Okay, so it's got very little to do with Christmas, but here goes anyway with my QI-style language quiz. It's multiple choice, and I'm not going to post the answers just yet, so if you want to know how you've done before I get round to doing that, feel free to leave your answers as a comment underneath the quiz. Right, here goes:
1. What did the word 'alphabet' first mean?
a) Alpha and beta
b) Alf and Betty
c) Ox and house
2. What's the correct plural of 'octopus'?
a) Octopuses
b) Octopus
c) Octopi
3. Which writer first used the word 'muggle'?
a) JK Rowling
b) Nancy Stouffer
c) Layamon
4. Who gave us the word 'slithy'?
a) W. Whateley
b) W. Shakespeare
c) L. Carroll
5. Which writer is credited by the Oxford English Dictionary with creating the most neologisms?
a) William Shakespeare
b) Geoffrey Chaucer
c) Thomas Browne
6. And which single work is cited most often in the OED?
a) Hamlet
b) The Bible
c) Cursor Mundi
7. How many words in the English language end in 'dous'?
a) Just four
b) Just five
c) Nearly forty
8. What does the word 'tribadism' denote?
a) Tribal mating customs
b) Lesbian lovemaking that simulates heterosexual intercourse
c) Things being three times as bad as they previously were
9. What does 'DVD' stand for?
a) Digital Video Disc
b) Digital Versatile Disc
c) Nothing
10. Why is Chicago known as 'the Windy City'?
a) It's windy there
b) The river that runs through Chicago is long and winding
c) The politicians speak a lot of hot air
11. Who was the first person with the given name 'Gary'?
a) Garibaldi
b) Gary Cooper
c) Gary Sparrow
12. Where does the word 'posh' come from?
a) Acronym (Port Out Starboard Home)
b) A Victorian poet's gay regard for a boatman
c) Nobody knows
13. Parapraxis is better known as what?
a) A spoonerism
b) A Freudian slip
c) Forgetting a word
14. Who gave us the name for the subatomic particle the 'quark'?
a) Richard Feynman
b) Stephen Hawking
c) James Joyce
15. Who compiled the first ever dictionary of the English language?
a) Dr Johnson
b) Robert Cawdrey
c) James Murray
16. Who gave us the words 'chortle' and 'galumph'?
a) Lewis Carroll
b) William Shakespeare
c) Jonathan Swift
17. The moon of Uranus, Ariel, is named after a character from one of which writer's works?
a) William Shakespeare
b) Alexander Pope
c) Lewis Carroll
18. Which novelist coined the phrase 'dark horse'?
a) Charles Dickens
b) Benjamin Disraeli
c) William Makepeace Thackeray
19. How did sirloin steak get its name?
a) Henry VIII knighted it
b) Elizabeth I knighted it
c) It's French
20. Where does the name Jessica first appear?
a) The Bible
b) The Merchant of Venice
c) The Odyssey
Well done! You've reached the end of the quiz. If you would like your quiz marked, or if you would like to point out any errors you see in any of the questions, then I'd love to hear from you. And if anybody scores 20/20 I will personally visit them with a surprise prize. Of course I will. Now, would I lie to you?
Dear Teacher,
ReplyDeleteI have done my homework and here are my answers: 1)A, 2)A, 3)C, 4)C, 5)C, 6)C, 7)C, 8)B, 9)B, 10)C, 11)B, 12)A, 13)B, 14)C, 15)B, 16)A, 17)B, 18)B, 19)C, 20)B.
However,
*I am not sure why you oppose the plural form "octopi",
*I also found Romany/Gypsy etymology for "posh" meaning originally "half",
* what about Ariel in "The Tempest"? Surely that was before A.Pope....
Yours,
Tigerlina ;)
You're a bad man. I am so thrown by the possibility of being wrong (distasteful at beast) that I dare not partake. Quark is, of course, a Joycian coinage, and I seriously hope that it is still Carroll who gave us 'galumph'. What of Octopodes? Cawdry for the dictionary? Murray was the OED but that surely isn't technically the first? I'm all out of steam this end-of-year day.
ReplyDeleteI blame Sporcle for going down the other night. Otherwise I would never have terrorised anyone with this dangerously devilish quiz. You're spot on, of course, with Joyce, and it was indeed Carroll who gave us 'galumph' and 'chortle' (and 'mimsy', as I now recall), and Cawdrey was the first one known to have compiled anything dictionaryish in the slightest - in the early 17th-C, so he beats old Murray and, of course, the fat dullard or wobblebottom himself.
ReplyDeleteI didn't include octopodes, although you're right - that is really the technically correct plural. Should've put that in instead of 'octopus' (which nobody has been silly enough to plump for). Any thoughts on the others? About time I actually published the answers to the quiz, but lunch is calling and my tumtum is rumbling.
Answers, belatedly, are: 1 c), 2 a), 3 c), 4 a), 5 c), 6 c), 7 c), 8 b), 9 c), 10 c), 11 b), 12 c) (or b) at a push), 13 b), 14 c), 15 b), 16 a), 17 b), 18 b), 19 c), 20 b).
ReplyDelete