Tonights quiz ws an odd one - full of the kind of questions where my answer would be "depends who you ask" or "no, that's an urban myth.

One sticks in my mind.

The question was "what is the oldest word in English?" and the given answer was "town".

Anyone want to offer an opinion?

This message has been edited. Last edited by: BobHale,

How does one define English? Post-Angles and Saxons I presume? Or post-Danes? Or post-Romans?

This page says "town" is the oldest word because it originated in Old English and kept the same definition.

Except that the earliest recorded meaning of "town" is "An enclosed piece of ground; a field, a garden; a yard, a court."

The question "what's the earliest word" is like "what's the oldest language" in its meaninglessness. "What's the earliest writing in English" - that question is maybe answerable and the answer might be the runes on the Franks Casket (eighth century).

My thinking exactly.

Quite a few of the questions in it had the sound of urban myth about them and ones like "oldest word" are unanswerable. The first thing we tried (unsuccesfully) to clarify was "what do you mean by English?"

All but one team argued at length about this question.

"Which is the first number which when spelled out in words contains an "A"?"

His answer, and the answer of the only team with Americans in it was "One thousand". Of course this entirely ignores the fact that the rest of the English speaking world does NOT say "one hundred one" they say "one hundred and one" which has an "a" right there. He was having none of it. But he is American.

One of his questions that was definitely an urban myth was how far does the QE2 move on a single gallon of fuel - giving the answer as six inches which would mean that it must carry over thirty-six million gallons of fuel to get to New York. It's official fuel capacity is only one million gallons.Cunard say that one gallon moves it about 49 feet. I have a dislike of quizzes where the wrong answers are given.

This Wikipedia article suggests that the word is "keel".
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vortigern

quote:

Gildas adds several small details that suggest either he or his source received at least part of the story from the Anglo-Saxons. The first is when he describes the size of the initial party of Saxons, he states that they came in three cyulis (or "keels"), "as they call ships of war". This may be the earliest recovered word of English.

Almost forgot...

there was also this question.

"Which long running TV show bizarrely but accurately predicted many things about the future?"

The answer given was The Simpsons (which we got because by then I had worked out that the quizmaster believed everything he saw on Facebook) and the example given was predicting Donald Trump would run for president...which is debunked here.


I'm considering in my next quiz doing a round where I want the wrong answer, not the right answer based entirely on Urban Legends.

This message has been edited. Last edited by: BobHale,

Agreed, Bob, that I hate quizzes/trivia where the answers are wrong. My daughter's biology teacher used to have Friday trivia questions, and I remember one was, "What is the strongest muscle in the body." The answer was a tongue. Now, that may be for the size of the tongue, but clearly it isn't the strongest muscle in the body.

That, of course, is another question like the oldest word in English. First you have to define what you mean by "strong". Do you mean able to exert pressure for a short time (that would be in your jaw, I believe), do you mean carry a load for a long time (calf?), most hard working (heart?) and so on. Another in a long line of ill-defined and essentially unanswerable questions. It was a question on a quiz in my students text books last year and I looked up the answer then.