P to T
P is for Pub Quiz
“Twenty years ago,” says Marcus Berkmann,
author of Brain Men, an excellent book on the British
Institution of pub quizzing, “if you had walked
into your local to find a man behind a microphone reading
out general knowledge questions, you would probably have
called the police.” Now, most pubs have a quiz night,
providing “hard-fought competition that manages
to be both deadly serious and completely meaningless.
“ Berkmann describes the appeal: “All knowledge
is worthless if you can’t display it in front of
your friends and rivals.” Q
is of course for Quiz
Anecdote has it that the word was invented by Irish
theatre manager Daly who bet a handful of colleagues
that within 24 hours, he could introduce a meaningless
word into the English language. Overnight the word ‘quiz’
was painted on every prominent wall in the city of Dublin.
By lunchtime, it was all the rage. Everyone was talking
about it, wondering what it meant. Daly had won his
bet and the word entered the lexicon as ‘a person
who makes practical jokes, a hoaxer, a joker’
R is for Robinson Anne.
“Queen Of Mean”, “Battleaxe”,
“Mrs Nasty”, “TV’s Rudest Woman”,
“Redhead Of the Year 2001” (true) etc
S is for Specialist Subject
Mastermind’s weirder ones have included: 'The
Life-cycle and Habits of the Honey-Bee', 'The Coinage
of England 1066-1662', ‘The Moomin Saga by Tove
Jansson’, ‘Sweet Peas’ and ‘The
Life and Times of Author and Broadcaster Magnus Magnusson’
(no, really).
T is for Trivial Pursuit
Invented in 1979, by Canadians, Scott Abbot and Chris
Hanley, ostensibly it’s a trivia board game with
some 6000 questions that were often deliciously crap
(“What is the name for a person who has more than
two testicles? Polyorchid”) or wrong (TP is responsible
for single-handedly spreading the myth that the Great
Wall Of China can be seen from space). In reality, though,
TP is mostly an excuse to have a punch-up arguing over
the proper name for the ‘wedges’, ‘pieces
of pie’, ‘cheeses’, or ‘coloured
plastic segments’ or WHATEVER THEY’RE BLOODY
CALLED.
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