speaker 01 Oh, like, yeah.
5:28 Speaker 03 And what's he doing?
5:28 Speaker 01 He's doing, think of, think of the classic position in jockey racing where they're leaning on the front of the horse. They're sort of crouching forward.
5:35 Speaker 03 They're on the neck. Yeah.
5:36 Speaker 00 Yeah, like imagine if you're cycling in the Tour de France, you might be crouched.
5:40 Speaker 03 Okay, okay, okay. I'm on it.
5:41 Speaker 01 Pretty stunning to invent a new way of riding on a horse.
5:44 Speaker 00 It's like, yeah.
5:45 Speaker 03 Yeah.
5:45 Speaker 00 That's incredible.
5:46 Speaker 03 I think he's.
5:46 Speaker 00 Here's the thing, humans have been doing for 8,000 years. But I think I can improve it.
5:50 Speaker 01 I think to be fair, I think he popularized it as opposed to being the very first person to do it. I think a few people were testing it out, but they didn't expect the Todd Sloan to suddenly be monkey crouching everywhere. He was in movies as well.
6:02 Speaker 00 Was he?
6:02 Speaker 01 Yeah, he was an early Hollywood star.
6:04 Speaker 03 When was he alive?
6:05 Speaker 01 So this was in the 1930s that he'd be making the movies. And he was in a movie called Painting the Town, in which he plays a jockey called Todd Sloan.
6:16 Speaker 01 Then he was in a movie called Madison Square Garden, in which he plays a jockey called Todd Sloan. Then he was in a movie called When Romance Rides. I'll give you a clue from the plot. Lucy Bostel, daughter of a Colorado ranch owner, is led by a dog to his master, Lynn Sloan. Now, what do you think he was called in that movie?
6:36 Speaker 02 James.
6:36 Speaker 01 Holly. Yeah. Did not have the name. Abragous. And he was in that movie with another actor called Frank Hayes. Does that name ring any bells to you guys?
6:46 Speaker 03 Yeah.
6:46 Speaker 01 Do you remember in 1923, there was a jockey who died?
6:50 Speaker 00 Died halfway through the race?
6:52 Speaker 01 Yeah, and won the race while dead.
6:54 Speaker 00 No.
6:54 Speaker 02 No.
6:55 Speaker 01 It's a different Frank Hayes. But who also died in 1923?
7:00 Speaker 00 What is going on?
7:01 Speaker 01 What is going on? You two are murder mystery writers, what's going on? Two Frank Hazers die?
7:06 Speaker 03 This is bad plotting, I'm gonna say it.
7:08 Speaker 02 Yeah. Implosive, implosive.
7:11 Speaker 03 So Todd Sloan is an example of rhyming slang, right?
7:14 Speaker 02 Yes.
7:14 Speaker 03 I'm on my Todd, Todd Sloan.
7:16 Speaker 02 On your own, yes, sorry.
7:18 Speaker 00 I never put that together.
7:19 Speaker 02 Yes, that's what I should have said.
7:21 Speaker 03 Because I'm very interested in it, because you read about rhyming slang and then it sounds like it's, people say, oh, it's thieves' language from the 19th century. But I don't understand how thieves would gain an advantage and, you know, to help them avoid the police or whatever. I don't understand how saying, use your loaf instead of use your head, loaf of bread.
7:40 Speaker 00 It's not like he escapes up the apples and pears and the police are actually looking for the greengrocers. It must be in here somewhere.
7:46 Speaker 03 Exactly, I don't really get it, it's quite murky.
7:49 Speaker 02 The best theory that I know is that actually it originated amongst the costermongers of London, who sold costards, which were these sort of sour apples. So they're called costermongers and they would want to talk about their deals in a coded shorthand that other people couldn't understand. But it was also banter, you know, it had this sort of playful element to it.
8:10 Speaker 00 Because actually these guys would be the worst possible people to use different words for apples and pears, wouldn't they?
8:15 Speaker 02 Exactly.
8:15 Speaker 03 Yes.
8:15 Speaker 02 They wanted to use apples and pears. But they do draw, quite a lot of them do draw on those kind of basics, sort of food stuff that they sold at the market.
8:23 Speaker 03 So I'm so sorry, we talked about butcher's slang, which they still use, don't they?
8:27 Speaker 02 Yes, they Latin in a way, yeah.
8:29 Speaker 03 And they say words backwards?
8:30 Speaker 02 Yes.
8:31 Speaker 03 Oh, in Australia?
8:31 Speaker 02 Ref Club. I spoke to a couple of butchers and they literally would be sent home to learn stuff for the next day and they'd talk about their customers, they would, yeah, it was, I loved it, it was a very deliberate shorthand.
8:43 Speaker 03 We, we talked about this on the show, I don't think you were on that episode, Suzy, and I think I got it from you. Because you wrote this extraordinary book, which is all about the current day slang that's being used by every different kind of grouping.
8:56 Speaker 02 All the shorthands.
8:57 Speaker 03 Yeah. Who had the most?
8:59 Speaker 02 Um butchers were great, Freemasons as you would expect, had quite a few, birders had loads, paramedics, I mean, we all have them, only we're not tuning into other people's because we're so busy lobbing our own, you know, with others, I mean cyclists, honestly, it would be very hard to say who had the most, but it might well be butchers in terms of sort of keeping it going as a deliberate sort of tribal thing where you exclude others.
9:27 Speaker 03 And paramedics, I suppose it's useful if you're trying not to say this, this person's, your arm's come off, they're trying, they need to say to their colleague, this patient's arm has come off, but without alarming the patient.
9:39 Speaker 02 Yes, exactly, lots of euphemisms. And they also, a group of paramedics told me the, which you will have heard, but whenever they were being told off by their bosses, they would just say, hey, there we are then. And there we are then is an acronym for exactly what they thought of the person telling them.
9:55 Speaker 00 I will be using that.
9:57 Speaker 03 Ah, then.
9:58 Speaker 00 There we are then.
10:01 Speaker 02 But it's interesting you're talking about, Todd, being a socialite because so was Gordon Bennett, who was the son of a newspaper magnate, and he was a huge socialite, and that was why his name really stuck in the imagination. And plus, it's a handy sidestep for, you know.
10:18 Speaker 01 He was big.
10:19 Speaker 02 God blimey.
10:20 Speaker 01 Yeah, he sent, I believe he sent Stanley out to find Livingstone, who was Gordon Bennett.
10:24 Speaker 02 Yes.
10:25 Speaker 01 And so many people just don't know that name, they just think it's an exclamation.
10:28 Speaker 03 Yeah.
10:29 Speaker 01 But there was a Gordon Bennett.
10:31 Speaker 02 There was a Jack the Lad, there was a Smart Alec. We think that there was a Mickey Bliss who gave us Taking the Mickey, Taking the Mickey Bliss piss.
10:39 Speaker 01 Bob's your uncle?
10:39 Speaker 02 Bob's your uncle was Robert Balfour, who gave his nephew a job in government, even though he wasn't remotely suited for it.
10:48 Speaker 00 I was looking up Jimmy Riddle, I wondered where that.
10:51 Speaker 01 Yes.
10:52 Speaker 02 Oh, Jimmy Riddle?
10:53 Speaker 00 Yeah.
10:54 Speaker 03 I haven't heard that as a phrase.
10:55 Speaker 00 I'm going for a Jimmy Riddle.
10:57 Speaker 02 Yes.
10:57 Speaker 03 Okay.
10:58 Speaker 00 I don't know if this is the origins of it, but I looked in the newspaper archives for the earliest mention, and in 1866, there was an American song called Jimmy.
11:09 Speaker 00 Jimmy Riddle. So it was come union men, one and all, and learn how to fiddle. We'll vote all day and sing all night for good old Jimmy Riddle. And it looks like it was related to James Buchanan, the president, because the rest of the song, it's about Martin Van Buren and slavery and all this kind of stuff. So it seems, I think, that it might be from this, from James Buchanan, but
11:32 Speaker 03 Yeah.
11:32 Speaker 00 I'm not a lexacographer. How have you proved that these are true or false?
11:36 Speaker 02 It's, it's so hard. And often people think, particularly with the Oxford English Dictionary, that a words journey is complete and it's locked in, but that's absolutely not the case. So we're always finding new evidence.
11:49 Speaker 03 Are you, as one of the leading UK people in this area, are you someone that if a new bit of info is found, they sort of come to you subtly before it gets released to the public? Do you get inside?
12:00 Speaker 02 Sometimes I do, but honestly, there are, there are brilliant people out there who are doing the, you know, the detective work. So there was one lovely discovery, it must have been maybe 10 years ago now, of hot dog and where that came from. And that was from students at Harvard who generally were eating from pretty dodgy vans and generally thought that they were eating dog. And so we were able to kind of date that. So it's things like that which are wonderful. But when you say the, the, the leading, you know, lexicon, but I'm the only one people, people know. Because I always feel such an imposter. There, there are brilliant people.
12:37 Speaker 03 You're on your tod.
12:38 Speaker 02 I'm on my tod.
12:41 Speaker 03 But I would, I would have thought hot dog was, um, because sausage dog, because you get a sausage dog and then you're eating a sausage.
12:46 Speaker 02 Yes.
12:47 Speaker 03 Yeah. How interesting.
12:48 Speaker 02 Yes. No, it was a poor joke at Bad Meat.
12:51 Speaker 03 I have a question, Susie.
12:52 Speaker 02 Yes.
12:53 Speaker 03 Is there a word for
12:55 Speaker 00 things? Do you also get people coming up to you saying, I found a new word, Susie?
13:00 Speaker 02 Yes.
13:02 Speaker 03 Is there a word for
13:03 Speaker 02 I probably wouldn't know.
13:04 Speaker 03 Things that you think are named the way they are for an ostensibly obvious reason, but actually they're named after a person who's got an amusingly apt name.
13:15 Speaker 00 So an example that you will know is sideburns, which was named after Burnside, but you would think it was the side of the face, right?
13:21 Speaker 02 Yes. That's why it was flipped, because you've got the side. People thought these were your burns.
13:26 Speaker 03 I'm working on a short book of 1,000 of these.
13:30 Speaker 02 Wow.
13:31 Speaker 03 So well. 1,001. 1,001. Really happy to get to it.
13:35 Speaker 00 He's got the one.
13:38 Speaker 03 So for example, you guys haven't heard this one yet.
13:40 Speaker 01 Oh, yeah.
13:41 Speaker 03 I've been doing, I've been torturing these two with these for a really long time.
13:46 Speaker 01 A long time, Susie.
13:47 Speaker 03 Recently, I found out about a New Zealand coffee company which is called Allpress Espresso. It's named after the co-creator, Michael Allpress.
13:54 Speaker 00 Yeah, yes.
13:56 Speaker 02 Oh.
13:58 Speaker 03 Or French Park in Ireland, which is named after the French family. The Oberlin, Ohio, there's a place called the Carpool, which is named after Robert Carr.
14:06 Speaker 01 Okay.
14:07 Speaker 03 Who's the president of the, of the college.
14:10 Speaker 00 Do you remember there was a town in America called Snowflake that was named after Mr. Snow and Mr. Flake?
14:14 Speaker 03 Exactly.
14:15 Speaker 01 Yes.
14:15 Speaker 03 Exactly.
14:16 Speaker 01 It's that kind of thing.
14:17 Speaker 00 Is there a word?
14:17 Speaker 02 There is a word for this. I don't know if there is. I think you need to invent one. And that can be the title of your book.
14:22 Speaker 03 Yeah, nice.
14:23 Speaker 02 Have you got a title?
14:24 Speaker 03 Well, at the moment, it's called The Book of 1001 Things That You Think Are Named The Reason They Are For An Obvious Reason. But actually, they're named after someone with an interestingly apt name. But the editorial phase might win it a little bit.
14:36 Speaker 00 So your books have excellent names, Susie, I have to say. How do you think that one stands up?
14:42 Speaker 02 I think it's novel.
14:44 Speaker 01 Yeah.
14:44 Speaker 03 It's actually non-fiction.
14:45 Speaker 02 I know, I know, I know.
14:48 Speaker 01 Do you think there's ever been a book that's had more words in the title than the book itself?
14:52 Speaker 02 Yes, does it form an acronym, that title, maybe?
14:55 Speaker 03 Wanker.
15:00 Speaker 00 Words are not.
15:01 Speaker 02 That would be autological then. If you could come up with something that, that fits, then it would be.
15:06 Speaker 00 They're like, is it an eponym that's named after a person? So they're like eponyms, but they, they are eponyms, but you don't think they're going to be eponyms.
15:14 Speaker 03 Yeah, someone actually, someone emailed the Fish inbox with one of these, podcast at q i dot com. And they suggested homonyms, like homonyms.
15:22 Speaker 02 Yeah.
15:22 Speaker 03 I think that's not bad.
15:23 Speaker 02 Quite nice.
15:24 Speaker 03 Yeah. Why are you laughing then?
15:26 Speaker 01 I just can't believe that we've got into this territory.
15:29 Speaker 03 He's got a Lexicon for all, I'm not going to talk about my book. I'd like you to write the foreword, Susie, please. I know you did Brewers' Fable and this is going to be as elementary.
15:39 Speaker 02 I'm just trying to think of other, other eponyms. Now I like it.
15:42 Speaker 03 Thank you.
15:43 Speaker 02 Very nice.
15:43 Speaker 01 Like it, there's the quote for the front. That's all we needed. Thanks for coming in, Susie.
15:48 Speaker 03 Front and centre, front page.
15:54 Speaker 03 Okay, it is time for fact number two, and that is James.
15:58 Speaker 00 Okay, my fact this week is that the smarter your best friend's mum is, the smarter you will be.
16:07 Speaker 03 Dan, your best friend's mum must have been a real thickie. I don't have any friends.
16:14 Speaker 00 How rude.
16:15 Speaker 03 What's... Yeah, I'm so sorry. I'm telling Debbie, and you will regret that.
16:21 Speaker 00 So, this is research. They've, like, old research would say that the smarter your family are, the smarter you might be. Now, that might be genetics, or it might be just because your family, you know, are richer, for instance, or lots of different reasons. But there have been some new researchers who have looked at something called the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health, which followed students for more than a decade, and asked them loads and loads of questions. They did loads of questionnaires. And in part of it, they were asked the name of their best friend. And so these people could look at the best friend, and then look at their family, and work out if there was any correlation.
17:02 Speaker 00 And they found, actually, there was a real correlation between the success of the best friend's mum and the success of the child. And they don't know why it is. There's lots of reasons it could be. But they actually, they checked it against various different things, like, you know, affluence and all that kind of stuff, and they still reckon that this works out really well. And they don't know why.
17:23 Speaker 03 It's crazy.
17:24 Speaker 02 Because your best friend, then, is modelling their mum, so that you are...
17:28 Speaker 00 Yeah, yeah. It could be that.
17:30 Speaker 02 That you then model them.
17:31 Speaker 03 I did a bit of first-hand research on this.
17:33 Speaker 00 Oh, yeah.
17:33 Speaker 03 Phoned up my best friend, asked about his mum.
17:36 Speaker 00 Yep.
17:36 Speaker 03 She's got two degrees.
17:38 Speaker 02 Oh.
17:38 Speaker 03 Okay.
17:39 Speaker 00 So, you know, there's always...
17:41 Speaker 03 There's always exceptions and outliers.
17:44 Speaker 01 That is interesting.
17:45 Speaker 00 But this is all about like, how do you judge people's intelligence, really?
17:49 Speaker 01 Yeah. Alfred Binet, or Binet, depending on your pronunciation. He was the sort of proto IQ test creator. He was creating a test that were looking specifically at children to work out what schooling they would need.
18:05 Speaker 03 And they were trying to find less able children via these tests so that they could receive more help academically.
18:10 Speaker 01 Yes, exactly. Yeah. But he never thought that it should be used in the way that we are currently using it in order to assess what intelligence is. That sort of just grew out through different evolutions by further scientists and psychologists down the line.
18:24 Speaker 03 He was French, wasn't he?
18:25 Speaker 00 Binet, yeah.
18:26 Speaker 03 Yeah. Yeah, yeah. He coined the phrase erotic fetishism in 1887.
18:31 Speaker 02 Oh, I've not actually heard that phrase before.
18:33 Speaker 03 Was?
18:33 Speaker 02 I've not really heard that as a phrase.
18:36 Speaker 00 It's not a day to day phrase that we all come across.
18:39 Speaker 01 You just hear it because of the pop up ads on your Google, so Andy can't escape it.
18:46 Speaker 00 But yeah, genius. One interesting thing is etymologically, women can't have genius. And that's because in ancient Rome, it was a godlike soul that lay in the foreheads of men only. And the female equivalence was called the iuno. So men would have genius and women would have iunos.
19:05 Speaker 01 Oh, really?
19:07 Speaker 00 Yeah.
19:07 Speaker 01 Right.
19:08 Speaker 00 Isn't that interesting?
19:09 Speaker 02 I've just worked on a, on a series called Secret Genius.
19:13 Speaker 00 Yes.
19:13 Speaker 02 Where there were so many women who were geniuses.
19:16 Speaker 00 Sorry, I'm not saying that women are not geniuses.
19:19 Speaker 02 I know.
19:19 Speaker 00 The phrase etymologically speaking was doing a lot of heavy lifting in that fact.
19:23 Speaker 02 No, it's really interesting.
19:25 Speaker 00 What kind of people did you find on your show?
19:27 Speaker 02 Well, primarily, we wanted to find people who didn't know how brilliant they were. And all their friends knew that they had something special, but they hadn't been validated at school or they bunked off school because they knew they were different but felt embarrassed by it and that kind of thing. So it was actually really lovely.
19:45 Speaker 03 Were you tracking people via their children's best friends? Was that the method that you used?
19:48 Speaker 02 I think that should, that would be the logical thing now. That should be one of our criteria when we. Research.
19:54 Speaker 03 Because there are so many different ways of cutting it, you know, is it, there are creative arts, there are scientific forms of genius, there are engineering forms of.
20:02 Speaker 00 Yeah.
20:03 Speaker 02 There's so much and actually it's very difficult to sort of have a hard and fast rule as to, you know, you fit this category and you fit this one. And emotional intelligence now, I think, is also being really recognised, which is great.
20:14 Speaker 00 Yeah, I think that's interesting because there was a fact that did the rounds a few years ago that said sixty five percent of Americans thought they were above average in intelligence.
20:23 Speaker 01 Right.
20:24 Speaker 00 And everyone's like, oh, idiot Americans. But actually, if someone asks you, are you intelligent? And you say, well, yes, I am because I'm emotionally intelligent or because I'm good at puzzles or because I'm going to word games or whatever. Which you naturally would think, whatever your best thing is, you'd be like, yeah, I am great. Of course, sixty five percent of people think they are and they probably are.
20:42 Speaker 03 That's a really good point.
20:43 Speaker 02 Yeah.
20:44 Speaker 03 You guys.
20:44 Speaker 01 Yeah.
20:45 Speaker 03 Do you think that your partners, your wives are attractive or intelligent?
20:53 Speaker 00 I think Dan's, yeah, yeah.
20:57 Speaker 00 Fenella, yeah, absolutely, she is.
20:59 Speaker 01 Dan's, that was plural. How do you know about my secret wife?
21:03 Speaker 00 Fenella's listening going, well, I'm neither of those things, so there must be at least two others.
21:09 Speaker 01 Well, the interesting.
21:10 Speaker 00 Yeah, of course, like.
21:10 Speaker 03 Of course you do, of course you do. You married them. But you tend to think you've attracted someone gorgeous. Like, if you're with someone, you tend to think your partner's really attractive, naturally. But so we do know there's an effect where people overrate how attractive they think their partners are. I'm not saying your partner is overrated.
21:27 Speaker 02 Is this in the first few months or this is just continually?
21:30 Speaker 03 I think this is in general.
21:32 Speaker 02 Okay.
21:32 Speaker 03 I think you're just asking, basically, of course, because you're with them, you will say, well, I think that person's, you know, really gorgeous. Whereas maybe a neutral jury of their peers might say they're reasonably good looking.
21:44 Speaker 02 This is so dangerous.
21:47 Speaker 03 I know, I'm listening, I can hear listeners' marriages cracking up all over the place.
21:51 Speaker 00 The trick is not to ask the people at the wedding what they think.
21:55 Speaker 03 Our survey, sir.
21:59 Speaker 03 Well, the fascinating thing is that people also overestimate their partner's IQs by a thumping amount.
22:05 Speaker 00 Because surely you think, well, they're smart because they pick me.
22:08 Speaker 02 They're with me.
22:09 Speaker 03 Right, right. It's between 36 and 38 IQ points that people overrate their partner's intelligence. What it turns out is that your partner is a hideous moron.
22:19 Speaker 03 I'm so sorry.
22:21 Speaker 00 Well, that fascinates me.
22:22 Speaker 02 Yeah. Much better to do that than underestimate, though, surely. It'd be awful if you just were completely disrespectful.
22:29 Speaker 03 You know, you're with them, you love them, you think they're terrific, you think they're attractive and intelligent.
22:33 Speaker 02 I think that's a good idea. I think that's really good.
22:35 Speaker 03 Yeah. There's another test, which is called Mega. It's the Mega Test, which is like an IQ test.
22:42 Speaker 00 That's Megastonia Grey together, isn't it?
22:46 Speaker 03 And there was someone who was a very high scorer on it. And in fact, there was a record in the Guinness World Records up until 1990 for the highest IQ that someone has ever got. And it was a woman called Marilyn Vos Savant.
23:02 Speaker 02 Oh, that is wonderful.
23:05 Speaker 03 Yeah.
23:05 Speaker 02 She's totally bearing out her name.
23:07 Speaker 03 I read about her.
23:09 Speaker 00 Yeah.
23:09 Speaker 03 She's stunning. So.
23:10 Speaker 02 She's stunning.
23:11 Speaker 03 I'm sorry.
23:12 Speaker 00 I'm smart.
23:13 Speaker 03 I'm so sorry.
23:14 Speaker 02 And you married her.
23:19 Speaker 03 She, in 1985, she was 10 years old and she was recorded as having answered every single question right on an adult test.
23:25 Speaker 02 Wow.
23:25 Speaker 03 Now, according to the way IQ is done, which is where it's basically your IQ is, it's like a version of mental age. I mean, it's, there are all sorts of reasons.
23:35 Speaker 00 But it's dependent on your actual age, isn't it?
23:37 Speaker 03 It's dependent on your actual age. So if you're, let me get this right, if you're 10, but you get the same as an average 15 year old, supposedly you have an IQ of 150. Like, it's roughly like that.
23:47 Speaker 00 So if I'm 47 and I get the same as someone who's 70 years old, do I get 150 as well?
23:54 Speaker 03 I'm not sure when the baseline age is. That's a really good point. That's a really good point. But she was, at the age of 10, she did this test, which apparently gave her an IQ of 228. She became extremely famous. And for her work, she spent more than 20 years as an agony aunt.
24:11 Speaker 00 Gosh.
24:11 Speaker 03 Ask people's dilemmas.
24:12 Speaker 02 Emotional intelligence, you see.
24:14 Speaker 01 Ask Carolyn, it was called, and yeah. And there was a big moment in it where she popularised what is quite a famous mathematical problem now, which is the Monty Hall problem.
24:22 Speaker 00 Oh, really?
24:23 Speaker 01 Yeah, so the Monty Hall problem. James, you'll probably explain it better, but let's say you're on a game show, which I believe is why it's connected to it. Monty Hall was the host of the show. And you had three doors and you had to pick one that you think the treasure is behind, or the prize that you're going to get. And then behind the two other doors are, say, goats or something. So you select your door and then Monty opens one of the other two doors and shows a goat behind it. It says, okay, there's only one, two options now. Do you want to stick with your choice or do you want to change it? The problem suggests that you should then change it because your odds are higher.
24:57 Speaker 00 Almost everyone says I should stick, or they say it doesn't matter, it's 50/50 now.
25:01 Speaker 02 Why are the odds higher?
25:03 Speaker 00 Sorry?
25:03 Speaker 02 Why are the odds higher then if you can switch?
25:05 Speaker 00 Well, one way of looking at it is if there's 100 doors and you choose one and then he removes all of them apart from the last two. So he's taken out 98 doors. You now know that it's either in your door or the other one. But most of the time when they removed 98 doors, yours would have been one of them. But in this case, it wasn't. So there's a decent chance that yours is empty.
25:28 Speaker 03 You're going from odds of one in three to odds of one in two and you're re-chosing.
25:32 Speaker 00 You're now going into odds of two in three, actually.
25:35 Speaker 01 Oh, of course, of course. And this.
25:37 Speaker 00 But it's very counterintuitive.
25:39 Speaker 01 It breaks my brain.
25:40 Speaker 00 It breaks everyone's brain, honestly. It's, it's crazy.
25:42 Speaker 01 And it did at the time because she popularised this idea. I think she might, I want to say she came up with it, but I'm not 100%. But 10,000 people wrote in saying, no, that's not the case, including 1,000, nearly 1,000, who had PhDs. And in fact, Paul Erdos, the mathematician.
26:02 Speaker 00 Hungarian.
26:03 Speaker 01 Hungarian mathematician. He's kind of noted as one of the most prolific in the world. He refused to believe it and was only convinced when a computer simulation showed that her predictions were correct.
26:13 Speaker 02 It's mystical almost, isn't it?
26:14 Speaker 01 Yeah. Do you know a quick way to score higher on your IQ test, if you do one?
26:19 Speaker 00 It's not something you're trying to cheat though, is it?
26:21 Speaker 01 But what's interesting is they have noticed that the same person doing an IQ test actually can get differing scores based on a certain thing.
26:29 Speaker 03 So it must be something physical you can do in the room to quickly improve the blood flow to your brain, for example, like shaking your head really fast.
26:34 Speaker 01 That's okay.
26:35 Speaker 00 Run into the wall. Run into the wall and bang your head into the wall.
26:39 Speaker 01 Mr. Hocken, Mr. Murray were asked to leave the IQ seven up.
26:43 Speaker 00 Pencils up your nose.
26:44 Speaker 01 Yeah.
26:44 Speaker 03 What is it?
26:46 Speaker 01 It's all that, no.
26:47 Speaker 00 Is it, is it just practice? Like, cause those puzzles, I tend to be able to get a lot of those puzzles, but I don't think it's because I'm smart. I think it's because I've seen the puzzles before.
26:55 Speaker 01 Yeah, no, no, it's not that. And this is some research that was done by friend of the podcast, Angela Duckworth, who appeared on the 20 hour marathon that we did. She was over in America. They found, so if I was, let's say my oldest son, Wilf, if he was about to do it, if just before I said, I'm going to pay you $20 if you do well on this.
27:15 Speaker 02 Oh, incentivize.
27:16 Speaker 01 The money incentive will make him do better in the IQ test. It will change his concentration.
27:22 Speaker 03 Did you try this on your show?
27:23 Speaker 01 So he will bug you 20 quid.
27:25 Speaker 02 A hug.
27:27 Speaker 00 But you said before, I think on this show that that's how you get your kids to do anything, like brush their teeth. You give them 20 quid.
27:33 Speaker 03 I'm really broke. We, we need more. Please subscribe to the Clubfish on Patreon, everyone.
27:43 Speaker 03 Okay, it is time for fact number three, and that is Andy. My fact is by the year 1600, everyone's tongues were slightly higher in their mouths than in the year 1400, and nobody knows why. Oh, that's amazing. Not that high. Split the difference.
28:01 Speaker 00 Oh, so it's on that, because when you said this, I thought it was like in the palate, but it's not that.
28:06 Speaker 03 It's, well, okay, this is a thing that is one of the most bizarre elements of the English language. And it's really well established that it happened in our language, you know? Other languages around the world may definitely have had it. But it's a thing that started in roughly the 15th century and lasted for roughly 200 years, where everyone started saying a particular kind of letter, long vowels. So that's things like the A in cake, uh, rather than the O in hot. That's a short vowel.
28:35 Speaker 00 Yeah.
28:35 Speaker 03 But so if it sounds like the vowel, A, cake, it's a long vowel.
28:39 Speaker 00 Yeah, yeah. Which, by the way, is impossible to teach to kids. Like I'm teaching my daughter how to read right now and she keeps reading the words slightly wrong. I'm like, no, that it is actually an I.
28:49 Speaker 03 This is exactly it. If you're teaching anyone to read like a child, you have to, in English, you have to keep saying, no, that's just one of these funny things.
28:57 Speaker 00 Yeah.
28:57 Speaker 03 Because you can't talk about the great vowel shift, which is what this is called. Basically, Middle English, you would hold vowels for a long time and then people started moving their tongues slightly differently while saying these long vowels and it caught on. And there is not a guaranteed explanation of why this happened. There are lots of theories, but it's why you have to say, oh yes, cough doesn't look at all like dough. And it's why chaucer doesn't rhyme to us. If you read the Canterbury Tales, you think this guy's a moron. But actually, a hideous moron. Actually, he was probably- This chaucer's like, well, actually, for me, he was a beautiful genius. And, you know, all of these words have changed their pronunciation. So, you know, sheep, what we would call a sheep, they would call a sheep. You know, your wife-
29:41 Speaker 02 I think this settles, by the way, the scone versus scone debate, because I think we should just call them scone. And then we'd be fine. It would be no-
29:48 Speaker 03 Absolutely. It sounds like you're from Yorkshire, though, when you say that, scone. Yeah. Well, probably regionally, it's a bit different. You know, your wife was once your weef.
29:58 Speaker 02 Yeah.
29:58 Speaker 03 But is this the same as the wife of Bath being the wife of Bath? Or is that a slightly different thing? I think that's different.
30:06 Speaker 02 Yes, that is more regional. Yes. And the wife weef, we just meant woman, by the way. It wasn't a wife. Yeah.
30:12 Speaker 01 Was the, there's old spelling and new spelling. Does the old spelling reflect how it was being pronounced? As in, we obviously don't have recordings from the 1500s. So that's how we know it was being pronounced differently.
30:23 Speaker 03 This is the whole problem. The spelling hasn't changed and the pronunciation did.
30:26 Speaker 01 Yeah.
30:26 Speaker 02 We're still speaking. Yeah.
30:28 Speaker 01 How do we know?
30:28 Speaker 02 Spelling in sound divorce centuries ago. Well, we know because we can interpret from rhymes quite, quite a lot. And we literally are just sort of sifting through evidence to try and work out how they were pronounced at the time, because as you say, we didn't have audio.
30:44 Speaker 01 So, but did no one at the time think to do a phonetic, were the books that were teaching-
30:50 Speaker 03 They were dying of plague. They were dying of plague there. They were busy.
30:52 Speaker 01 That sounded ruder than I meant it to. Apologies to the Middle Ages.
30:57 Speaker 03 When Dan goes back in time, he's like, come on, guys, you just need to think of a phonetic.
31:01 Speaker 02 But even then, they didn't have the International Phonetic Alphabet or anything. So even then, we wouldn't have been able to interpret. They could have said, you know, cat as in cart or something. But we wouldn't know how cart was pronounced at the time. So a phonetic glossary wouldn't-
31:16 Speaker 01 Wouldn't exist.
31:17 Speaker 02 Wouldn't know.
31:17 Speaker 03 But poetry, poetry is massive for it.
31:19 Speaker 02 Yeah.
31:19 Speaker 01 Okay. Well, so you're telling me that right now, the theory we've gone for is that our tongues were in a different bit of our mouth.
31:26 Speaker 03 They were.
31:27 Speaker 02 There were.
31:27 Speaker 03 Why?
31:28 Speaker 02 Well, one theory is that the Black Death was just shuffling everyone around and people were migrating more towards London. And Londoners were more fashionable and more elite, or that the French were more elite, so we copied them. I mean, there are loads of theories.
31:42 Speaker 03 There's, it could be, the thing you can say in any history essay, the growing middle class. You could say that at any point in the last 2000 years, because actually there was a burgeoning of middle class at the time, but this changed, how things were said, you know, possible.
31:55 Speaker 00 It could be due to speaking French or avoiding speaking French. I've seen both of those theories. Which is basically either because the aristocracy were switching from French to English. And the middle class were kind of speaking French a little bit, but speaking it wrong, a bit like.
32:12 Speaker 02 Mangling it, yeah.
32:13 Speaker 00 Yeah, the guy from Allo, Allo, I kind of think, good mooning. Or that there was anti-French sentiment because we were at war with them quite a lot.
32:21 Speaker 02 Yeah.
32:22 Speaker 00 And there was a lot of that going on.
32:23 Speaker 03 Yeah.
32:25 Speaker 02 The printing press kind of came along mid-shift. So the printing press did more than anything to sort of solidify spelling, or not solidify it, but to standardize spelling.
32:36 Speaker 02 Thanks to Caxton, because before that was completely chaotic, but the sound changes kept happening. So we are still typing as they were in the 15th century, but we sound much later.
32:47 Speaker 03 Isn't that crazy? If we'd only not developed the printing press, or if we only had had the Great Vowel Shift 200 years before. It would be easy to learn English now. And you would, there wouldn't be all these mad exceptions where you just say, I'm sorry, you're just going to have to remember that for the rest of your life, that it's a bit different, that one. It's so crazy. But now, but now because spelling has been pretty well pinned and isn't changing, I guess it's not changing as fast as it would have done, you know, a thousand years ago. Because it was, things were sliding around all over the place, but we'll never spell handbag, handbag, which is what people say.
33:21 Speaker 02 Well, we might do. I mean.
33:22 Speaker 03 I hope so.
33:23 Speaker 02 Yeah.
33:25 Speaker 03 Bring your handbag.
33:26 Speaker 00 A handbag?
33:27 Speaker 03 Ham, handbag?
33:29 Speaker 00 That was what the confusion was in the place.
33:34 Speaker 01 No one talks about that. I, so weirdly by researching this fact, I've sort of developed a personal theory about my accent. Cause I have, I do have a weird accent. I, so I was born and raised in Hong Kong, lived in Australia and then moved here. And I put Rs, I have a forced R in a lot of stuff. So listeners of the show know that I say Covernard Garden as opposed to Covent Garden.
33:56 Speaker 02 Covernard.
33:56 Speaker 01 Covernard.
33:57 Speaker 02 Oh, nice.
33:57 Speaker 01 I put an R right at the end.
33:58 Speaker 03 Holborn instead of Hoban.
33:59 Speaker 01 Or Chicago, I put in there. And what I realised was when I moved to Australia, I had a very American accent. And when I got there.
34:07 Speaker 03 It's cause you went to an international school.
34:09 Speaker 01 In Hong Kong. Yeah, that's right. And in Australia, I went to a very, um, just down the line Aussie school. And I was worried about the accent, but the first day, a girl who I found very pretty called Penny, said, love your accent. And I thought, oh, okay, cool. I'm going to keep this. And I think I made an active effort to not lose my accent at a period where I would have been losing it. And I think the forced R is what that was.
34:32 Speaker 03 It's Penny's fault.
34:34 Speaker 01 Yes.
34:34 Speaker 02 Yes, it's the attractive R, not the intrusive R.
34:38 Speaker 03 Well, you think it's an attractive R.
34:42 Speaker 01 But yeah, I think, I think that's probably it. That may be how accents develop. It's, as you're saying, a reluctance to not be French, you know.
34:50 Speaker 02 Yeah, or to, or to sound cooler and sound like a Londoner.
34:52 Speaker 01 Yeah, exactly. Yeah.
34:54 Speaker 03 How interesting. On a little other element of Middle English, there's a brilliant piece on, I don't know why it was on BBC Future. Cause it's about language a thousand years ago. But anyway, it was a brilliant piece about how a thousand years ago, everyone had more pronouns than they do today. Because English had all these pronouns that we just have, have naturally sounded off the language. So there was wit, which we have the word we, meaning me and one person or more than one person. We can be two people, three people.
35:24 Speaker 01 Yeah, yeah.
35:25 Speaker 03 Anyone. Wit is specifically we too.
35:27 Speaker 01 Okay.
35:28 Speaker 03 So it's a word, yeah. And it's a, you know, there are poems where it's, it's we too. And it's sort of used as a romantic thing, you know.
35:36 Speaker 02 Oh, we too. We too.
35:38 Speaker 03 We too.
35:39 Speaker 01 Yeah, exactly.
35:40 Speaker 03 If you were an owl.
35:44 Speaker 01 And if there's our as well, but our can be multiple people or it can be two people. And you would have unka for mine and one other person's. So there were all these pronouns that we used to have. So in the old days, if you ask someone, what are your pronouns, you'd be there a while. Cause you know, there were loads more. Yeah, just find that so interesting. Or git for you too.
36:07 Speaker 02 Oh, like that.
36:07 Speaker 00 That's so interesting because English, I think, used to have, or like in a real, real long time ago, we had more cases, right? That we've just lost over the years. So like in German or Russian, you have all these different genitives and datives and all that. And you can still see some of them, especially in short words like the and they and all that kind of stuff. They've still kind of hung around a little bit.
36:29 Speaker 02 Yeah, I love that because we are, we are Germanic at heart, but then we, we kind of, you know, as you say, so many influences.
36:35 Speaker 01 Do you speak more than one language, Suzy?
36:37 Speaker 02 I speak German.
36:38 Speaker 01 Okay.
36:39 Speaker 02 So German was my first love and French and tiny bit of Spanish, but don't test me. And a tiny bit of Finnish because I was in Au Pair.
36:47 Speaker 00 Oh.
36:48 Speaker 02 Finnish ambassador for a while. I can talk about going to buy an ice cream, but that's about it. Finnish must be the most difficult language to learn, surely.
36:56 Speaker 00 Yeah, I've heard that.
36:57 Speaker 02 So many declensions and things, yeah.
36:59 Speaker 00 Is it ketosh in Finnish means thank you or something?
37:01 Speaker 02 Thank you.
37:02 Speaker 00 Yeah, I was taught you basically say mosquitoes with a soft ending and then lose the moss. And that's how you say it. Right. And if you have to learn that for every single word in the language, it's going to take you a long time.
37:15 Speaker 02 Yeah.
37:16 Speaker 01 We did a fact quite a long time ago on the show, which was, I think it was Icelandic or Finnish, where there was a translator of Agatha Christie novels who spent over a decade trying to work out how to translate just two words in this one novel, because it was the giveaway. It was the reveal and just couldn't work out to do it. Yes, it took over a decade.
37:38 Speaker 00 They don't have butlers in Iceland.
37:42 Speaker 00 Um, we talked about the phonetic alphabet earlier.
37:46 Speaker 01 Yeah.
37:46 Speaker 00 And the most recent consonant added to the international phonetic alphabet is the labial flap.
37:53 Speaker 01 Oh, crumbs.
37:54 Speaker 00 It looks, it looks like a V with a little tail at the top.
37:58 Speaker 01 I know what it looks like, James.
38:01 Speaker 00 Grow up. It's a very rare speech sound produced by quickly drawing the lower lip back behind the upper teeth and then releasing it forward.
38:14 Speaker 00 And it's found in some sub Saharan languages. But the rarest one I could find, I think this is the rarest, this, I saw this on TikTok with someone called Human1011, and they talked about the voiceless labial velar implosive, which is like pronouncing a K and a P at the same time, but instead of putting it out of your mouth, you suck it in. I couldn't do it, well, he did. But it's in a single dialect of a single language, of Igbo, which you get in Nigeria. But yeah, it's only used in that one tiny bit, but it's, you know.
38:49 Speaker 03 Very cool. There must be more out there that we haven't discovered.
38:52 Speaker 00 I'll be honest, it was mostly about just saying labial flap.
38:54 Speaker 03 Absolutely.
39:02 Speaker 01 Okay, it is time for our final fact of the show, and that is my fact. My fact this week is that many of Charles Dickens's readers in Victorian England consumed his works as audiobooks. This is, this is a little fun little detail from a book by Amy Cruz called The Victorians and Their Books. And there's an extract in it, an account from the time of when Charles Dickens was over in Paris and his son was sick and he was staying in the lodgings. And I believe that the boy's grandmother was looking after him. And so she said to the carer of the house, Mr. Dickens is coming. And the housekeeper was believed to have been illiterate, but said, Oh, Mr. Dickens, I love his work. She thought, how, how do you
39:45 Speaker 01 read? And so she explained that there is a little snuff shop and the man who works there would invite people in on the first Monday of every month. And he received a little payment and in return they got some tea, but they also were read extracts from the latest bit of a Charles Dickens novel. So effectively, if you couldn't read, you might pay someone to be the audiobook for you. And you get groups of people to do that.
40:12 Speaker 00 Even if you could read, I can imagine that'd be quite nice, having someone reading your story.
40:16 Speaker 01 Yeah, it's a big thing, wasn't it? I mean, in the earlier 19th century, Jane Austen's time, reading to your family was, was one of the things that you do.
40:22 Speaker 02 It was the thing after dinner, wasn't it? Yeah, poetry. But Dickens was a huge performer of his own works, wasn't he? I mean, they said that it really damaged his health in, in the end.
40:30 Speaker 00 Yeah, supposedly it killed him.
40:32 Speaker 02 Yeah, right. Yeah, he just, to Bill Sykes and things, he gave so much sort of of himself.
40:38 Speaker 01 Oh, wow.
40:39 Speaker 02 Yeah, and his performances that it, he was warned not to do it by his doctors.
40:43 Speaker 01 How interesting, because he did, there was a train crash that occurred not long before he died, where he got very ill. So he was still performing afterwards, was he?
40:51 Speaker 03 He was, he wasn't hurt himself, I think, but it was incredibly shocking to be in a train crash.
40:54 Speaker 01 Yeah, I think psychologically, yeah.
40:55 Speaker 00 We said before that, like, before his shows, he would drink a lot of champagne.
40:59 Speaker 03 Yes.
41:00 Speaker 02 Oh, really?
41:00 Speaker 00 Make a pint of champagne.
41:01 Speaker 03 Yes, yeah. So that might have had an effect, we don't know.
41:06 Speaker 03 Maybe all the raw eggs he also had before he died, yeah, could be. So this is interesting. Audiobooks didn't exist.
41:12 Speaker 01 Yeah.
41:12 Speaker 03 But we have a recording of A Christmas Carol exactly as Dickens would have read it, and in fact, read by Dickens, but Dickens died with no recordings of his voice being made. Little me this.
41:27 Speaker 00 AI.
41:28 Speaker 03 AI, that's it, it's AI, yeah.
41:31 Speaker 00 It's not, is it?
41:32 Speaker 03 No, it's the new robo Dickens. Every household will have one in 10 years' time, it's really exciting. No.
41:38 Speaker 01 Is it, is it a descendant who just looks very similar to Dickens and it's that, is it?
41:43 Speaker 03 It's so annoying. Dan's got it.
41:45 Speaker 01 Is that it?
41:45 Speaker 03 It was read by A Dickens, but not B Dickens. It was read by Monica Dickens, who was his great granddaughter, herself a novelist.
41:52 Speaker 02 She was.
41:53 Speaker 03 Uh, she wrote 40 novels.
41:54 Speaker 01 Oh my God, I picked up a book by her today.
41:56 Speaker 02 Yeah, yeah, they're really good.
41:57 Speaker 03 She had listened to her grandfather, i.e. Charles Dickens's son, reading A Christmas Carol lots. And he had a version of A Christmas Carol, which had all of the original Dickens annotations in it, where to, which words to stress, which words to leave out, which, you know, which way to lean this and that. So it was properly annotated. And she in 1950, recorded that version of A Christmas Carol. So we're. Through three generations, we have, four generations, we have the Dickens-approved version of A Christmas Carol.
42:27 Speaker 02 Amazing. Have you seen The Great Christmas Feast, which is a brilliant performance that goes on every Christmas, where they recreate Dickens reading A Christmas Feast to all of you who sit around in Dickensian clothes, eating great Dickensian food. It's brilliant.
42:46 Speaker 02 But he definitely would have a Patreon, wouldn't he?
42:50 Speaker 02 He was a one-man podcaster, really.
42:51 Speaker 03 He really was.
42:52 Speaker 00 Not that there's anything wrong with having a Patreon.
42:54 Speaker 03 Or being a podcaster. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. What are you trying to say?
42:58 Speaker 00 Yeah, he like did tour it a lot, didn't he? And he went to America even and toured it round there and apparently didn't really like it very much. He complained to his friends that he could do nothing that he wanted to do, go nowhere I want to go and see nothing that I want to see. If I turn into the street, I am followed by a multitude. Cause he was so famous.
43:17 Speaker 03 We've been on tour though, it's like that. It's just like that, you know?
43:20 Speaker 00 Oh, yeah. Couldn't wander through Times Square without being mobbed. But when he was in America, he was there, he did his show and stuff, but he also wanted to put the idea of an international copyright forward. Because at the time, everyone was copying his works in America and he wasn't getting any of the cash for it. And so he went around saying, okay, I'm gonna do my bit, but then also you guys should pay me for your books. It's not really fair. And the press, the American press really just did not like him and they said he was mercenary. They said he was only coming to America for monetary gain, all this kind of stuff. And then in his next novel that he wrote, Martin Chuzzlewit, Martin Chuzzlewit goes to America and says, this place is a shithole.
44:04 Speaker 00 And he really fell out with the Americans.
44:06 Speaker 03 Wow. It's really interesting. The copying and the plagiarism, I think we might have mentioned before that Dickens was pirated a lot. Cause he released them bit by bit. People could piggyback on that and then overtake him. So people, plagiarists would pump out works like Oliver Twist, Martin Guzzlewit or whatever. And there was one particular press baron called Edward Lloyd, who hired 10 or 50 writers to just churn these things out, get them on the streets before Dickens has released his next chapter or whatever it is. And Dickens did sue over one, saying this is outrageous, but the judge in the case, I love this, who was called Sir Lancelot Shadwell.
44:49 Speaker 01 Yes, please.
44:50 Speaker 03 Yes, please. Said, "These are so bad that they don't meet the test of plagiarism or pirating. No one could possibly be fooled..." Oh, really? "...by Nicholas Nickelberry, or whatever." Yeah, yeah, yeah. "It is not good enough to be plagiarism." Yeah. How interesting.
45:06 Speaker 00 Would that still work if I write a really awful version of Game of Thrones and I can get away with it?
45:12 Speaker 03 I think there are laws about parody, and there are tests... Do you remember the moron in a hurry?
45:17 Speaker 00 Oh, the man on the omnibus or something.
45:19 Speaker 03 Yeah, like if a moron in a hurry can still tell the difference between your work and the original, then it's fine. That is, that's it. But if they would be fooled, then it might be a problem.
45:27 Speaker 00 But you leave my wife out of this.
45:30 Speaker 01 Do you, do any of you know about, um, UK Red?
45:33 Speaker 00 UK Red?
45:34 Speaker 01 You heard about this, Susie? This is an open access database, um, housed at Open University, and it contains 30,000 easily searchable records documenting the history of reading in Britain from 1450 to 1945. And you can put in someone like Charles Dickens, and it will show you a track record in time of who has been reading, let's say in this case, Charles Dickens.
45:55 Speaker 03 Oh.
45:56 Speaker 01 Um, I found this in an article by, uh, someone called Mary Hammond. So, for example, it shows Victorian professional criminals when they were reading books in prison. There's an example of the novelist in the 1850s, Elizabeth Gaskell, reading a little bit of Little Dorrit over the shoulder of a passenger on a bus and being frustrated that she had to get off before her companion turned the page. Uh, there was A.A. Milne, who read Oliver Twist at the age of nine, and it gave him nightmares. Um, a man called Newman Flower, who in 1901 rose at 4:00 a.m. to watch the funeral procession of Queen Victoria pass by, but whiled away the hours reading Bleak House, but got so engrossed in the book, he completely missed it.
46:38 Speaker 03 Oh, no.
46:42 Speaker 03 No offence, but depending on the bit of Bleak House, it's not always totally easy to completely lose yourself in, as I say. I'd say you're quite distracted.
46:49 Speaker 02 That would be everything.
46:50 Speaker 01 Isn't that amazing? UK Red, highly recommend checking it out.
46:53 Speaker 03 That's so cool.
46:54 Speaker 02 I find it quite interesting that, because there is a sort of silent shame about audiobooks these days, isn't there? That you just sort of said, I've read it technically.
47:02 Speaker 00 Yeah.
47:02 Speaker 02 But it's a deep Victorian tradition. And I think, I think this is brilliant. I think we should be proud.
47:08 Speaker 00 Do you think it's if you read the audiobook, you get as much out of it than if you read the actual words?
47:13 Speaker 02 If you listen to the audiobook, sometimes, I would say, it depends, it depends so much on the narrator, doesn't it?
47:23 Speaker 00 I think science pretty much agrees with sometimes it depends.
47:26 Speaker 02 Yeah.
47:27 Speaker 00 Because I've found a few studies, there was one in 2016, where they played sections of a book to some people and then the other ones read it, and then they did a quiz and actually everyone kind of took in the same amount of information. And then there's one slightly more recent where they did the same thing, but this time they asked them trick questions. So it's like, the kind of trick question is like, how many of each animal did Moses take on the ark? And the answer is, no, Moses didn't take any.
47:59 Speaker 02 Moses, it wasn't Moses, yeah.
48:00 Speaker 00 So it's that kind of trick question. So they asked the people that kind of question, and they found that the people who had read the book were less likely to be tricked. So it's almost like you still take it in, but you don't process it quite as much. That's what they said.
48:14 Speaker 03 Often you're listening to an audiobook while doing something else. Whereas reading a paper book, you, you can't be driving a bus. For example, you know, so I think that probably makes a bit of a difference in the real world.
48:25 Speaker 02 I wonder if the brain also provides a little bit of white noise when you're reading, because you can sort of pause or whatever, because there's also really interesting research that involved two recordings being played to an audience, one with all the white noise, the ums, the r's, the fillers and things, kept in, and another one where it was entirely stripped out. And the one where it was kept in was, was remembered best.
48:47 Speaker 00 Oh, interesting.
48:48 Speaker 02 Because it gives you a bit of time to absorb.
48:50 Speaker 00 Oh, that's interesting.
48:51 Speaker 02 As long as it's not over the top.
48:54 Speaker 00 I tend to allow one per sentence. Really?
48:58 Speaker 02 Yeah.
48:59 Speaker 03 That's probably enough.
49:00 Speaker 01 We could double our numbers if you leave in all of our stumbles.
49:03 Speaker 02 There's a sweet spot, I think.
49:04 Speaker 03 Yeah.
49:05 Speaker 02 Me, you know, like in Love Island just drives everyone mad, doesn't it? So I think too many and then it the reverse is true, but yeah.
49:12 Speaker 01 Interestingly, anytime we read, this is for most of us, we are listening to the audiobook as we're doing it.
49:20 Speaker 02 I think that's true.
49:20 Speaker 01 Sub vocalization. It's a thing that happens where most of us, when we're reading the words in our head, we can hear our voice.
49:27 Speaker 02 Yeah.
49:28 Speaker 01 Reading it. And in many cases, the muscles in the in your throat that would be moved to make sound are very subtly making those movements as well. Yeah.
49:38 Speaker 02 Some people mouth quite obviously.
49:39 Speaker 01 Some people mouth. And so apparently you also can only go at the speed at which you read.
49:45 Speaker 03 But you can read faster and slower.
49:46 Speaker 01 Yeah, you can, but you can't break any kind of, you can't trick your brain into going faster. Yeah.
49:52 Speaker 03 How interesting. And there was all this debate about whether people in in olden times had the capacity to read silently.
49:58 Speaker 00 Yeah, because there was one guy, wasn't there, from like the ninth century? And someone wrote, amazingly, he can read without talking or something. And that was taken as evidence that actually no one could do that before.
50:09 Speaker 02 Gosh.
50:09 Speaker 00 I'm not sure of that.
50:10 Speaker 03 I don't know. I think there's still debate going on about that, or it's a bit, it was a bit of a dubious one.
50:14 Speaker 01 It's quite fun. I was, um, I was thinking about audible and how you get any kind of book you want now. And you can put an actor's name in and you can get whatever they've read. So there are some people who have quite iconic voices. And it's quite funny when they're paired up with certain books. So for example, you can read a book called The Savior Is Born, which is the story of the nativity from the voice of God. Morgan Freeman.
50:37 Speaker 00 Oh.
50:38 Speaker 01 Yeah. You can be read the Bible by Mufasa, which is James Earl Jones, or arguably Darth Vader's reading it to you. It's quite fun, these kind of iconic voices that.
50:49 Speaker 03 But they strip out all the.
50:52 Speaker 01 Yeah.
50:53 Speaker 00 One per sentence.
50:55 Speaker 02 But in the future, we'll be able to just pick a voice, pick a text and match them, won't we?
50:59 Speaker 01 Yes.
51:00 Speaker 02 Which is quite scary.
51:01 Speaker 01 James Earl Jones is a good example because he's given over the rights to his voice for any future Star Wars, so they can now AI Darth Vader into...
51:08 Speaker 00 I mean, you could do it now, not legally, I reckon. Like, pretty much, you probably wouldn't take much to take Susie's voice and then do an audiobook just with AI, I reckon.
51:19 Speaker 02 Yeah.
51:20 Speaker 00 Melania Trump's memoir in 2024.
51:23 Speaker 02 I'm not doing that one.
51:26 Speaker 00 She announced that it would be the future of publishing because it was an AI voice that was doing her audiobook.
51:33 Speaker 02 That poor man else.
51:37 Speaker 00 One of the main companies in the field, Eleven Labs, said that the product lacked the nuanced emotional expression of an actual person.
51:45 Speaker 01 Sorry, are we talking about the book or the readings?
51:54 Speaker 01 Okay, that's it. That is 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 all be found online. I'm on Instagram on at Schreiberland. James?
52:06 Speaker 00 I'm on TikTok, no, it's this thing, it's James Harkin.
52:09 Speaker 01 Andy?
52:09 Speaker 03 My Insta's Andrew Hunter M.
52:11 Speaker 01 Yep, and Susie, where do we find you?
52:13 Speaker 02 Instagram, at Susie Dent.
52:14 Speaker 01 Nice, cool. And yeah, Susie, you're on tour at the moment, right?
52:17 Speaker 02 Yes, it's called Word Perfect, and it is just a one-woman show where I just talk words, we have a laugh, I hope, some silly videos, sort of facts that you guys hopefully would love, and I have a Q and A section, which is my favourite bit. So there's a sort of word surgery where people can ask me anything they want, within reason.
52:37 Speaker 01 And yeah, do follow Susie on Instagram. And if you want to write about any of the stuff we've spoken about in this episode generally to us, you can do that by emailing podcast at qi.com. All the emails make their way to Andy. He cherry picks the best of them and he separates them into two groups. The first group is the facts. We love picking the facts out for our new Monday show that we've been doing called Little Fish. It's a bonus episode. We put down our facts, we pick up yours and we read the best of them out. And then we also use the second pile as part of Drop Us A Line, which is our Mailbag Show, and that's a sort of private, secret members' club that is on Patreon. It's called Club Fish. There's lots of tiers, lots of rewards, lots of interesting things that you can check out there if you're a fan of the show. So do go there.
53:22 Speaker 03 And go where, Dan?
53:23 Speaker 01 Patreon.com/clubfish.
53:27 Speaker 03 I love it.
53:27 Speaker 01 It's great. It's great as a web domain and you should enjoy it too. Anyway, you can otherwise just come back here because we're going to be back with another episode next week and we will see you then. Goodbye.
53:49 Speaker 04 She's been thinking about this sleepover all week, but I think about her food allergies all the time. Fortunately, her doctor prescribed Zolair, omalizumab. It's proven to significantly reduce allergic reactions if a food allergy accident happens.
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