QI: The Book of General Ignorance - the Noticeably Stouter Edition (45 page)

They are all hares, not rabbits.

Bugs Bunny and Brer Rabbit are both modelled on North American Jack Rabbits, which are long-eared, large-legged hares.

Bugs Bunny, who won an Oscar in 1958 for
Knighty Knight
, made his screen debut in 1938 in
Porky’s Hare Hunt
. Mel Blanc, the voice of Bugs Bunny, loathed carrots: nevertheless he still had to chew them during recordings as no other vegetable produced the desired crunch.

The origins of Brer Rabbit are in the story-telling traditions of African American slaves, who told tales about the hare being more wily than the fox. Robert Roosevelt, uncle of President Theodore and a friend of Oscar Wilde, was the first person to write down the stories but it wasn’t until 1879 that the ‘Uncle Remus’ stories, transcribed by Joel Chandler Harris, became national classics.

The insufferably cute Easter Bunny is also a modern American invention. It’s a commercial sanitisation of the hare as fertility-rebirth-moon symbol. In Saxon culture, the hare was sacred to Eostre, the goddess of spring, which is where we get the word ‘Easter’.

Few animals have such rich mythological associations. From Ancient Egypt and Mesopotamia through to India, Africa, China and Western Europe, hares have been portrayed as sacred, evil, wise, destructive, clever and, almost always, sexy.

Maybe it’s because they are so fast – they can run at 77 kph (48 mph) and leap 2.5 metres (8 feet) in the air Or maybe it’s their astonishing fertility: a female hare (doe) can produce 42 leverets in a single year. Pliny the Elder believed eating hare would make you sexually attractive for up to nine days.

Hares and rabbits are not rodents but ‘lagomorphs’ (which derives from the Greek for ‘hare-shaped’). Lagomorphs are
peculiar in being able to close their nostrils and choosing to eat their own droppings.

They do this for the same reasons cows chew the cud – to extract the maximum amount of nutrients and energy from their food. Unlike cows, hares and rabbits don’t get to stand around for hours ruminating.

The familiar spring ritual of ‘boxing hares’ is not a male dominance contest but a doe fighting off unwanted suitors.

Squirrel fur.

Charles Perrault, who wrote the familiar version of the story in the seventeenth century, misheard the word
vair
(squirrel fur) in the medieval tale he borrowed and updated for the similar-sounding
verre
(glass).

Cinderella is an ancient and universal story. A Chinese version dates back to the ninth century and there are over 340 other versions before Perrault’s. None of the early versions mentions glass slippers. In the ‘original’ Chinese story ‘Yeh-Shen’ they’re made of gold thread with solid gold soles. In the Scottish version ‘Rashie-Coat’ they’re made of rushes. In the medieval French tale, adapted by Perrault, her shoes are described as
pantoufles de vair
– slippers of squirrel’s fur.

One source says the
vair–verre
error occurred before Perrault and he merely repeated it. Others think glass slippers were Perrault’s own idea and that he intended them all along.

The
OED
states that
vair
, in use in English as well as French since at least 1300, comes from the Latin
varius
, ‘particoloured’, and refers to fur from a species of squirrel that is
‘much used for trimming or lining garments’.

Snopes.com states that Perrault could not have misheard
vair
as
verre
because
vair
‘was no longer used in his time’. This seems extremely doubtful – the word was continuously in use in English until at least 1864.

Perrault was an upper-class Parisian author who rose to become Director of the Académie Française. His
Tales of Mother
Goose
(1697), originally devised as Court entertainment and published under the name of his 17-year-old son, were immediately popular and opened up a new literary genre: the fairytale. Apart from Cinderella, his famous versions of classic tales include Sleeping Beauty, Little Red Riding Hood, Bluebeard and Puss-in-Boots.

As well as polishing up Cinderella – adding the mice, the pumpkin and the fairy godmother – Perrault reduced their peasant bloodthirstiness. In the medieval original, the ugly sisters cut off their toes and bunions to try on the slipper, and after the Prince marries Cinders, the King takes revenge on them and the wicked stepmother by forcing them to dance themselves to death wearing red-hot iron boots. Much of this bloodthirstiness was later reinstated by the Brothers Grimm.

In
Three
Contributions to the Theory of Sex
, Freud claimed slippers were a symbol for the female genitals.

Trees.

Not from the sea – that’ll be sponges you’re thinking of – loofahs grow on trees. They are a kind of gourd and are regarded as a tasty snack throughout Asia.

Smooth loofah (
Luffa aegyptiaca
) is a rampant, fast-growing annual vine that produces pretty yellow flowers and strange-looking fruits that are edible when immature and useful when fully grown. The vine can grow more than 30 feet (9 metres) long and scrambles over anything in its path.

Probably native to tropical Africa and Asia, it is grown throughout most of Asia and is cultivated commercially in the United States for export to Japan.

The immature fruits, 7.5 to 15 cm (3 to 6 inches) in length, can be stir-fried whole or sliced, or they can be grated and used in soups and omelettes. Any fruits longer than 10 cm (4 inches) need to be peeled because the skin becomes bitter.

Allowed to mature on the vine until they start turning brown and their stems go yellow, loofahs are easy to peel for use as back scrubbers, skin exfoliators or general kitchen pot scrubs.

Balsa.

It’s the strongest wood in the world when measured in three categories of stiffness, bendability and compressibility – stronger than oak or pine.

Although it is the softest of woods, it is not, botanically, a
softwood, but a hardwood. ‘Hardwood’ is a botanical term that describes broadleaved, mostly deciduous trees which are angiosperms (flowering plants such as balsa) as opposed to coniferous gymnosperms (non-flowering plants such as pine).

It is also light, of course, though it is not the lightest in the world – the lightest practical wood is a New Zealand native, the small
whau
tree (pronounced ‘phow’) which is used by Maori fishermen to make floats.

Balsa
is Spanish for ‘raft’. Balsa wood is mothproof.

Nothing bad, apart from being told not to.

Pencils don’t contain lead and never have done. They contain graphite, one of the six pure forms of carbon, which is no more poisonous than the wood it’s wrapped in. Even the paint is now lead-free.

The confusion comes from the fact that sharpened lead was used for more than 2,000 years to draw on papyrus and paper.

The only deposit of pure, solid, graphite ever found was uncovered by accident in Borrowdale, Cumbria in 1564. It was protected by strict laws and armed guards and mined for just six weeks a year.

The so-called ‘black lead’ it produced was cut into thin square sticks to make the first pencils. English pencils were adopted quickly across Europe. The first recorded use was by the Swiss naturalist Konrad Gessner in 1565.

Henry David Thoreau, author of
Walden
, was the first American to successfully fire graphite with clay to make a pencil ‘lead’ but the big commercial breakthrough came in
1827, when Joseph Dixon of Salem, Massachusetts introduced a machine that mass-produced square graphite pencils at the rate of 132 per minute.

By the time he died in 1869, the Joseph Dixon Crucible Company was the world leader, producing 86,000 round cased pencils a day. Today (now called Dixon Ticonderoga) it is still one of the world’s leading pencil-makers.

Roald Dahl wrote all his books using a yellow Dixon Ticonderoga medium pencil. The traditional yellow pencil goes back to 1890 when Josef Hardmuth manufactured the first one at his Prague factory and named it after Queen Victoria’s famous yellow diamond, Koh-i-Noor (she’d called his luxury line ‘the Koh-i-Noor of pencils’). Other manufacturers copied it. In North America, 75 per cent of all pencils sold are yellow.

The average pencil can be sharpened seventeen times and can write 45,000 words or a straight line 56 km (35 miles) long.

The rubber attached to the end of a pencil is held in place by a device known as a
ferrule
. The patent was first granted in 1858, but they were unpopular in schools because teachers believed they encouraged laziness.

The ‘rubber’ in most pencils is actually made from vegetable oil, with a very small amount of rubber binding it together.

No, you haven’t.

Banisters are the thin struts that support the fat bit you sit on when you slide down – which is properly called a ‘balustrade’ or ‘handrail’.

With a stone staircase, the pillars that support the handrail are called ‘balusters’ and, strictly speaking, ‘baluster’ is the correct word for any upright support for a handrail on any kind of staircase. The word ‘banister’ (or, worse, ‘bannister’) is a misspelling of the original word. Though in common usage since at least 1667, Victorian dictionaries railed and blustered about the use of the word ‘banister’ as ‘improper’ and ‘vulgar’. However, you will be relieved to learn that it is now deemed acceptable.

The word ‘newel’ – the bit with a knob on that stops you sliding off the end of the balustrade – has also changed its meaning. It was originally the central pillar of a spiral. In due course, it came to mean any pillary bit associated with stairs, and eventually just the one at the end.

In modern French, a language with many fewer words than English, the word
noyau
serves as a multi-purpose term, meaning not only a newel post but also the stone or pit of a fruit, the kernel of a nut and the nucleus of an atom.

The word ‘baluster’ comes from the Greek
balaustrion
, meaning ‘the blossom of the wild pomegranate’ whose doublecurving, pear-shaped bulges resemble (and presumably were the inspiration for) classic balusters.

Sir Roger Bannister, the first man to run a mile in under four minutes, in Oxford on 6 May 1954, held the record for only forty-six days. John Landy of Australia beat his time by 11/2 seconds in Turku, Finland, just over six weeks later on 21 June.