Apologies to anyone who opened this email expecting to find a quiz. We do love a quiz, don’t we, us Brits? True of False: In any given week you can find more than 300 different quiz shows on British TV. I include in that Good Morning Britain, in which there is only one question and it’s always the same:
Why the hell do people keep giving Piers Morgan work?
No sooner was BBC TV past its second birthday than it began broadcasting its first TV quiz show, Spelling Bee, in 1938. This, as the name suggests, was a spelling quiz, in which teams of soberly dressed B-listers wearing headphones were given words and asked to – wait for it – spell them. You could almost taste the excitement.
It was not the BBC’s finest hour but it did gain some traction in the public conscience (well, the five people who owned a telly anyway) as an alternative to watching dust gather in the grate. Eventually Neville Chamberlain was forced to declare war on Germany just to get it off air.
But Spelling Bee tapped into a strange part of the British psyche that has turned us into a nation of quizaholics. And it’s not just a case of wanting to air our knowledge of trivia. Each week, three million people tune in to University Challenge to watch other people answer questions they don’t understand.
It’s a far cry from the first pub quiz I ever went to. Back in the mid-80s, when London’s Docklands was a flat no-man’s land roamed by dinosaurs and drooling developers, a wind-blown wasteland of empty waterways, pile drivers and the occasional Victorian terrace that had yet to succumb to the wrecking ball, there stood just two commercial buildings: the office I worked in and a pub, frequented by my workmates, the local psychopath and a bunch of resentful ex-dockers. In an effort to boost trade and build bridges between her eclectic clientele, the landlady decided to put on a quiz night. Question 1: What are you looking at?
We didn’t get to Question 2.
Ironically, the one question that nobody has yet been able to answer is ‘Where does the word quiz come from?’ You would assume it derived from the Latin ‘quizzicus’, wouldn’t you? Or perhaps an Old English word for the wrong end of a pig. But it doesn’t. There is no Latin word ‘quizzicus’.
There’s a good story, which appears to have some validity, about a Dublin theatre owner coining the word to win a bet that he could invent a new word and get the whole city using it within a day. But there is also prior evidence of the word being used to mean both an eccentric person (from which we get the word quizzical) and a type of toy like a yo-yo.
This was in the late 1700s. It wasn’t until the mid-19th century that the verb ‘to quiz’ came about, meaning to question. And even then no-one seemed to know where it came from.
So if you opened this email hoping for questions, I’d like to think I’ve delivered. If not, here are three more that cost me dear last night.
Is Australia a continent?
Really? Since when?
