Summary
Overview
In this episode of Lateral, host Tom Scott welcomes three guests to solve lateral thinking puzzles: first-time player and art historian Verity Babs (author of 'The History of Art in One Sentence'), returning video essayist Rowan Ellis, and returning guest Matt Gray. The team tackles questions about derisive nicknames, New Zealand's marriage lottery system, sign language contrast, the French flag's presidential proportions, a Chinese tongue-twister poem, and a court case paint-off that proved artistic authorship.
Derisive Nicknames Across History
The first question explores how four seemingly unrelated concepts share a common origin story. The team discovers that the Big Bang, the Tories, Cubism, and the Quakers were all initially given their names by critics or skeptics as derisive terms. Rowan makes the breakthrough connection that these were all nicknames that weren't meant to be complimentary but were eventually embraced by their subjects.
- The Big Bang was named by astronomer Fred Hoyle on BBC Radio in 1949 as a skeptical, mocking term
- 'Tory' comes from the Irish word for outlaw or robber, originally used as a slur
- 'Cubism' was named dismissively by writer Louis Vauxcelles who criticized the art movement
- 'Quakers' refers to the trembling or quaking that occurred during religious experiences
" I'm an art historian who I hope is at least mildly amusing. So it's a sort of funny whistle-stop tour through 500 years of art history of artists behaving badly, basically. "
New Zealand's Marriage Lottery and the Biscuit Tin
The panel unravels a peculiar connection between a token drawn from a biscuit tin near New Zealand's Parliament building and a same-sex marriage ceremony. Matt and Rowan piece together that New Zealand uses a literal biscuit tin filled with numbered tokens to randomly select which private member bills get debated in Parliament, and the token drawn in 2012 led to the legalization of same-sex marriage.
- The 'Beehive' is the nickname for New Zealand's Parliament building in Wellington
- Private member bills in New Zealand Parliament are selected randomly from a biscuit tin containing numbered bingo tokens
- The marriage equality bill was drawn from the tin in 2012, leading to legalization in 2013
- Lindley Vandel and Ali Wanakao were married on a plane between Queenstown and Wellington, with Modern Family actor Jesse Tyler Ferguson attending
" I bet that's not the first time a relationship started withdrawing a private member and ended in marriage. "
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