QI: The Book of General Ignorance - the Noticeably Stouter Edition (2 page)

People sometimes accuse me of knowing a lot. ‘Stephen,’ they say, accusingly, ‘you know a lot.’ This is a bit like telling a person who has a few grains of sand clinging to him that he owns much sand. When you consider the vast amount of sand there is in the world such a person is, to all intents and purposes, sandless. We are all sandless. We are all ignorant. There are beaches and deserts and dunes of knowledge whose existence we have never even guessed at, let alone visited.

It’s the ones who think they know what there is to be known that we have to look out for. ‘All is explained in this text – there is nothing else you need to know,’ they tell us. For thousands of years we put up with this kind of thing. Those who said, ‘Hang on, I think we might be ignorant, let’s see…’ were made to drink poison, or had their eyes put out and their bowels drawn out through their botties.

We are perhaps now more in danger of thinking we know everything than we were even in those dark times of religious superstition (if indeed they have gone away). Today we have the whole store of human knowledge a mouse-click away, which is all very fine and dandy, but it’s in danger of becoming just another sacred text. What we need is a treasure house, not of knowledge, but of ignorance. Something that gives not answers but questions. Something that shines light, not on already garish facts, but into the dark, damp corners of ignorance. And the volume you have in your hands is just such a blazing torch which can help us embark upon the journey of dumbing up.

Read it wisely, Little One, for the power of ignorance is great.

FOUR WORDS

Foursquare. Fourball. Fourstroke. Foursome.

FORE WORDS

Forehead. Forever. Foreign. Forestry.

FOR WORDS

Forflitten. Forglopned. Forroast. Forslug.
*

The company behind BBC2’s
QI
, the website qi.com and the book you hold in your hand was formed a decade ago.

The world was a very different place then. The dotcom boom had barely begun and the Twin Towers were still standing, there were no British or American troops dying in Afghanistan and Iraq, and the banks were as sturdy as the Bank of England.

But one aspect of the world hasn’t changed much. The moneybags who run the culture still seem to think we’re all a bit thick. Television, magazines and newspapers pump out stuff that interests practically no one and, as a result, they’re all going steadily broke. Man cannot live by celebrity dancing alone.

The principle behind
QI
is that everything is interesting if looked at closely enough, for long enough, or from the right angle. Along with that goes the idea that if a thing cannot be explained to an intelligent twelve-year-old, then it is either wrong or not very well explained. It’s our view that the people who watch
QI
are just as intelligent as the people who make it – even if they don’t know as much (well, who does?) as the National Treasure who chairs it. And all of us (host, production team, panellists, studio audience, elves) believe that it’s perfectly possible to be funny without also being nasty.

As a result of these simple theories, the programme has been a runaway success on BBC2, where it consistently beats much better-publicised, supposedly ‘trendier’ programmes in the ratings, and is watched by more young people than anything else on the channel. It is by far the most popular programme on BBC4 (and has been since the channel’s launch) and consistently tops the ratings on the thrusting commercial outfit Dave. In 2009,
QI
is transferring to BBC1. Stephen Fry, we regret to announce, will not be appearing in a leotard.

This edition contains an index, fifty extra questions, a smattering of new cartoons by the talented Mr Bingo, and an appendix detailing all the editions of the TV show made to date. In deference to the transfer of QI to BBC1, it also includes some sixty excerpts from the programme itself, to give newcomers a sense of how the raw information of
QI
research is smelted into jokes.

We hope you will enjoy reading it as much as we enjoyed researching and writing it. You will not be alone. The original edition of
The Book of General Ignorance
has been translated into twenty-nine languages – not just French, German, Spanish and Chinese, but Vietnamese, Turkish, Cambodian, Serbian and Finnish. It was a best-seller in the
New York Times
, and is the fourth best-selling book on Amazon (after two Harry Potter books and
The Dangerous Book for Boys
) since that company first went online in 1995. In the month of December 2006, in fact, it was the bestselling book in the world on Amazon, narrowly beating something called
The Audacity of Hope
by an
up-and-coming American senator called Barack Obama.

We, too, believe fervently in the possibility of change.

We make it two.

Or four if you’re a Catholic.

Henry’s fourth marriage to Anne of Cleves was annulled. This is very different from divorce. Legally, it means the marriage never took place.

There were two grounds for the annulment. Anne and Henry never consummated the marriage; that is, they never had intercourse. Refusal or inability to consummate a marriage is still grounds for annulment today.

In addition, Anne was already betrothed to Francis, Duke of Lorraine when she married Henry. At that time, the formal act of betrothal was a legal bar to marrying someone else.

All parties agreed no legal marriage had taken place. So that leaves five.

 The Pope declared Henry’s second marriage to Anne Boleyn illegal, because the King was still married to his first wife, Catherine of Aragon.

 Henry, as head of the new Church of England, declared in turn that his
first
marriage was invalid on the legal ground that a man could not sleep with his brother’s widow. The King cited the Old Testament, which he claimed as ‘God’s Law’, whether the Pope liked it or not.

Depending on whether you believe the Pope or the King, this brings it down to either four or three marriages.

Henry annulled his marriage to Anne Boleyn just before he had her executed for adultery. This was somewhat illogical: if the marriage had never existed, Anne could hardly be accused of betraying it.

He did the same with his fifth wife, Catherine Howard. All the evidence suggests she was unfaithful to him before and during their marriage. This time, Henry passed a special act
making it treasonable for a queen to commit adultery. Once again, he also had the marriage annulled.

So that makes four annulments, and only two incontestably legal marriages.

Apart from Henry’s last wife, Catherine Parr (who outlived him), the lady who got off lightest was Anne of Cleves. After their annulment, the King showered her with gifts and the official title of ‘beloved sister’. She visited court often, swapping cooks, recipes, and household gadgets with the man who had never been her husband. 

Four. Two you can see; two you can’t.

This discovery came from observing how fish breathe. Fish get their oxygen from water. Most of them have two pairs of nostrils, a forward-facing set for letting water in and a pair of ‘exhaust pipes’ for letting it out again.

The question is, if humans evolved from fishes, where did the other pair of nostrils go?

The answer is that they migrated back inside the head to become internal nostrils called
choannae
– Greek for ‘funnels’. These connect to the throat and are what allow us to breathe through our noses.

To do this they somehow had to work their way back
through the teeth. This sounds unlikely but scientists in China and Sweden have recently found a fish called
Kenichthys campbelli
– a 395-million-year-old fossil – that shows this process at its half-way stage. The fish has two nostril-like holes between its front teeth.

Kenichthys campbelli
is a direct ancestor of land animals, able to breathe in both air and water. One set of nostrils allowed it to lie in the shallows and eat while the other poked out of the water a bit like a crocodile’s.

Similar gaps between the teeth can also be seen at an early stage of the human embryo. When they fail to join up, the result is a cleft palate. So one ancient fish explains two ancient human mysteries.

The most recent research on noses, incidentally, shows that we use each of our two external nostrils to detect different smells, breathing different amounts of air into each to create a kind of nasal stereo.