QI: The Book of General Ignorance - the Noticeably Stouter Edition (20 page)

E pluribus unum
(‘out of the many, one’) is the motto of the Portuguese football club Sport Lisboa e Benfica – usually abbreviated to Benfica.

E pluribus unum
used to be the national motto of the United States, referring to the integration of the thirteen founding states (it has thirteen letters), but it was replaced by ‘In God we trust’ (a line from ‘The Star-Spangled Banner’) as the official national motto in 1956. The confusion arises because
e pluribus unum
is still used in the Great Seal, on the ribbon streaming from the eagle’s mouth, which appears on the reverse of the dollar bill and on all US coins.

The phrase was originally used to describe a herby cheese spread. In a Latin recipe poem called
Moretum
, once attributed to Virgil, the poet describes the lunch of a simple farmer in which he grinds cheese, garlic and herbs together into a ball (
color est e pluribus unus
).

By the eighteenth century it had become a well-worn phrase meaning unity or friendship.

Benfica was created as a merger of two clubs in 1908. It is Portugal’s most popular soccer club, but also fields teams in a range of other sports as well.

American sign language bears a striking similarity to the old French sign language system.

This is because a deaf Frenchman, Laurent Clerc, was one of the first teachers of sign language in the US in the nineteenth century.

American Sign Language (ASL) is a complex visual-spatial language used by the deaf in the US and parts of English-speaking Canada. It is a linguistically complete language, spoken as the native tongue of many deaf people as well as some hearing children of deaf families. Though American universities such as Yale do not offer courses in ASL because ‘it is not an academic language’, ASL is one the commonest languages used in the US today, easily in the top dozen.

Not only is American Sign Language totally different from British Sign Language (BSL), it is so different in grammatical structure from American English that ASL has more in common with spoken Japanese than it does with spoken English. Deaf Americans will find it much easier to make themselves understood in France than in Britain.

Sign languages are not feeble, mimed versions of spoken or written speech but languages in their own right, with grammatical structures and syntax that do not correspond to their spoken or written forms. They are not universally intelligible. They differ from country to country even more than normal speech and it is not uncommon for sign languages to differ from city to city in the same country.

From 1692 to 1910, nearly everyone on Martha’s Vineyard, an island off the coast of Massachusetts, was bilingual in Martha’s Vineyard Sign Language (MVSL). The first deaf person arrived there in 1692 and, as a result of the remote nature of the island, and of intermarriage between people with the deafness gene, there was a very high rate of hereditary
deafness in the area. In some villages, as many as one in four were deaf.

Deafness on the island was so common that many people believed it to be contagious, but it was never considered a handicap.

In 1817, the school now known as the American School for the Deaf opened on the mainland in Hartford, Connecticut, and most of the deaf children were sent there to be educated. Many settled and married nearby and the hereditary deaf gene on Martha’s Vineyard fizzled out. The last deaf native died in 1950 and MVSL is now extinct, although modern ASL still retains some of its features.

They don’t. Cherokee speech has no ‘ch’ or ‘r’ sound.

The correct spelling (and pronunciation) is Tsalagi. ‘Cherokee’ is a Creek Indian word meaning ‘people with another language’. The preferred Cherokee word for themselves is
Aniyounwiya
which means ‘the principal people’.

There are about 350,000 Cherokee alive today, of whom about 22,000 speak the language. Their written alphabet was devised by Sequoyah (1776–1843), a Cherokee Indian also known as George Guess. He is the only known example in history of an illiterate person inventing a written language.

Sequoyah was the son of a Cherokee mother and Nathaniel Guess, a German-born fur trader. He was either born handicapped or injured while young, hence his name Sik-wo-yi, which means ‘pig’s foot’ in Cherokee.

He first became interested in creating a Cherokee alphabet in 1809. An accomplished silversmith and – despite his
handicap – a brave soldier, Sequoyah fought for the US in the Cherokee Regiment under Andrew Jackson against the British and the Creek Indians at the Battle of Horseshoe Bend in 1814. A wealthy Georgian farmer called Charles Hicks showed him how to write his own name so he could sign his work as a silversmith. During his military service, Sequoyah became convinced of the need for an alphabet because he saw that – unlike the white soldiers – the Tsalagi were unable to write to or receive letters from home, and all battle orders had to be committed to memory.

It took him twelve years to work out the alphabet. He called the eighty-five letters his ‘talking leaves’. On showing it to the Tsalagi Chiefs in 1821, it was accepted immediately, and was so simple that, within a year, almost the whole tribe became literate.

Seven years after its adoption, the first Tsalagi language newspaper,
The Cherokee Phoenix
, was printed in 1828.

Jimi Hendrix, Dolly Parton and Cher have all claimed Cherokee descent.

Nothing. There are no buffaloes in North America. However, he did kill a lot of
bison
– 4,280 of them in fewer than eighteen months.

The word ‘buffalo’ is frequently misapplied to bison. The North American Plains Bison (
Bison bison
) is related to neither genus of true buffalo – the water buffalo
Bubalus
and the
African buffalo
Synceros
. Their most recent common ancestor died out six million years ago.

The bison population fell from 60 million in the seventeenth century to just a few hundred by the late nineteenth. There are about 50,000 bison roaming the range today. Bison/cattle crosses are bred for meat, called ‘cattalo’ or ‘beefalo’. They have cattle fathers and bison mothers. Offspring of a male bison and female cattle are too broad-shouldered for the cow to deliver safely.

William Frederick ‘Buffalo Bill’ Cody, hunter, Indian-fighter and showman, joined the Pony Express – the West’s legendary mail service – at the age of fourteen, in response to an ad which ran: ‘WANTED young skinny wiry fellows not over eighteen. Must be expert riders willing to risk death daily. Orphans preferred. Wages $25 a week.’

The Pony Express only lasted nineteen months and was superseded by the railroad. In 1867, Cody was hired to hunt bison to feed the construction crews of the Kansas Pacific Railroad, which is where he notched up his astounding total.

He ran his Wild West Show from 1883 to 1916. The show was hugely popular; its European tour was attended by Queen Victoria. On his death in 1917 – and despite the fact there was a war going on – Cody received tributes from the British King, the German Kaiser and President Woodrow Wilson.

Although he had specified in his will that he should be buried near the town of Cody, Wyoming (which he had founded), his wife stated that he had converted to Catholicism on his deathbed and asked for him to be buried on Lookout Mountain, near Denver.

In 1948, the Cody branch of the American Legion offered a $10,000 reward for the ‘return’ of the body, so the Denver branch mounted a guard over the grave until a deeper shaft could be blasted into the rock.

Hatchets weren’t buried until 1968, when there was an
exchange of smoke signals between Lookout Mountain (Denver) and Cedar Mountain (Cody), while the spirit of Buffalo Bill was transported symbolically from one mountain to the other on a riderless white horse.

It deliberately sets fire to them.

Giant Sequoia trees (
Sequoiadendron giganteum
) are the heaviest living things ever to have existed on earth: they can weigh more than 6,000 tonnes and the tallest are as high as a twenty-six-storey building. Their bark is up to 1.2 m (4 feet) thick, but the seeds are tiny, weighing 1/3,000th of an ounce each, about a billionth of the weight of the fully grown tree.

The massive number of minuscule seeds of the Giant Sequoia is contained in egg-shaped cones less than 7.6 cm (3 inches) long. The tree’s thick bark also protects it against insects and lightning strikes. As a result, many trees are completely hollow but still standing.

Paradoxically, forest fires are essential for the sequoia’s survival. Because of their thick bark they survive fires that completely destroy all other trees. The fires leave the forest clear of undergrowth, which enables the sequoia’s absurdly tiny seeds to survive. The trees also rely on the heat of the fires to open their tough seed cones and to expose the bare soil.

Since time immemorial, forest fires had swept through the sequoia groves every five to fifteen years. In the 1950s and 1960s, the US Forest Service became concerned that the trees had stopped reproducing. Studies by Dr Richard Harteswood
in the 1960s proved that it was because the US Forest Service had managed (quite brilliantly) to suppress all fires in the area since being formed in 1905. The solution offered by Dr Harteswood was to reverse the process by deliberately starting fires, and this is in fact now government policy.

Also known as Wellingtonia trees, Giant Sequoias are native to California but have been planted worldwide. In terms of volume, they are the fastest-growing trees in the world.

The tallest known Giant Sequoia was 95 m (311 feet) tall and more than 40 feet in diameter, but Giant Sequoias are not the tallest trees in the world: California redwoods (
Sequoia sempervirens
) can be as much as 116 m (380 feet) tall.

Sequoias are named after a half-breed Native American called Sequoyah (1776–1843), otherwise known as George Guess, who invented the Cherokee alphabet (see
‘How do the Cherokee pronounce “Cherokee”?’
).