‘Twas the Quiz Before Christmas
Christmas is a time of quizzing. Even GCHQ get in on the act. In the hallowed halls of Tiffin, teaching, and quite possibly learning, continues to the last syllable of the recorded term but teachers are also busily ladling in some festive fun to their brimful lessons. So today’s paltry words are going to be a quiz of some sort.
But I wouldn’t be Director of Literacy and Oracy without a brief word about a word. The origin of the word quiz involves a story. Marcus Berkmann, in his book “A Matter of Facts” writes of a Dublin theatre proprietor around 1780 by the name of Daly who made a bet that a nonsense word could be made known within 48 hours throughout the city, and that the public would give it a meaning. Daly had the word QUIZ written up on walls all over Dublin and sure enough he won his bet. According to the OED “There is no evidence to support this theory” – but why let evidence get in the way of a good story? That’s not how science works after all. Daly’s quiz originally meant “a person who banters or chaffs another” and soon came to mean “any odd or eccentric person”. I had long thought that the first use of the word was in Jane Austen’s “Northanger Abbey”, in the sentence “Where did you get that quiz of a hat?” but I am happy to be wrong. Which is useful as it happens so very frequently. By 1867 the word was being used in America in its modern meaning of “A test of knowledge, especially as a competition between individuals or teams as a form of entertainment” (OED).
So without further ado let us be on to the Director’s Christmas Quiz and let us start as we mean to go on, with a multiple choice Round 1 and a call back to last week’s column.
ROUND 1
Question 1
Is nature mechanical or machine-like?
A Yes, the universe is like a machine, animals and plants are like machines, we’re like machines. In fact, we are machines. To borrow Richard Dawkins’ phrase, we are lumbering robots.
B No, don’t be silly.
C It’s an interesting question.
Question 2
Is matter unconscious?
A Yes, the universe is made up of unconscious matter. There’s no consciousness in stars, in galaxies, in planets, in animals, in plants or in rocks.
B No, don’t be silly. Matter can’t be unconscious. After all, we’re ‘matter’ and we’re conscious.
C Yes, and we’re not really conscious at all anyway. Consciousness is an illusion.
D Probably, but consciousness is just an accidental by-product of having complex brains.
E It’s an interesting question.
Question 3
Are the laws of Nature fixed?
A Yes, the laws of nature are the same now as they were at the time of the Big Bang and they’ll be the same forever. Not just the laws; but the constants of nature are fixed. That’s why they are called constants. Obvs.
B No, in an evolutionary universe, why shouldn’t the laws evolve? The very idea of there being ‘laws’ of Nature is a metaphor from the realm of human laws. And human laws evolve. It’s a very anthropocentric metaphor; only humans have laws. And as we have discussed in previous columns, metaphors often break down or indeed slip in unwanted and unwarranted ideas. As C.S. Lewis once said, to say that a stone falls to earth because it’s obeying a law, makes it a man.
D It’s an interesting question.
Question 4
Is the total amount of matter and energy always the same?
A Yes, it never changes in total quantity, except that time when it did, you know, at that Big Bang thing when it all sprang into existence from nowhere in a single instant.
B No
C It’s an interesting question.
Question 5
Is Nature purposeless?
A Yes, there are no purposes in all nature and the evolutionary process has no purpose or direction.
B No, and if it is, why do evolutionary biologists keep talking about evolution as a deterministic force?
C It’s an interesting question.
Question 6
Is biological hereditary material?
A Yes, everything you inherit is in your genes, or in epigenetic modifications of the genes, or in cytoplasmic inheritance. It’s material.
B No, I refer you to previous Director’s columns.
C It’s an interesting question.
Question 7
Are all your memories stored in your brain?
A Yes, somehow everything you remember is in your brain in modified nerve endings, phosphorylated proteins etc. I mean nobody really knows how it works but it must work like that anyway. And that is not a dogma of faith by the way. Absolutely not.
B Indubitably no. It’s that metaphor thing again where we forget it’s a metaphor. Our brains are not hard drives.
C No. The similarities between the sentences “I’ll keep it in mind” and “I’ll keep it in this box,” for instance, (along with many others) can lead one to think of the mind as a thing, something like a box with contents of its own. The nature of this box and its mental contents can then seem very mysterious. Our friend Wittgenstein suggests that one way, at least, to deal with such mysteries is to recall the different things one says about minds, memories, thoughts and so on, in a variety of contexts.
“What one says, or what people in general say, can change. Ways of life and uses of language change, so meanings change, but not utterly and instantaneously. Things shift and evolve, but rarely if ever so drastically that we lose all grip on meaning. So there is no timeless essence of at least some and perhaps all concepts, but we still understand one another well enough most of the time.” Duncan J Richter, Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889- 1951) Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy
D No. Like all forms of understanding, memory is immaterial.
E It’s an interesting question.
ROUND 2
Question 8
What word would you get by taking the initial letters from the capital cities of Ecuador, Mongolia, Pakistan and Croatia?
Question 9
Which two words have the Scrabble letter values 8-1-1-8?
ROUND 4
Question 10
If Cinderella’s glass slipper turns out to be a perfect fit, how did it fall off in the first place?
Question 11
What happened to ROUND 3?
ROUND 3 There it is!
Question 12
According to the FA’s laws of football from 1979, what is the purpose of the goal area on a football pitch?
Question 13
What is the difference between the dancer and the dance?
Question 14
What is the shortest word in English which contains the letters A B C D E and F?
And there I shall take my leave. Syria has been in the news muchly this past week, so what better way to finish than with a Syrian Arabic goodbye? It is, I’m told, generally a three-part sequence: a) bxa-trak, by your leave; b) ma’assalama, with peace; c) ‘allaysallmak, God keep you. If a) is said first, then b) is the reply and then c) may be used. If b) is said first, then c) is obligatory.
Until next week, Happy Reading/ma’assalama!
Once again, the Director’s mailbag was empty so I leave you with a thought.
A Director’s Thought #1
If two mind readers are reading each other’s minds, whose thoughts are they thinking?