QI: The Book of General Ignorance - the Noticeably Stouter Edition (8 page)

Wrong again. It wasn’t her.

You probably remember the history lesson as if it were yesterday. It’s 1789 and the French Revolution is under way. The poor of Paris are rioting because they have no bread and the Queen, Marie Antoinette – callously indifferent, trying to be funny or just plain stupid – comes up with the fatuous
suggestion that they eat cake instead.

The first problem is that it wasn’t cake, it was brioche (the original French is
Qu’ils mangent de la brioche
). According to Alan Davidson’s
Oxford Companion to Food,
‘Eighteenth-century brioche was only lightly enriched (by modest quantities of butter and eggs) and not very far removed from a good white loaf of bread.’ So, the remark might have been an attempt at kindness: ‘If they want bread, give them some of the good stuff.’

Except Marie Antoinette didn’t say it. The line had been in use in print as an illustration of aristocratic decadence since at least 1760. Jean-Jacques Rousseau claimed he’d first heard it as early as 1740.

Lady Antonia Fraser, Marie Antoinette’s most recent biographer, attributes the remark to the Queen Marie-Thérèse, wife of Louis XIV, ‘The Sun King’, but there is a host of other grand eighteenth-century ladies who might have said it. It’s also entirely possible it was made up for propaganda purposes.

There is another story that suggests Marie Antoinette introduced croissants to France from her native Vienna. This seems highly unlikely, as the earliest French reference to a croissant isn’t until 1853.

Interestingly, wandering Austrian pastry chefs did introduce the flaky pastry to Denmark at about this time, the eponymous ‘Danish’ pastries being known there as
wienerbrød
(‘Vienna bread’).

In Vienna, they are called
Kopenhagener
.

Swiss rolls are not Swiss: nobody knows why they are called ‘Swiss’ in Britain. The Swiss equivalents are called either
Biscuitrolle
or
gâteau
roulé
; the Spanish call them
brazo de gitano
, or ‘gypsies’ arms’ and the Americans call them jelly rolls (jelly being American for ‘jam’).

Despite Orson Welles’s famous soliloquy in Carol Reed’s film
The Third Man
(1949), the cuckoo clock was invented in Germany in 1738.

The Swiss are responsible for several more modern and useful contributions to modern life including rayon, cellophane, Velcro, milk chocolate and the Swiss Army knife.

The Swiss are neutral but they are not pacifists. Every Swiss man aged between twenty and forty is in the Swiss national militia and keeps a rifle at home. If the Swiss had to fight a war, their ‘Army’ would be 500,000 strong. During the Second World War, the Swiss air force nonchalantly shot down both German and Allied aircraft.

That leaves us with dog-eating. The sensible, law-abiding Swiss are the only Europeans who eat dog meat.

No one knows how many dogs end up salted, smoked or made into sausages in remote Alpine villages, but it certainly happens. Cats, too. Their defence: it’s a reasonable way to recycle a much-loved pet and it’s good for you. After eating the tastiest parts of the dog, the rest is made into lard and used to cure coughs. 

St Bernards have never, ever carried brandy barrels.

The dog’s mission is entirely teetotal – apart from anything else giving brandy to someone with hypothermia is a disastrous mistake – but tourists have always loved the idea, so they still pose wearing them.

Before they were trained as mountain rescue dogs, they were used by the monks at the hospice in the Great St Bernard Pass – the Alpine route that links Switzerland to Italy – to carry food, as their large size and docile temperament made them good pack animals.

The brandy barrel was the idea of a young English artist named Sir Edwin Landseer (1802–73), who was much favoured by Queen Victoria. He was a renowned painter of landscapes and animals, best known for his painting
The Monarch of the Glen
and for sculpting the lions around the base of Nelson’s Column.

In 1831, he painted a scene called
Alpine Mastiffs Reanimating a Distressed Traveller
featuring two St Bernards, one of them carrying a miniature brandy barrel around its neck, which he added ‘for interest’. St Bernards have been saddled with the association ever since. Landseer is also credited with popularising the name St Bernard (rather than Alpine Mastiff) for the breed.

Originally, St Bernards were known as Barry hounds, a corruption of the German
Bären
, meaning ‘bears’. One of the first lifesavers was known as ‘Barry the Great’, who rescued forty people between 1800 and 1814 but was unfortunately killed by the forty-first, who mistook him for a wolf.

Barry was stuffed and now has pride of place in the Natural History Museum in Berne. In his honour, the best male pup from each litter at the St Bernard’s Hospice is named Barry.

Sometimes, the Hospice’s duty to provide food and shelter for all who ask can prove troublesome. One night in 1708, Canon Vincent Camos had to provide food for over 400 travellers. To save manpower, he had a device built like a large hamster-wheel attached to a spit. Inside, a St Bernard trotted along turning the meat skewer.

It’s estimated the dogs have made over 2,500 rescues since 1800, though none at all in the last fifty years. As a result, the monastery has decided to sell them off and replace them with helicopters.

An Albanian pig.

Albanian dogs go
ham ham.

In Catalan, dogs go
bup bup
. The Chinese dogs say
wang wang
, the Greek dogs go
gav gav
, the Slovenians
hov hov
and the Ukrainians
haf haf
. In Iceland, it’s a
voff
, in Indonesia, it’s a
gong gong
, and in Italian, it’s a
bau bau
.

Interestingly, when there is less variety in an animal’s noise, languages seem to agree more commonly on its interpretation. For example, nearly every language has a cow going
moo
, a cat going
meow
and a cuckoo going
cuckoo
.

Dogs even develop regional accents, according to researchers at the Canine Behaviour Centre in Cumbria. Scouse and Scots dogs have the most distinctive accents. The Liverpudlians have higher-pitched voices, whereas the Scots have a ‘lighter tone’.

To gather their data the Centre asked for owners and their dogs to leave messages on their answering machine; experts then compared the pitch, tone, volume and length of the
sounds made by humans and dogs.

They concluded that dogs imitate their owners in order to bond with them; the closer the bond, the closer the similarity in sound.

Dogs also mimic their owners’ behaviour. A terrier owned by a young family will tend to be lively and difficult to control. The same dog living with an old lady will end up quiet, inactive and prone to long periods of sleep.

None at all. Particularly not
RIBBIT
.

The three-foot-long Goliath frog from central Africa is mute.

There are 4,360 known species of frog, but only one of them goes ‘ribbit’. Each species has its own unique call. The reason everyone thinks all frogs go ‘ribbit’ is that ‘ribbit’ is the distinctive call of the Pacific tree frog (
Hyla regilla
). This is the frog that lives in Hollywood.

Recorded locally, it has been plastered all over the movies for decades to enhance the atmosphere of anywhere from the Everglades to Vietnamese jungles.

Frogs make a huge variety of noises. They croak, snore, grunt, trill, cluck, chirp, ring, whoop, whistle and growl. They make noises like cattle, squirrels and crickets. The barking tree frog yaps like a dog, the carpenter frog sounds like two carpenters hammering nails out of sync, and Fowler’s toad makes a noise like a bleating sheep with a heavy cold. The South American paradoxical frog (
Pseudis paradoxa
) grunts like a pig (it’s paradoxical because the tadpoles are three times larger than the frog).

Female frogs are mostly silent. The noise is made by male frogs advertising themselves to potential mates. The loudest frog is the tiny
coquí
of Puerto Rico, whose Latin name,
Eleutherodactylus coqui,
measures more than its body. Male coquís congregate in dense forest – one to every ten square metres – and compete to see who can call loudest. From three feet away, this has been recorded at ninety-five decibels, about the same as a pneumatic drill, and close to the human pain threshold.

Recent research has solved the riddle of how frogs avoid bursting their own eardrums. They use their lungs to hear. By absorbing up the vibrations of their own calls, the lungs equalise the internal and external pressure on the surface of the eardrums, protecting the delicate inner ear.

Frog calls operate rather like radio stations: each species selects its own frequency. So what we hear – a forest or pond full of competing froggy racket – is much less distracting to the lady frogs, who only tune in to the calls of their own species.

Internationally, frogs are generally regarded as making a similar sound to ducks. But not everywhere. In Thailand, for example they go
ob ob
, in Poland
kum kum,
in Argentina
berp
; Algerian frogs make a
gar gar
noise, similar to the Chinese
guo guo
; Bengali frogs go
gangor-gangor
; in Hindi frogs go
me:ko:me:k-me: ko:me:k
(the colon indicates that the preceding vowel is long and nasalised); Japanese frogs produce a
kerokero
sound and Korean frogs go
gae-gool-gae-gool
.

William Shakespeare first used the phrase ‘tu-whit, tu-who’ in his song ‘Winter’ from
Love’s Labour’s Lost
:

No single owl has ever gone ‘tu-whit, tu-whoo’.

Barn owls screech. Short-eared owls are largely silent. A long-eared owl makes an extended low pitched ‘oo-oo-oo’ noise.

The owl noise that most resembles ‘tu-whit, tu-whoo’ is made by Tawny owls. Two of them.

The male Tawny – also known as a Brown Owl – calls with a hooting ‘hooo-hoo-hooo’, and the female replies with a hoarser ‘kew-wick’.

He ate them, although only once.

Charles Darwin was driven by gastronomic, as well as scientific, curiosity. While half-heartedly reading Divinity at Cambridge University, he became a member of the ‘Glutton’ or ‘Gourmet Club’ which met once a week and actively sought to eat animals not normally found on menus.

Darwin’s son, Francis, commenting on his father’s letters, noted that the Gourmet Club enjoyed, among other things, hawk and bittern, but that ‘their zeal broke down over an old brown owl,’ which they found ‘indescribable’. 

Over the years, Darwin sharpened up considerably in the academic arena and lost his faith in God, but he never lost his taste for the allure of an interesting menu.

During the voyage of the
Beagle
, he ate armadillos which, he said, ‘taste & look like duck’ and a chocolate-coloured rodent that was ‘the best meat I ever tasted’ – probably an agouti, whose family name is
Dasyproctidae
, Greek for ‘hairy bum’. In Patagonia, he tucked into a plate of puma (the mountain lion
Felis concolor
) and thought it tasted rather like veal. In fact, he originally thought it
was
veal.

Later, after exhaustively searching Patagonia for the Lesser Rhea, Darwin realised he had already eaten one for his Christmas dinner, while moored off Port Desire in 1833. The bird had been shot by Conrad Martens, the ship’s artist.

Darwin assumed it was one of the common Greater Rheas, or ‘ostriches’, as he called them, and only realised his mistake when the plates were being cleared: ‘It was cooked and eaten before my memory returned. Fortunately the head, neck, legs, wings, many of the larger feathers, and a large part of the skin, had been preserved.’ He sent the bits back to the Zoological Society in London and the
Rhea darwinii
was named after him.

In the Galapagos, Darwin lived on iguana (
Conolophus subcristatus
) and, on James Island, wolfed down a few helpings of giant tortoise. Not realising the importance of giant tortoises to his later evolutionary theory, forty-eight specimens were loaded aboard the
Beagle
. Darwin and his shipmates proceeded to eat them, throwing the shells overboard as they finished.

A Phylum Feast is a shared meal using as many different species as possible, eaten by biologists on 12 February to celebrate Darwin’s birthday.