493: No Such Thing As An X

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Hey everyone, Dan here.

Welcome to this week's episode of Phish.

Before we get going, I just want to let you know about today's guest.

Joining us this week, we were so excited to be joined by someone who is genuinely British nerd royalty.

It is, of course, the lexicographer, the star of Dictionary Corner from Countdown, and 8 out of 10 cats does Countdown, and that is Susie Dent.

Now, Susie Dent is someone that we, you know, we basically monitor her Twitter account on a 24-hour basis.

She's just always pumping out incredible words with these definitions, and you've never heard them before, and we've never met her before.

So this was such an exciting moment for us, not only to be able to meet her in person, have a nice chat, but also to sit down with her her on stage in front of a crowd and dork out with her so uh yeah i really hope you enjoyed the episode we absolutely loved it and outside of that i just want to quickly mention that you need to get your hands on susie's two new upcoming books The first one comes out September 28th, and that one is called Interesting Stories About Curious Words.

So it's sort of all those phrases that we know, Stealing Thunder, Red Herrings, but what do they actually mean?

So this book is going to be looking into all those phrases and terms on your behalf so that you now know who was sweet Fanny Adams, why are circles vicious?

All those questions that you might have had.

She's put it into an ultimate compendium to explain it all.

So that's out September 28th.

But then on the 5th of October, she also has a book coming out called Roots of Happiness, 100 words for joy and hope, and that is a book for kids.

Basically, Susie had the idea when looking through a dictionary that there's far too many negative words in there and that we should be highlighting the more happy ones, the more uplifting ones.

So reading directly from a blurb here, it's going to lift you out of your mubble fobbles, which is a slightly sad mood, make you grin like a giggle mug, which is someone who never stops smiling, and have you feeling for blissed, extremely happy.

So, do pick up both those books, but until then, enjoy Susie here, live at the Soho Theater, with no such thing as a fish.

On with the show.

Hello and welcome to another episode of No Such Thing as a Fish, a weekly podcast this week coming to you live from the Soho Theater in London.

My name is Dan Schreiber.

I'm sitting here with James Harkin, Andrew Hunter Murray, and Susie Dent.

And once again, we have gathered round our microphones with our four favorite facts from the last seven days and in no particular order.

Here we go.

Starting with fact number one, and that is Susie.

Okay, Samuel Johnson, in his dictionary of the English language from 1755, decided that he would not include any words beginning with the letter X because he said, thus begins no word in the English language.

That's my fact.

And is that true?

Were we xylophoneless at this point?

Yeah, xylophone was a century later.

But also, he was quite picky.

You know how lexicographers today, we are really careful about not giving any opinion whatsoever.

Even with words like trumperiness, which are my favourite, meaning something completely showy but utterly worthless.

We're not allowed to say

anything.

But he was notoriously rude to the Scots, you know, about Americans.

So I think he probably didn't have much truck with anything from Greek.

Okay, right.

But we did have X words at the time.

We had a few X words, but a lot of them came later.

Lovely words, all from Greek, like zenium, which is a gift to strangers, which I think is really nice.

But what was lovely is that it came from the Phoenicians and they had a letter Samek, which actually gave the letter S, we think.

But that meant fish.

So you could say there's no such thing as an X.

Oh, that's quite cool.

Well, that's the title of the episode.

Exactly.

Is that the quickest we've ever got our title as well?

Wow.

Did they have xenophobe in those days?

They have a xenophobe.

Xenophobia, I think most phobias are based on Greek, but we kind of made them up a little bit later.

But we based them on classical things, like cooler phobia, fear of clowns, which I have.

They didn't have clowns in ancient Greece, so they chose the word for stilt walker.

Yeah, it's quite cool.

What's your and are you also afraid of them because of the sort of knock-on?

No, I like stilts, okay, yeah.

Um,

but yeah, clowns, definitely not really, no,

have you seen the new, is it the smiler, the horror, no, no, okay, don't

wow.

The reason I ask about xenophobia is because because Johnson, as you say, probably didn't like the Scots very much.

He didn't like the Americans.

He didn't like the French for sure.

He predicted that he'd write the dictionary in three years.

And then, when someone pointed out that it had taken the French 40 years to write their own dictionary,

he said, well, this is proportion.

40 times 40 is 1600.

As three to 1600, so is the proportion of an Englishman to a Frenchman.

Yeah.

Right.

Yeah.

Wow.

So 42,000 words made it into this first dictionary that he did write.

42,000 definitions.

And he had self-deprecating jokes that he kind of included in there, which is quite fun.

So yeah, the word for dull, the description for the word dull, he explained, to make dictionaries is dull work as part of his description.

And then also the definition of lexicographer, he wrote, a writer of dictionaries, a harmless drudge.

Yeah.

Oh, look, you know it by heart.

Yeah.

Seriously.

That's incredible.

And also he was quite...

he would never admit that he didn't know a word, which was quite funny.

So, or the origin of a word.

So,

spider, I loved.

He couldn't quite get to the root of spider.

So, he just said, Is this not the insect that spies from a door?

That's the one.

It's not an insect, mate.

It's a ratnid.

Exactly.

It just feels like such a, like the any old bollocks era of study.

It just feels like such a great time to be alive.

Dan, you would have absolutely

been

been king back then, yeah.

That is true.

He was one of the last people in England to be touched for scroffula.

Oh, yeah.

So cool.

That's such a horrible word, scroffula.

Scrofula, yeah.

And he was just a skin condition, and the monarch would touch people and effectively cure them, ineffectively cure them of scroffula.

And Sammy Johnson's parents took him to London from his hometown when he was three years old.

You know, your local parish would maybe club together, raise the money, they'd send you off, and the queen, the monarch would touch you.

There'd be big cues as well, right?

Huge cues.

Charles II, we might have mentioned this before, he touched something like 2% of the population of England.

Wow.

Wow.

Yeah.

Steady.

It was a different time, mustn't it?

It was a turn.

It was a very different time.

And

like, and Johnson had it, he had a gold coin.

He saw queen.

The touch piece, which is the sort of, yeah.

It didn't work, though.

And actually, he's quite disfigured his face through scroffula, which is very sad.

Yeah.

Yeah, and there's some really weird but but lovely etymologies in there.

So, tarantula was an insect, insect, he does say, call it an insect again, whose bite can only be cured by music because it was thought it could be cured by the tarantella, the dance.

Wow.

Was that proper doctor's advice at the time?

Really?

Wow.

Is there a doctor in the house, Dr.

Johnson?

Yes.

Get a hurdy-gurdy to this woman now.

And then he had retromingency, which means pissing backwards.

That's how he defined it.

When you say pissing backwards, you don't mean sucking it up into your body, right?

Oh,

I think it's like possible?

I'm hoping.

I think it's like some animals, their penis points backwards, right?

I think.

And so a retromingent mammal

on the back of its feet.

Yes, that's close.

That's all right, I think.

This is a bit like Roy Keene saying, shove it up your bollocks.

He's like,

shove it up your bollocks.

But it does feel sometimes when you need to pee and you don't want to, that the hold has a suck action to it as well.

Am I alone here in that?

I rather think you might be alone.

No, no, no, but properly think about it.

You're kind of like, I really need to pee, and you're going, you're doing, you are, I am.

I am.

There's a word for that as well.

If you are holding on so tight, it's piss you pressed.

And what does

that mean?

It's used to forces mostly.

It's kind of desperate to pee, but holding it in.

Piss you pressed.

Piss you pressed.

It's like piss suppressed.

Ah,

suppressed.

So don't do it, Dan.

Tiko Brahe supposedly died from doing that, didn't he?

Yeah.

He was at a dinner.

He was a famous astronomer, and he was at a dinner and he was too polite.

Yeah, and his bladder exploded.

Oh, yeah.

So don't do that, Dan.

Well, he, I imagine Johnson would have had to pee a lot because supposedly he could drink in one sitting 25 cups of tea in one go.

No.

He loved his tea.

He loved his food.

Boswell wrote about this.

Boswell would say that to watch him eat was like watching the most intense thing ever.

He would not have any conversation.

He was just rampaging through his food.

The veins on his head were like pulsating.

He was just a man obsessed with needing to get the, and he did that with reading as well.

You would just have to read really hard and 25 cups of tea is what I read as well.

Wow.

That is amazing.

He lived at the same time as Francis Gross, who really was Gross by figure.

Yeah, right.

So Johnson always chose the classical references for his dictionary.

He was quite a purist originally, anyway.

And then Francis Groves went to the brothels and the taverns and picked up all the street slang.

And I don't know if they ever met.

Because they weren't, you know, but they would have had a good dinner party.

They would have known about each other, Dean.

I think they would, yeah.

Yeah, so while he's sort of harmlessly drudging away, he's thinking of this other guy who's going to have fun

having fun, yeah.

Yeah.

Must have been terrible.

Yeah.

I like some of his definitions.

So the word etch is a country word of which I know not the meaning.

The word defluction, the definition is a defluction.

That's a real Friday afternoon word, isn't it?

I got to get to the brothel.

I just plenty on the table.

25 cups of tea waiting just across the room.

That's great.

A sock, something put between the foot and the shoe.

It's good.

Lunch, this is good.

Lunch, as much food as one's hand can hold.

Oh, there is a word for that.

A gaupen and a Jepsen.

So a gaupen is as much as you can hold in a single hand.

And I think Jepsen is two hands.

So biscuits, good for biscuit measurements.

That's brilliant.

I've got a couple of X word things.

Oh, yeah.

Yeah.

So

the word X-ray.

Do you know what the X and X-ray stands for?

Unknown?

Unknown.

Just X.

He didn't know what it was.

I'm just going to put X here for now.

And when they work out what it is, we can change that.

And it just hasn't been been changed.

Maybe called Brundgen Reis, that would be a nightmare.

Is that whonden?

He was called from Germany, wasn't he?

So, yeah, Rundgen Reis.

Runtenrays.

Runten Reis.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Maybe you know this one.

The X-Men.

Why are they called the X-Men?

I have no idea.

Is it because they spend all their time on Twitter?

Yes.

Yeah.

Well, I thought it was because Professor X, Professor Xavier, Professor X, X,

X-Men.

Yeah, but no,

it's extra power, which was said in a comic book.

Oh, really?

Yeah, and just while we're, if you insist, we continue on, X-Men,

just

discovered an amazing character from X-Men today that I've never heard of before.

So did you know that there's a character in X-Men called Forget Me Not?

Oh, no.

No, you don't, because they don't either, because if he is out of your sight, no one can remember him.

Amazing.

So the first time we meet him is someone from X-Men going, hey, how you doing?

And he's like, I've been here six years.

And no one can remember this guy.

It's and it's...

But that's a great superpower.

Not if you want to be part of the team.

Yeah, but

for robbing a bank?

Yeah.

Go in, you rob a bank, you leave.

That's true.

They just carry on with their day.

I think that's a really good superpower.

I think the superheroes generally aren't robbing the banks.

But Professor X, the only reason he knew he existed, because he set an alarm on his iPhone or whatever to remind him every so often, like, forget me you're not, it's a character in our comic book.

Oh, okay, cool.

So that was the only thing.

Professor X isn't aware that it's a comic book that he's taking part in.

So

I was just, yeah, I was leaving.

I broke the fourth wall there for him.

Anyway, I don't know.

All right.

Thanks for letting me get that out.

I've got another X for you.

Oh, yeah.

X when you watch things like at not the normal speed.

Like one.

One times two times one point.

Yeah.

Okay, just a quick show of like whoops.

Who here regularly watches things sped up?

Who regularly listens to podcasts sped up

i know our voices are probably like why are they talking so slow on stage hello and welcome to another episode yeah what does anyone listen to our podcast sped up

slowed down

do you follow an etiquette for your exes on messages because i was having this conversation with brilliant greg jenner historian

and so he said x um has only just been been kind of okay within the last 10 years.

Yeah.

But on a platonic text, you know, between friends, XX is more romantic.

Yeah.

And he would never put three X's.

And I said, why?

I put three X's to my best friend all the time.

He looked up on his phone, all porn.

I didn't realize.

Did you realize that?

Three X's?

That might be saying something about Greg's phone.

The interesting thing means love, right?

Yeah, you think so.

But the interesting thing about that is the first use we have of adding X for kisses or a greeting like that is from 1763 and they did seven X's.

Wow.

That's a lot, isn't it?

To just go straight in with seven.

Whoa, yeah.

Yeah, that's intense.

That's huge.

According to the OED, yeah.

It's a Christian X.

Well, yeah, they think that it was like a blessing, right?

Because it was like the cross.

Yeah.

But yeah.

Oh, I heard.

Well, this is in relation to X rated, that it was based on the skull and crossbones, maybe.

Oh, really?

Yeah.

It was exclusively films which featured pirate activity.

Do you know why a blue joke is called blue?

Sorry?

Do you know why a blue joke is blue?

No, no.

Because sensors used to have a blue pencil and also sex workers in prison had to wear blue gowns.

Oh really?

That's great.

Blue gowns.

Blue gowns, yeah.

Sorry,

are they prisoners in this?

In prisoners in the middle of the morning.

Sorry, I thought they were like visiting.

Blue

uniforms.

Uniforms all the time.

Yeah, they weren't.

They were frilly things.

Imagine you've got to visit your friend like, sorry, sorry, we've run out of the white for visitors.

Do you mind wearing blue, Andy?

No problem.

What a visit I've had.

Good lord.

Nick's lost the cocaine.

Sorry.

Too much?

Too much.

It is time for fact number two, and that is James.

Okay, my fact this week is that in 1986, a group of maths teachers organized a protest in Washington, D.C.

against the use of calculators in schools.

Their protests failed because they couldn't get the numbers.

That felt a bit ironic.

At that moment, you became a dad.

That's such a good fact.

Yeah, I just thought.

Maybe time for a numbers round as soon as you can.

Oh, yeah, yeah.

I bet you're the first person to make that connection since 1986.

And I bet no one even did at the time as well.

Well, wasn't it a maths?

It was a gathering of 6,000 maths teachers that they were at protesting about calculating.

It wasn't a massive story in the newspapers, I must admit.

But it was in the newspapers.

And like you say, it was the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics.

So they were all maths teachers.

There were 6,000 of them there.

And there were about 15 of them, we think, who had placards and songs.

And they were protesting against calcuholics because they thought that these kids, because they were using calculators, they won't be able to do normal maths.

They would just kind of rely on them and they won't be able to do any kind of multiplication or anything like that.

Yeah, it was a simpler time, wasn't it?

It was.

Oh no, our kids and their screens.

What sort of terrible stuff are they doing?

Typing in boobs upside down.

It was a more innocent time.

Yeah, their slogans are amazing.

The buttons nothing till the brain's trained.

And

they chanted, calculators later, we shall not be moved calculators later is good there was um they interviewed them in the newspaper I was reading they interviewed the leader John Saxon who organized this whole thing and they said well mr.

Saxon why are there no teachers you know why have you only got 15 people and he said teachers don't like to demonstrate because they are shy

Fair enough.

I guess mental arithmetic is an important thing.

I read something about you, Susie.

I want to know if this is something you still do.

But according to an interview you gave, every single morning you do your 75 times table um i think i was being a little bit whimsical um no it's because for a very very long time if 75 came up on the countdown board yeah i just gave up because i can't do five 75s i have to write it down i don't know what it is and the more I struggled with it the worse it got because I became fixated on it so that was probably where it came from.

I don't know why.

It's stupid.

It's not your job to

get the numbers though, is it?

Like you can just let Rachel do all that stuff.

No, no, I really do try and she's very good at giving things a different tip.

75.

Yeah.

Thank you.

Well done.

What you can't see at home is that he's got a calculator under the paper.

Yeah, and that we've edited this.

That took him 15 minutes to get to it.

The guy who listens to it slowed down is not going to get to it for half an hour.

But I love all those old calculating methods because calculate is from Calculus Little Pebble because they counter with stones.

And then they had abacuses, didn't they?

It is a political hot potato, though.

Like it is.

Calculator.

Well, yeah, so for example, does it harm whether you can do mental arithmetic if you use a calculator all the time, in your opinion?

Yes, probably.

Okay, well, you're in good company because in 2011 there was a British MP who led public concerns on this and said, I would describe this country as in love with the calculator from a very early age and said that too easy access to calculators is available in local schools.

And that MP, Liz Truss.

Whose command of large numbers is unparalleled.

So, Susie, you're a great company.

Lovely.

Lovely.

That reminds me of the petition to get rid of all French words from the British passport.

And it went online, it got quite a few signatures without realising that passport is French.

Most of the words on there were French.

Yeah.

Hiding to nothing, I think.

Human calculators are amazing.

People who can do incredible stuff in their head.

So

I was reading an interview with the 2020 world champion, who is an Indian guy who's called Nilakantha Banu Prakash.

And he got to it quite an interesting way.

He was confined to bed as a child for a year.

And loads of people who are amazing at mental maths have either been confined to bed or they've been in solitary confinement or something's happened where they've lived in their imagination for a long time.

So all the way through school, he would spend six to seven hours a day practicing mental arithmetic, just doing that.

When he was interviewed by the BBC, throughout the interview, he recited his 48 times table.

And when he's talking to someone, he will count how many times they blink just to keep himself engaged in the conversation.

Wow.

Yeah.

That's amazing.

Cool.

Yeah, there's been loads of them over there.

In fact, one of the things that you have to do if Guinness wants to find out if you're the fastest at working things out is they'll give you a 100-digit number and ask you to work out the 13th root.

So the square root is two things that you times together to get to that number.

So imagine then a cube root is three things you multiply together to get to that number.

You have to go all the way down to 13.

So it might be 37 times 37 times 37 times 37, 13 times.

The answer to the power of 13 is the number they give you in the first place.

That's right.

That's the question.

I'll be honest, I don't think you're going to trouble the Guinness Red Card Speaker.

You're describing this has put me into a sort of defensive crouch position.

Okay, so 33.

Yeah, and I was reading about a guy called Vim Klein,

who was the record holder.

This was in the 80s.

Must be still quite close.

He managed to do it in one minute, 28 seconds.

But his tactic was to mutter in Dutch while he was doing the calculations, and he would only mutter swear words.

So imagine I'm Dutch, he'd be like, fuck it out, I fuck up, fuck up, fuck it up.

And then he got 263, and it would be right every single time.

There's so much science behind swearing, lowering your cortisol levels and raising your serotonin levels.

And you know, that experiment when you dip your arm in ice-cold water, and it can all have been twice as long if you're shouting bollocks than if you're shouting bus.

So, and there's a little Lalokesia is exactly it.

So, that's what he was doing.

Wow, that's so working.

Yeah, yeah.

Okay, would it help doing this podcast if I just said bollocks all the way through?

Because that's what Dan's been doing for the last 10 years.

You wouldn't say that if we lived in the time of Samuel Johnson, mate.

Here's the thing you have to do at the Mental Calculation World Cup.

Just another example of what.

So the calendar, there's the calendar round.

This is an exciting round.

You get given a list of dates from 1600 to 2100, the years.

And you're given 60 seconds to name the day of the week that every one of those dates happened on.

Okay, so you get a minute to do it, okay?

Yep.

And this great long list of

days, like 24th of February

1603.

Monday.

Right, okay.

You're going to say Monday to all of them, aren't you?

Have you got the answers?

No.

It's pointless.

I can't disprove that it was a Monday, but the point might...

Oh my god, that's so like...

The point.

Well done, Dan.

No, no, no.

He may have got it right.

That's true.

But what I'm saying is...

Next question.

There are people who can do it even more effectively than just randomly guessing incredibly rapidly.

So the record, record, the record winner in 2012 was someone called Nofumi Ogasawara.

Okay, they got 57 in a minute.

Wow.

They weren't all Monday, though, were they?

They were all Monday.

That was the trick that year.

Yeah, yeah.

That is amazing.

Isn't that a little bit more?

That's

going down the list.

Monday, Thursday, Tuesday, Saturday.

I think there are tricks, aren't there?

To rock it out.

Really?

I've met someone who can do that.

It takes them a tiny bit longer, obviously, but we're talking about a champion here.

Yeah, but you can say any day and they go and they work it out.

there are tricks you can marker history in certain ways to get you to that day.

Well like what?

I don't know.

Like a civil war broke out on a Wednesday

three and a half years earlier.

Who knows?

Yeah.

But there was when there used to be people who would go on stage and you would ask them to multiply two numbers together and they'd just be able to do it and that would be their whole act.

Pretty good.

It's pretty cool.

And it's unverifiable for everyone in the crowd as well.

That's true.

But that's good.

But that's.

Oh, no, because if you've got someone on stage who's doing the SM while they do it, then that's it.

Yeah, but

they would be able to do it much quicker than that, for sure.

But so you're right, it would be quite unverifiable.

But the tricks that they used to use, basically there's loads of math tricks like you would see on countdown, it's like your nine times table is one way of doing it, or removing things or adding things to 100, all these different tricks they have.

But the way that they would mostly do it is someone would ask you to multiply this by this, and then you would go, okay,

what were they again?

And you keep stalling a few times, but you're already doing it in your head.

And then you would multiply all the numbers.

And if I multiply two numbers, I would always start from the digits and work my way up to the highest number.

But they would always start with the highest number.

They might say 17 million, and they're working out the next ones as they go along, but they haven't even got there yet.

Wow.

And so they would be able to say, like, I can answer the question immediately, but actually, they're kind of working it out as they went along.

Amazing.

It's pretty clever, isn't it?

Yeah.

I once got brought up to the front of my school when I was a teenager in high school and told on the spot, Daniel has achieved the top percentage of people in New South Wales, Australia for mathematics in the recent exam that we took as part of Thing.

And it was a multiple choice exam.

Oh no, yeah.

Monday, Monday, Monday, Monday.

I literally guessed every single answer because I knew nothing about mathematics and I just happened through fluke to get it right.

And I still have a certificate at home for being one of the greatest mathematicians in New South Wales of my period.

Did they sort of say, well, this is great because we've been wanting to put someone up for the junior for a year.

Come on, Daniel, get your big old award.

I was like, I was an idiot.

No, it was humiliating.

I've still got the certificate.

That's amazing.

Yeah.

It is fascinating watching Countdown.

And I know that you're saying that you like to do it as well, but watching Rachel...

be able to get to those sums is it does feel like magic doesn't it when you see it it really does yeah the camera crew who've been with us for such a long time as well, they're also very nerdy.

So they give nods of approval for two things.

One is when I ever mention an orphaned negative, which is when you have things like ruley, gruntled, sheveled, well, shoveled doesn't exist, but um, ruthful, gormful, stuff like that.

Whenever I mention orphaned negative, they go.

And whenever Rachel says, yes, that's the sum of two primes, she'll

skip.

Yes,

that is how

we are.

Do the cameramen like play along with the game, do you think?

I think they do, yeah.

I think lots of camera women as well, but they're all brilliant.

Oh, and

sorry.

James.

I wasn't ticking you off.

But yeah, I reckon they do.

I reckon they do.

Quite a lot of them get the conundrum.

Not the women, though.

More often than you would think.

I've got a quick protest thing, another protest thing.

Is it the protest waiting for James outside the

camera folk of the world?

It's just me too.

We have so many camera women, it would be really bad of me not to mention them.

But I honestly wasn't having a dig.

They're called cinematographers, James.

I don't like that.

Well, so the thing I want to mention about protests is one of my favorite things I've learned recently.

In 1966, the Procrastinators Club of America held a protest against the War of 1812.

And

they made signs and everything.

They were protesting it.

And the club newsletter that came out after it announced that the protest had, in fact, been a success because a treaty has now been signed.

So,

good on them.

That's so good.

Okay, it is time for fact number three, and that is Andy.

My fact is that for 30 years, Tibetan Buddhists have been saving fish from certain death and releasing them back into nature.

Unfortunately, it turns out they have unwittingly been feeding them all straight to the local otters.

So there's this ritual called Fang Sheng.

It's very, it's very, you know, ancient traditional thing.

It's called like life release is what it means.

You get animals that were destined for slaughter and

you sort of

free them and it's your way of like paying a debt back to the universe.

It's that kind of thing.

And since since the 1990s, there are lots of Buddhists in Tibet have been buying up fish from fish markets, live ones, and releasing them into local rivers, thousands of them every year.

And unfortunately, there's a recent scientific report which has looked at the state of the nearby rivers because, I mean, it's not a great thing to do in terms of ecology.

You know, lots of, that's a really invasive species risk and it'll completely mess up the local ecosystem.

Anyway, turns out that there are almost no fish left in the rivers and the otter feces are full of the fish that have been released into the river.

So they have been kind of helping nature in a way in that they've like a lot of very, very fat, happy otters on this river.

Yeah.

And the otters are stopping the non-native fish from destroying the ecosystem.

So in many ways, it's a happy story.

But not for them, if they realised what they'd been doing, right?

No, no, no.

Not for the fish that get released, confused, and immediately died.

And no karma for the Buddhists, or what do you reckon?

It's above my pay grade, I don't know.

There's a German word for this, which is I don't wonder if you've heard it Susie is er schlimbesserun verslimbesselum yeah and the definition is an attempted improvement that makes things worse yeah that's great that's a great one

I can't believe you just knew that

I mean I did see you peek at my notes here but

yeah now there's this whole industry isn't there of people capturing animals so that they can then be released yeah I think and obviously it is quite bad in lots of places.

And they looked in Singapore and in Southeast Asia and they're just finding all of these lizards and stuff, which shouldn't be there, and yet they are.

And so the Singapore Buddhist Federation is saying that maybe you should just, maybe just not eat meat instead.

Oh, yeah.

Or give some money to animal shelters.

Just anything other than doing this thing, which is inherently quite bad.

It does slightly mess things up.

There is something to be said there about if you go to a restaurant, I speak as a veggie here, but go to a restaurant and you see a tank full of lobsters I mean that's just I would do anything to rescue those things I probably would go and dump them in the local loch yeah

I can see why I can see why I definitely understand it yeah for sure you get um in Shanghai what happens is that again when it when the people turn up to carry out the fang sheng ritual uh a lot of people turn up selling them live turtles at very inflated prices.

So already, like they've created a secondary market in turtles at this point.

But then there are are also fishermen waiting down, sorry, fisher folk,

anglers

waiting with nets, but literally 20 meters away.

So, yeah, yeah, yeah.

It creates a lot of,

it's interesting from an economics point of view.

Yeah, but also, like, the temple ponds tend to be full of turtles because people just shove loads and loads of them in.

And obviously, you can only have so many turtles living in the pond before they have a bad time of it.

Yeah.

So these fish were carp, weren't they?

Yes, they would have been.

Yeah.

Why do do you think that's good?

I was just sitting in there that I went thinking, why do we carp on about something and whether that's got anything to do with the fish?

But I know that is from a Latin word meaning to pull to pieces.

Likewise, carpet is sort of like tufts that you kind of pull, but I don't think it's got anything to do with the fish.

What about carpet?

Did we say that?

Carpet on?

I thought it was harp on.

You can harp on as well.

So what's harping on versus carpet?

Harping is just endlessly playing the same note on a harp.

Oh, right.

And to carp on is to criticise and just kind of constantly have a go.

Stop carping, you know, that kind of thing.

Yeah, yeah.

Oh, okay.

I don't think it's got anything to do with the fish.

I've got a question.

Yes.

Is carp pulling something apart related to carpal tunnel syndrome?

The rest

condition.

Oh, that's interesting, yeah.

Or maybe.

I don't know, is the answer.

That's a very good one.

I think it is related to

carp.

My favourite fish is the cod

because cod meant scrotum, and the fish is supposed to look.

Sorry, sorry, James.

Let's take a bit of your beer.

I'll have the haddock.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

It's because it looks like a bag, apparently, the fish.

Yeah.

And a cod piece, a piece for your escrotum.

And brackets go back to a Spanish word meaning cod piece because they're a bit of support.

So architectural brackets, but also they kind of support a bit of your sentence.

That's lovely.

Yeah.

Well, it's not that lovely, Andy.

I don't know if you heard the start of the scrotum.

I know it's scrotal, but that's not.

I think that's nice that you think of your'scotum as a sort of set of brackets.

Yes.

Gently supporting

the things things that need to

keep going.

But it's a weird word otherwise, isn't it?

Cod piece.

Cod piece, yeah.

Maybe.

I wonder if you cod someone, because a cod is a practical joke as well, isn't it?

I like coddle.

I'm kidding, but I'm not, I'm coding.

Yeah, I'm codding.

I wonder if that's got anything to do with you talking balls or something.

I don't know.

I'm so sorry, I brought this tone in.

No, no, no.

I just.

I've never heard of carping, I've never heard of coding.

I've never heard of codding either.

No.

Yeah.

To cod.

To cosmopolitan.

I think it might be Irish.

I'm not sure.

And Cod's Wallop is completely different.

We're learning a lot.

That's amazing.

Do you know Gary Larson, the far side?

Yeah.

The comic books.

He was someone who was also into saving animals and sort of playing roles.

So

when he was a cartoonist in his early days, he was being paid, but it wasn't a lot of money.

So he needed to get a secondary job.

So he applied to be an animal cruelty investigator for the Seattle Humane Society.

But he never ended up doing the job because in the car on the way to the interview, he hit a dog.

And so he thought that's a bad start.

The dog was fine, but he didn't end up doing it as a result.

I was thinking a bit about reintroductions, you know, because this is about reintroducing an animal, maybe where it should be, maybe it shouldn't.

And, you know, like Britain is...

is kicking off beaver reintroductions, which is very exciting because they...

Beavers are a bit controversial, but basically they do do a lot of good in a lot of places.

They create wetlands, and wetlands store carbon, and they're more resistant to fire.

And, you know, they're very endangered.

Like, the wetlands themselves are endangered.

Beavers help bring them back.

So, this year, North London got two beavers called Sigourney Beaver and Justin Beaver.

Lovely.

Did we literally only get two?

Because they were the only puns we could think of.

I think so.

That's helpful.

Sort of coming back.

But anyway, like I say, it has caused some controversy.

So there was a headline from the Daily Mail earlier this year.

Could rewilding animals turn Britain into a modern-day Jurassic Park?

With beavers.

Well, firstly, exactly.

Yeah, beavers.

And secondly, Jurassic Park is set in the modern day.

Oh, here we go.

Ah, yeah.

Anyway, sloppy headline writing.

And there's a problem in America, you know, when if you go to the coast, often there are baby turtles that are born and you might wander into the city because they see the lights yeah you often get people going to the beach and they see these turtles and put them in into the water but the problem is that in those areas especially around florida there's also a lot of tortoises around there and people don't know the difference between turtles and tortoises one difference being that one can swim and one can't swim

so number one don't go around grabbing turtles anyway because you know there are people who will do it who know what they're doing but secondly tortoises have toes oh

That's the way to tell.

Oh, that's good.

Public service.

Leaders.

They like swimming.

Let's call them toe toils.

Oh, yeah, that'll do it.

It'd help me.

Don't touch that.

It's a totoral.

It's hard to say.

Of course.

That's probably why it didn't happen.

There's loads of red kites near me, though.

Red kites they've really done well with.

Yeah.

Yeah.

And the kite that we play with is from the bird hovering.

They're so nice.

Yeah, they're both girls.

They're beautiful.

They're gorgeous.

Yeah, yeah.

They've done amazing jobs.

They're everywhere.

Wild cats might get new wildcats in Devon and Cornwall.

This is exciting.

And you don't need permission to introduce them because there are already a few in Scotland.

So

if something is non-existent in the UK, like a wolf, then you need permission from the Environment Secretary.

And very boringly, they are not...

allowing us to have wolves everywhere.

So

could you and I just drive up to Scotland, grab a few wildcats, drive down and just set them free?

It doesn't sound like it's allowed.

It would be allowed, would it?

I feel like it would be a hell of a car ride.

The thing is, we both have electric cars as well, so we'd have to stop about five times.

I don't know if it would.

And I'm sorry to rain on your parade, James, but the problem is the wildcats in Scotland, they get described as functionally extinct.

So this is weird.

They are real, they exist, but they're also extinct because

there are a few hundred of them left only, and basically they've spent all their time shagging domestic cats to the extent that the gene pool is just completely

like scientists have studied lots and lots of dead cats from about the last hundred years and they found that you need a particular kind.

Like wild cats are quite a specific thing, but they're randy and they will just...

So do wild cats, are they really vicious wild cats or are they just quite...

Bit of a loaded way of describing them.

They're just doing it.

Well, I don't know.

I don't know what wildlife is.

No, no, I assume they think you're not.

They're not massive either.

They're two cats.

The size of two cats, I would say.

Okay.

Roughly.

A cat and a half, two cats.

They're not.

They're not.

I don't think they are.

No, no, no.

They very rarely take human young.

But I mean, domestic cats are quite vicious, aren't they?

They kill a lot of birds and stuff like that.

But I think wild cats are quite similar.

I just think it must be a pretty exciting day if you're just a normal domestic cat and a wild cat comes in town.

Ah, wild.

It'd be like John Travolta and Olivia Newton Newton John, wouldn't it?

It would just be like the leather-bound dude walking in.

It must be like if a Yeti was to approach you and have sex with you, Dan.

Because it's bigger, it's hairier,

it's a slightly different species, but still recognisable humanoid.

Yeah.

And it's on.

And it's on.

Yeah.

And it's.

My wife and I have an agreement.

We are.

Completely monogamous.

She's got a list of celebs.

She's got like Yeti.

John Hamm.

Yeti and Brian Blessed.

Those are the two

that make it in.

It is time for our final fact of the show, and that is my fact.

My fact this week is mathematician David Cox has two things named after him: a geometric coordinate ring and an algorithm that he invented with Stephen Zucker.

They are known as the Cox ring and the cocksucker machine.

So

what's particularly exciting about this is that in the 1970s, Cox and Zucker met each other and went, oh, we've got to write a paper.

The invention came after the juvenile dream of having a cocksucker paper.

So Dan,

these things, the coordinate rings and algorithms, as the greatest mathematician New South Wales has ever produced.

Could you explain perhaps what they are?

Yes, I would, James.

Because I have a maths degree and I fucking can't.

Is it complicated?

I really tried.

I really tried to understand it.

When I say I really tried, I just knew I was going to throw it to James.

And if he can't understand it, I feel fine.

It's, yeah, no, it is really, really complicated.

The second thing that he invented was not an invention.

It was attributed to him by two other students because he was the inspiration for it.

So the Cox Ring was inspired by his earlier work.

And they thought, let's play into the gag here.

But they came up with it and they named it after him.

Yeah, and it's just this wonderful thing about academics having a sense of humor.

This is something, this is interesting.

There's a thing called Stigler's Law of Eponym, right?

And what it states is that no scientific discovery is actually named after the person who discovered it in the first place.

So like Pythagoras's theorem, named after Pythagoras, not discovered by him.

Halley didn't discover Halley's Comet, it would be known about a bit earlier.

And so, this is the Stigler law of economy.

And it was coined by a sociologist who was called Robert Merton,

who named it after someone else.

And these two guys, when they did this, by the way, they were studying at Princeton University.

So the reason I came across this fact is because I found out that you studied at Princeton University.

You studied German there.

I know.

I'm weird.

No, that's very cool.

Was it a good degree, or was it a

divergent?

No, it was, no, it was brilliant.

I mean, German is just so, it just gets given such a hard rap, and it is honestly the most lyrical, beautiful.

We're just used to people shouting orders in war films, but it is really, really beautiful.

But people always say, why isn't there a word for this in English?

And then they will always say, well, I bet there's one in German.

And there usually is.

Because it is quite like Lego, isn't it?

You can just...

pile.

Have you ever had Ben Schott on your

show?

Love to.

He wrote this brilliant book called Schottenfreude, which was basically finding as many gaps in English as he could find and then getting a German translator to make up a word.

And my favourite one was Deppenfahre be Eugung, which is the compulsion to stare at the person you're overtaking in your car.

Just perfect.

That's wonderful.

That's really good.

Yeah, well,

that was him.

It was very good.

These people, Cox and Zuckerberg, I was looking at some other people with similar kind of names that are, what would you call that, double barrel names?

Yeah, if you go on the internet, you can find loads of examples of people who got married and had quite unfortunate names.

I'm not sure all of them are true, but I have looked at them all in the newspaper archives and found some that are definitely true.

And I'm gonna do a little quiz.

See if you can, I'm gonna tell you the name of one of the people in this relationship, and you can see if you can guess the name of the person they married.

So, this is an easy one: Elizabeth MacDonald,

John Hadavam,

E-I-E-I, no.

John Hadafarm and Lafarm.

No.

You can get this.

Elizabeth MacDonald married.

And they double-barreled the names.

Takeaway Burger?

Burger!

Joel Burger.

They didn't necessarily always double-barrel, but when you have the newspaper things, it says this person married this person, and they call it the McDonald Burger wedding.

Beautiful.

Beautiful.

Okay, so

I can pull this back.

You got it right.

You can do this, Andy.

Amy Wide.

Wide.

Wide.

Stephen Fanny.

Sorry.

Birth.

Birth is good.

Birth.

That would be great.

You were closest.

It was Alexander Hole.

Amy and Alexander Wide Hole.

Gosh.

Joe Looney.

Joe, what, Looney?

Looney.

Chuny.

Judy Tooney.

Ben.

Ben, no.

Tune.

Close.

Listen.

Quite a normal surname.

Matthew Tick.

Looney Tick.

Looney Tick, very good.

Shelby Ward.

Looney Ward.

Oh, God.

And one final one.

Teresa, come on.

Michael England.

Tim, Michael Tim.

Come on, Tim.

Come on, Tim.

Arnold Mabak.

Down, down, down.

Come on, down.

Come on.

So Mr.

Eileen.

David Eileen.

No.

Anyone in the audience?

No.

It was Teresa Coman and Frankie Topperme.

Oh, and I should also say that I was reading the Reddit of Jill Stein, you know, the Green Party leader in America.

Yes.

And she did an AMA, so it was like, ask her anything.

And the second most popular question they asked Jill Stein was, Dr.

Stein, have you ever thought about marrying Senator Al Franken and hyphenating your last name?

Very good.

That was so good.

There's only one street in the world named after John Major.

And

he didn't know it was named after him, and no one told him they were naming it after him.

It was going to be Sir John Major Close, which sounds menacing,

but it was going to be called Sir John Major Close.

But then the London Fire Brigade said, It's a bit complicated, we might get confused if someone rings up.

So they just called it Major Close.

They just cut out the Sir John.

And then

when he was asked about it, he said, I think it's most unlikely they'd name a street after me.

And he just hadn't been told.

No one informed him.

Margaret Thatcher has loads of stuff named.

Margaret Thatcher has a peninsula named after her.

Anyway.

That's quite interesting because in Europe, for every ten streets that are named after a man,

there's only one named after a woman.

It's much more likely that you would be named after a man if you're...

Which woman is it?

Well, interestingly, okay, taking that in mind, the most popular person in European streets names is a woman.

So can you guess who it is?

The Virgin Mary.

Elizabeth.

Elizabeth?

No, Andy's right, it is the Virgin Mary.

Oh, yeah.

In In Europe, of course, so lots of Catholic countries and stuff.

Do they actually have Virgin in the names?

No, it's usually just Mary Road.

Yeah, and it's usually named after the church

that it goes to.

Or Santa Maria.

Santa Maria.

Which I would argue is named after Santa and the Virgin Mary.

So we should lob those off her numbers.

That's a dumb fucking joke.

Love it.

Love it.

Tawdry is another religious one.

That is an eponym because tawdry comes, you know, if something's tawdry, it's really shoddy.

And that goes back to Saint Audrey.

So she was

an abbess and eventually a saint.

And she wore lots of kind of necklaces in her youth.

And then as a nun, she got throat cancer.

And she thought this was revenge because she would just wear such frippery.

But anyway, lace, such as the one that she wore around her neck, was sold at fairs and it was Saint Audrey lace.

And then it became tawdry lace.

What was it about being 55 minutes into this show that made me think of the word tawdry?

Oh.

Nothing.

It's the religious side of it.

You know the Chippendales, the dance troupe?

Yeah.

Oh, yeah.

Do you know what they're named after?

The

Tommelvin and...

Yeah.

Oh, no.

I was thinking of Thomas Chippendale, the person who made all the furniture.

I was thinking of the children's cossacks.

Christmas time.

That one, you know.

James is right.

James is right.

I'm just going to put you out of your misery.

James is right.

They were named after the furniture in the club where they performed.

That's the same thing.

Which is designed to look like classic Thomas Chippendale furniture.

Because they were kind of, you know, like muscular.

I guess they were sort of muscular and, you know, impressive looking.

So were the chairs.

Oh, I think they do sit on stage and you sit on their laps, right?

Surely.

Oh, do you?

I think so.

They become the chairs.

I think so.

That's what I'm saying.

They are.

Oh, don't pretend.

Oh, I think.

This is from the man who suggested come on my back a few minutes ago.

I was looking into just a scientist who have humor.

I like it when it makes it into a paper, and I just found a couple of papers that have been published that I really like the titles of.

So a couple of them, here they are.

The Mouth, the Anus, and the Blaster Pore.

Open questions about questionable openings.

Another paper, The Effects of Having Christmas Dinner with In-Laws on Gut Microbiota Composition.

And then the third one, Head and Neck Injury Risks in Heavy Metal, Head Bangers Stuck Between Rock and a Hard base

that's a good one um i'm gonna have to wrap us up

guys we've got to the end i was just looking at very unintentionally like unintentional things because this is about something where it was intentionally very rude yeah when i was trying to find examples of things that were unintentionally rude okay i've just like a couple of very tiny quick ones so uh yolo williams welsh naturalist okay was co-presenter on spring watch And in 2016, he was discussing diving seabirds with a female conservationist, and they watched one plunge into the water in front of them.

And he just turned to her and said, So, is that the deepest jag you've ever had?

She got to say, No, we have had deeper than that.

And I feel like we should end with it.

I think some of you will have heard this before.

I know the all-time classic Harry Carpenter after the boat race 1977 was reporting it live on TV and said, Oh, isn't that nice?

The wife of the Cambridge president is kissing the cocks of the Oxford crew.

Can I just do one one more?

I know that's really good, but uh, in 2012, Pfizer, the drug company, came up with a new drug for osteoarthritis in dogs called Rimadil.

And I went on to the newspaper archives for the adverts for this.

This is genuinely true.

There was an advert that said, Pfizer Animal Health, the manufacturers of Rimadil, have launched a program available only through veterinary hospitals.

Register online at rimmadog.com.

Okay, that is it.

That is all of our facts.

Thank you so much for listening.

If you would like to get in contact with any of us about the things that we have said on this show, We Can Be Found or whatever the fuck he's decided to call it this week.

But for now, I'm calling it Twitter.

I'm on at Schreiberland, James, at James Harkin, andy at andrew hunter m and susie at susie underscore dent yeah or you can go to our group account which is at no such thing or you could go to our website no such thingasafish.com all of our previous episodes are up there um you can also find links to club fish which is the secret members club any club fish members in the crowd tonight

there we go there's the six of them and uh

so do join that it's really really fun check out all the merch check out everything else we'll be back again next week with another episode soho theater thank you so much that was awesome say thank you to susie dent and we'll see you again next time