QI: The Book of General Ignorance - the Noticeably Stouter Edition (41 page)

The myth that bulls are infuriated by the colour red has been around since at least 1580, when the best-selling writer of the
time, John Lyly, noted that: ‘He that commeth before an Elephant will not wear bright colors, nor he that commeth to a Bul, red.’

The fact is that, like rats, hippos, owls and aardvarks, bulls are colour-blind. It is the movements of the bullfighter’s cape that cause the bull to charge; the colour is merely for the benefit of the crowd.

Dogs can distinguish between blue and yellow, but can’t tell green from red. At traffic lights, guide dogs decide whether it is safe to cross by listening to the traffic. Hence the peeping sounds on modern pedestrian crossings.

The creatures that have really strong views on red are chickens.

Poultry farmers know only too well the practical problems of a chicken ‘seeing red’. When one of them bleeds, the others peck at it obsessively.

This cannibalistic behaviour, if unchecked, can lead to a killing spree and a rapid reduction in the farmer’s flock.

The traditional solution is to trim the chickens’ beaks with a hot knife so they are blunt and cause less damage. However, in 1989 a company called Animalens launched red-tinted contact lenses for egg-laying chickens. The early results were promising – because everything looked red, the chickens fought less and needed less feed because they weren’t so active, but still laid the same number of eggs.

The egg industry operates on a tiny profit margin of about 1.6 per cent. There are 250 million egg-layers in the USA, 150 million of them on just fifty farms. Red contact lenses for chickens promised a tripling in profits.

Unfortunately, fitting the lenses was fiddly and labour-intensive. Deprived of oxygen, the chickens’ eyes degenerated rapidly, causing pain and distress. Falling foul of the animal rights lobby, Animalens withdrew the product.

In the first edition of Roald Dahl’s classic 1964 children’s novel
Charlie and the Chocolate Factory
, the tireless, loyal Oompa-Loompas were black, not orange.

Dahl described them as a tribe of 3,000 black pygmies imported by Mr Wonka from ‘the very deepest and darkest part of the African jungle where no white man had been before’, to replace the sacked white workers in his factory. They lived on chocolate, whereas before they had only eaten ‘beetles, eucalyptus leaves, caterpillars and the bark of the bong-bong tree.’

Although it was well received at the time, Dahl’s description of the Oompa-Loompas, with its overtones of slavery, veered dangerously close to racism and, by the early 1970s, his US publishers Knopf insisted on changes. In 1972, a revised edition of
Charlie and the Chocolate Factory
appeared. Out went the black pygmies, in came Oompa-Loompas looking like small hippies with long ‘golden-brown hair’ and ‘rosy-white skin’.

Later, Dahl’s illustrator Quentin Blake depicted them as multicoloured futuristic punks with Mohawk hairdos. The two Hollywood films in 1971 and 2005 made the Oompa-Loompas look like orange elves.

Dahl hated the 1971 film, not least because the (uncredited) screenwriter David Seltzer (later to write
The Omen
) had Wonka spouting poetic quotations that weren’t in the book.

The film’s title was changed to
Willy Wonka & the Chocolate
Factory
allegedly because ‘Charlie’ had become US street slang for an African American.

Red.

The earliest Robin Hood stories were ballads dating from the fifteenth century.

In the longest and most important of these,
A Gest of Robyn Hode
, Robin and his ‘mery men’ wear ‘a good mantell of scarlet and raye’, a kind of striped bright red wrap.

In other ballads, Robin wears red or scarlet while his men wear green. This reflects his status as leader – ‘scarlet’ was the most expensive cloth in medieval England, dyed using kermes, the dried bodies of the female shield louse (
Kermes ilicis
).

This also explains the name Robin – associated with the robin redbreast – and that of one of his closest associates: Will Scarlet.

It is only in later versions that ‘Lincoln Green’ becomes the colour for the outlaws’ gear but even this may not have been green.

Lincoln was the capital of the medieval English dyeing industry. ‘Lincoln Green’ was green (blue dye made from woad was over-dyed with yellow) but ‘Lincoln Grain’ was scarlet,
dyed with kermes, known as ‘graine’.

The early Robin Hood stories are obsessed by clothing. As well as Robin being named after his headgear, mantles, kirtles, coats, breeches, shirts and six different colours of cloth are mentioned in the
Ges
t
, and at one point Robin plays at being a draper, selling the King 123 feet of green cloth.

This has prompted the idea that the ballads may have been written for the Livery Guilds, companies of merchants involved in manufacturing. Many of them were founded at the time the
Gest
was written (
c
.1460); their preferred style of uniform was a coloured hood.

At least one historian has suggested that the real point of the Robin Hood stories is not the traditional ‘forest versus town’ or ‘rich versus poor’ battle, but the victory of the merchant adventurer over the failing, corrupt nobility.

Robin Hood, dressed in expensive red cloth, was really the champion of the emerging middle classes rather than the poor.

There are two rhymes for orange in English, although both are proper nouns: Blorenge and Gorringe.

The Blorenge is a hill outside Abergavenny in Wales, and Gorringe is a splendid English surname

The best view of Abergavenny is from the top of the Blorenge, a 1,833-foot hill owned by the South East Wales
Hang-gliding and Paragliding Club, who bought it from the Coal Authority in 1998.

Distinguished Gorringes include: General George Frederick Gorringe (1865–1945), the unpopular British First World War commander; Harry Gorringe, the first-class Australian cricketer; and Henry Honeychurch Gorringe, the man who brought Cleopatra’s Needle from Egypt to New York’s Central Park.

In 1673, New York was called New Orange (so the New Orange became the Big Apple). The city was founded by the Dutch in 1653 as New Amsterdam, taken by the English in 1664 and renamed New York, and retaken by the Dutch in 1673 and named New Orange. It lasted less than a year. Under the Treaty of Westminster in 1674 the city was ceded to the English, and New York became its permanent name.

The word ‘orange’ is a good example of what linguists call wrong word division. It derives from the Arabic
naranj
and arrived in English as ‘narange’ in the fourteenth century, gradually losing the initial ‘n’. The same process left us with apron (from
naperon
) and umpire (from
noumpere
).

Sometimes it works the other way round, as in nickname (from an eke-name, meaning ‘also-name’) or newt (from an ewt).

Orange was first used as the name for a colour in 1542.

Carrots didn’t reveal their inner orangeness for almost 5,000 years.

The earliest evidence of carrots being used by humans dates from 3,000
BC
in Afghanistan. These original carrots were
purple on the outside and yellow on the inside.

The ancient Greeks and Romans cultivated the vegetable, but mostly for medicinal purposes: the carrot was considered a powerful aphrodisiac.

Galen, the famous second-century Roman physician, on the other hand, recommended carrots for expelling wind. He was the first to identify them as separate from their close relative the parsnip.

As Arab traders spread carrot seed through Asia, Africa and Arabia carrots blossomed into different shades of purple, white, yellow, red, green and even black.

The very first orange carrot was grown in sixteenth-century Holland, patriotically bred to match the colour of the Dutch Royal House of Orange.

By the seventeenth century, the Dutch were the main European producers of carrots and all modern varieties are descended from their four orange ones: Early Half Long, Late Half Long, Scarlet and Long Orange.

There is currently a vogue for non-orange carrots: white, yellow, dark red and purple varieties are available in the shops. In 1997, Iceland developed a chocolate-flavoured carrot as part of their child-focused Wacky Veg range. It was withdrawn after eight months.

According to the United Nations in 1903 there were 287 varieties of carrot but these now number just twenty-one, a fall of 93 per cent.

Some breeds of carrot contain a protein that stops ice crystals growing. This natural carrot ‘anti-freeze’ can be extracted and used to preserve body tissues for medical use and improve the shelf-life of frozen food.

Not really.

Carrots are a good source of vitamin A, a deficiency of which can lead to night blindness, where the eye adapts very slowly to changes in light.

The retina of the eye is made up of light-sensitive cells called rods and cones. Cones pick up detail and colour, but need plenty of light to function (like a ‘slow’ film emulsion). The rods can’t distinguish colour at all but need less light (like a ‘fast’ emulsion) so are used for night vision. They contain a light-sensitive chemical called rhodopsin, the key ingredient of which is vitamin A.

The easiest way to treat night blindness is to increase the intake of vitamin A, most commonly found in carotene. Carrots contain carotene, but even better are apricots, dark-leaved vegetables such as spinach, and bilberries.

But improving defective night vision is very different from making normal night vision better. Eating lots of carrots won’t help you see any better in the dark – all it will do, over time, is to turn your skin orange.

During the Second World War, Group Captain John Cunningham (1917–2002) gained the nickname ‘Cats Eyes Cunningham’. His 604 squadron operated at night. The British government encouraged rumours that he was able see in the dark because he ate so many carrots.

This was deliberate disinformation designed to cover up the fact that he was testing the newly developed (and top secret) airborne radar system.

It seems highly unlikely the Germans were taken in, but it helped persuade a generation of British children to eat the one vegetable that remained in constant supply through the war.

The Government started to overdo the carrot propaganda. Carrots became ‘these bright treasures dug from the good
British earth’. A 1941 recipe for Carrot Flan – ‘reminds you of Apricot Flan – but has a deliciousness all of its own’ – fooled no one. And carrot jam and marmalade failed to find their way on to the British breakfast table.

The Portuguese are fond of carrot jam, though. In 2002 this led to the European Union redefining the carrot as a fruit.