1,227 QI Facts to Blow Your Socks Off (9 page)

The word pencil

comes from a Latin word meaning

‘small penis’.

When trying out a new pen,

97% of people

write their own name.

90% of everything

written in English

uses just 1,000 words.

20% of all road accidents

in Sweden

involve an elk.

12% of all the Coca-Cola

in America

is drunk at breakfast.

Gongoozler
n.

One who stares for a long time

at things happening on a canal.

Gossypiboma
n.

A surgical sponge

accidentally left inside

a patient’s body.

Jentacular
adj.

Breakfasty; breakfastish;

of, or relating to, breakfast.

Meupareunia
n.

Sexual activity enjoyed

by only one of the participants.

Gorillas

can be put on the pill.

The German for ‘contraceptive’ is

Schwangerschaftsverhütungsmittel
.

By the time you’ve finished saying it,

it’s too late.

On 20th August 1949,

time appeared to stand still

for several minutes,

when hundreds of starlings roosted

on the long hand

of Big Ben.

The correct adjective

to describe a thrush is

turdoid.

If a silkworm

is exposed to pure carbon dioxide,

it crawls around aimlessly,

apparently trying to remember

what it’s supposed to be doing.

Eskimos use refrigerators

to stop their food from freezing.

The Sun’s core is so hot that

a piece of it the size of a pinhead

would give off enough heat

to kill a person 160 kilometres away.

Every living thing can be anaesthetised,

even plants. Despite their successful use

since the mid-19th century,

no one really understands

how anaesthetics work.

A trained typist’s fingers

cover about 16 miles a day.

Every US president with a beard

has been Republican.

The Bible

is the most shoplifted book

in the USA.

The world’s biggest frog

is bigger than

the world’s smallest antelope.

The dik-dik is a miniature antelope

that can go for months

without water

but dies after a week

without salt.

One third of all the salt produced in the US

is used to melt ice on roads.

British geologists have discovered

more of the world’s oil

than the geologists

of all the other nations

put together.

After being annexed

by the British Empire,

the sarong-clad Burmese

referred to their new overlords as

‘The Trouser People’.

Towards the end of each afternoon,

Sir Philip Sassoon (1888–1939)

hauled down the Union Jack

that flew over his house

in case the colours

clashed with

the sunset.

Half of Napoleon’s army

at the battle of Eylau – 30,000 men –

were burglars.

The penalty for adultery in ancient Greece

involved hammering a radish

into the adulterer’s bottom with a mallet.

Radishes were a lot longer

and pointier in those days.

An octopus can ooze through an opening

no bigger than its own eyeball.

Humans and elephants

are the only animals

with chins.

Sir Charles Isham,

a vegetarian spiritualist,

introduced garden gnomes

to England in 1847.

He hoped that they would attract

real gnomes to his garden.

Until the late 15th century,

the word ‘girl’ just meant a child.

Boys were referred to as ‘knave girls’

and female children were ‘gay girls’.

The use of the English word ‘gay’

to mean homosexual

is older than the use of the term

‘homosexual’ to mean gay.

The Serpentine in London was the first

man-made pond in the world

designed to look

as if it wasn’t

man-made.

Albanian has 27 words

for different kinds of moustache

and 30 for eyebrows.

In the 9th century,

Ireland was called ‘Scotia’ and

Scotland was known as ‘Albania’.

Six ten-billionths of the Sun is gold.

If the 1,200,000,000,000,000 tonnes of it

could be extracted,

there would be enough to gild Scotland

to the depth of half a mile.

Beavers have transparent eyelids so they

can see underwater with their eyes shut.

The Old Testament book of
Leviticus

forbids the eating of cuckoos, ferrets,

camels, swans, crabs, frogs, chameleons,

eels, hares, snails, lizards, moles, ravens,

ospreys, vultures, lobsters, owls, storks,

herons, bats, ravens, pelicans, lapwings,

prawns and eagles.

1,000 baby eagles were eaten at

the Archbishop of York’s

enthronement feast in 1466.

Zeppo Marx, the youngest of the

Marx Brothers, designed the clamping

device that held the atom bombs in place

before they were dropped on

Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

Oprah is ‘Harpo’ backwards.

Oprah Winfrey’s real name is Orpah

(after the sister of Ruth in the Bible)

but no one could say or spell it properly

so she eventually gave up

correcting them.

The flowers of the coffee bush

smell like jasmine.

Jasmine is a member of the olive family.

Marie is a member of the Osmond family.

Her first name is Olive.

In 1987, American Airlines saved $40,000

by removing an olive

from each salad

in First Class.

In an average year in Britain,

trousers cause

twice as many accidents

as chainsaws.

100,000 mobile phones

are dropped down the loo

in Britain every year,

and 50,000

get run over.

People are 1% shorter

in the evening

than they are

in the morning.

The Metropolitan Police

employs 39% more people

than the Royal Navy.

Cranberries bounce when ripe:

another name for them is ‘bounceberries’.

One that bounces seven times

is in perfect condition to eat.

Horripilation

is another word

for getting goosebumps.

The technical word

for a French kiss is

cataglottism
.

Cockshut

is another word for twilight –

the time of day when chickens

are put to bed.

If all the time our eyes

are shut when blinking

is added together,

we spend 1.2 years

of our waking lives

in pitch darkness.

Every time a woodpecker’s beak

hits a tree, its head is subject to

1,000 times the force of gravity.

The smallest trees in the world

are the dwarf willows of Greenland.

They are two inches tall.

The world’s smallest test tube

has a diameter

10,000 times narrower

than a human hair.

Antarctic islands include

Disappointment Island, Fabulous Island,

Desolation Island, Monumental Island,

Inexpressible Island, Pourquoi Pas Island,

Shag Island, Circumcision Island and

Shoe Island.

In 2008, Usain Bolt

set the world record for the 100 metres

with one shoelace undone.

Every electron in the universe

knows about the state of

every other electron.

Honeybees

always know where the Sun is,

even if it’s

on the other side of the world.

The national anthem of Bangladesh

includes the lines:

‘The fragrance from your mango groves

Makes me wild with joy.’

One in three men in Britain

of Bangladeshi origin

works as a waiter.

Towels are a central part

of the culture in Belarus,

even appearing on the country’s flag.

At a traditional Belarusian wedding,

the bride walks to the church

dragging a towel.

13% of Belarus

is swamp.

In 2011, a 61-year-old woman

gave birth to her own grandson.

The baby was conceived with an egg

donated by her 35-year-old daughter.

The American Psychiatric Association

listed homosexuality

as a mental illness

until 1973.

Sudan is the only country

that still has crucifixion

as an official form

of capital punishment.

By the age of 18,

the average American child

will have seen 200,000

murders on television.

In German,

a
Turnbeutelvergesser

is a boy who’s too weedy

for school sport and ‘forgets’

to bring his gym bag.

Schattenparker

is German for someone

who parks his car in the shade.

Depp

means ‘twit’

in German.

Thud!

the Discworld novel by Terry Pratchett,

is published in Germany as

Klonk!

The Basque word

for ‘cold’ is

hotz
.

The Russian word

for ‘sock’ is pronounced

‘no sock’.

If you say the letters S.O.C.K.S

aloud in English, you will find yourself

pronouncing the Spanish for

‘it is what it is’

almost perfectly.

If you forget the tilde (~)

over an N when asking

how old someone is in Spanish,

you will end up asking them

how many anuses they have.

When Montenegro became

independent from Yugoslavia,

its Internet domain name went from being

.yu to .me

The Irish word
leis
(pronounced ‘lesh’)

has four different meanings.

Bhí leis leis leis leis
means

‘His thigh was naked also’.

A
bourdaloue
was a gravy-boat-like

receptacle that ladies would squeeze

between their thighs

if they needed to urinate at court

in Georgian England.

George W. Bush, Dick Cheney and

Donald Rumsfeld

all have slime-mold beetles

named after them.

Since 1700, new beetle species

have been discovered

at the rate of

one every six hours.

The short-circuit beetle is so named

because it eats the lead covering

of telephone cables.

Cartwrightia cartwrighti
is a scarab beetle

described by Oscar L. Cartwright.

As you are not supposed to name

a species after yourself,

he claimed to have named it

after his brother.

Deathwatch beetles

attract mates

by repeatedly banging

their heads on the floor.

During his first teaching job in 1925,

Evelyn Waugh set out

to drown himself at sea,

but turned back

after being stung by a jellyfish.

The Irish name for jellyfish is

smugairle róin,

which literally translates as

‘seal’s snot’.

The French

for a walkie-talkie is

un talkie walkie.

The Eiffel Tower

has the same nickname

as Margaret Thatcher.

It’s known as
La Dame de Fer

(‘The Iron Lady’).

Crime, disease and average

walking speed increase by 15%

as a city doubles in size.

People all over the world

are walking 10% faster

than they did a decade ago.

Airlines all over the world are flying

10% slower than they did in 1960

(to save on fuel costs).

As an apple falls to Earth,

the Earth falls very, very slightly

towards the apple.

Isaac Newton served as MP for Cambridge

but spoke in the House only once.

He asked for a window to be closed

because it was draughty.

Bram Stoker,

the author of
Dracula
,

married Oscar Wilde’s

first girlfriend.

Arthur Ransome,

author of
Swallows and Amazons
,

married Trotsky’s secretary.

Two-thirds of all the poetry

sold in the UK by living poets

is by Seamus Heaney.

The Slavonic name

for God is

Bog.

In 1568, the Catholic Church

condemned the entire population of

the Netherlands to death for heresy.

In the 1930s, the Rev. Frederick Densham

of Warleggan in Cornwall

alienated his flock by painting the church

blue and red, surrounding his rectory

with barbed wire and replacing

the congregation with

cardboard cut-outs.

Stalin had shamans

thrown out of helicopters

to give them a chance to

prove that they could fly.

It is most likely to be raining

at 7 a.m.

and least likely

at 3 a.m.

In Maori,

the word Maori

means ‘normal’.

Princess Anne

was the only woman

not to be gender-tested

at the 1976 Montreal Olympics.

Anne, Duc de Montmorency (1493–1567),

was a French general and politician.

He was named after his mother,

Anne Pot.

Pol Pot,

the Cambodian dictator

responsible for the deaths

of 21% of his country’s people,

was a former

geography teacher.

The Swahili word

for a coconut is

nazi
.

‘Mother-in-law’

is an anagram of

‘Hitler woman’.

Both Stalin and Hans Christian Anderson

were the sons of a cobbler and a

washerwoman.

In 1187, as a symbol of unity

between their two countries,

Richard I of England

spent a night in the same bed

as Philip II of France.

In 1381, Richard II made Chelmsford

the capital of England

for one week.

In 1517, Richard Foxe,

the blind bishop of Winchester,

founded Corpus Christi College, Oxford.

On his first visit to the new college,

he was led twice round the main quad

to make it seem bigger than it really was.

In 1953, Keith Richards’ musical career

began as a choirboy

singing at the Queen’s coronation.

No male jaguar

has ever successfully mated

with a female tiger:

if it were to happen, the resulting animal

would be known as

a ‘jagger’.

Early draft names for

Walt Disney’s seven dwarfs included

Flabby, Dirty, Shifty,

Lazy, Burpy, Baldy

and Biggo-Ego.

Strictly speaking,

the plural of dwarf

is dwarrows.

In 2011, Toyota announced that

the official plural of Prius was

Prii.

Research using rabbits

has led to 26 Nobel Prizes

for Physiology or Medicine.

To process their food

with maximum efficiency,

rabbits swallow up to

80% of their own faeces.

The Sumatran rabbit

is so rare and shy

that the nearest humans

have no word for it in their language.

Bugs Bunny

is not a rabbit

but a hare.

The sloth is the only animal

named after one of the Seven Deadly Sins.

During the rainy season,

its metabolism slows down so much

that it can starve to death

on a full stomach.

Dolphins shed

the top layer of their skin

every two hours.

Paper can only be recycled six times.

After that, the fibres

are too weak to hold together.

A 2011 study by Nobel Economics laureate

Daniel Kahneman of 25 top Wall Street

traders found that they were

no more consistently successful

than a chimpanzee tossing a coin.

A 2011 study in the journal
Psychology
,

Crime and Law
tested 39 British senior

managers and CEOs and found that they

had more psychopathic tendencies

than patients in Broadmoor.

Since 1980, the salaries of executives in

FTSE 100 companies have risen by 4,000%

compared to 300% for their employees.

An average pay rise of 50% in 2010

took the annual earnings of the directors

of Britain’s FTSE 100 companies

to £2.7 million each: over 100 times

the national average.

At the end of 2011,

the FTSE index stood at 5572:

1358 points lower

than it was at the end of 1999.

Google

was originally called

Back-Rub.

The
acnestis

is the part of the back

that is impossible to scratch.

The most common treatment

for angina is

nitroglycerin.

It comes in pills, sprays or patches.

All Bran

is only

87% bran.