It’s an addiction. Children, teens, young adults, adults. Male, female, cisgender, non-gender, whatever. Everyone can get addicted to it. Because this activity has nothing to do with age, sex, appearance, or socio-economic backgrounds. Success in this activity depends entirely on your ability to recall random information instantly, and the “pre-ability” to absorb and store arbitrary factoids in a dark(ish) recess of your mind.
This addiction is called a Quiz. A four-letter word, which like all four-letter words, promises infinite possibilities. It binds together people from varied backgrounds, walks of life (yes, that’s Knopfler – a quiz question for newbies) and food preferences. All united by the urge to pit their grey cells against a Being – the Quiz Master.
The origins of the activity, and the word itself, are hazy. Surprisingly for the subject matter, no one really knows how the word “quiz” came about, what was the first quiz question (I would have thought “To Be Or Not To Be”, that would be the question), who won the first ever quiz, and so on. One would have imagined that this primordial question would have been answered by the myriad quizzards dotted about the planet. But alas, ‘tis not to be. Theories abound, but no irrefutable sources (the bedrock of any quiz) are available. The mystery is huge, and to delve into the various theories would be the equivalent of several Christie novels. Of course, along the way you might learn the name of the first actor to play Hercule Poirot on television.
Quizzing is a hugely popular British Question. It seems to be most prevalent in the Mother Country and her many ex-colonies. In India (Jewel Of The Crowd, sorry Crown), quizzing is a particularly raucous and heated activity in the eastern and southern parts, though the western part does hold its own! Kolkata especially is a hotbed of questionable activities, with children being taught to read and absorb varied bits of trivia as soon as they can say “Ilish”. The north seems to be stuck on “Who invented Chicken Tikka Masala?” (Disclaimer: this is my perception and is not backed by verifiable facts).
The Brooklyn Eagle Quiz on Current Events (a quiz on an American radio channel started in 1923) is widely considered to be the first ever “quiz show”. This has degenerated into macabre, dystopian shows such as the Spelling Bee (in which young students, usually of South Asian origin, are asked to spell words like Appoggiatura and Smaragdine) and “Who Wants To Be A Millionaire?" (where answers are exchanged for…money!)
The acme of quizzing as an activity for pure intellectual satisfaction, with no lucre involved, is no doubt Mastermind, aired on the BBC. With its classic line “I’ve started, so I will finish” (inspired no doubt by Nelson just after the first shot at Waterloo), the show is capable of reducing the most erudite contestants to sweaty, blubbery, blobs of unanswered questions. The mother country also has another quiz variable – the Pub Quiz. Burns and Shorter had no idea how wildly successful their idea would become as a marketing strategy when they launched it in 1976. More on this in a later post.
But what is it about quizzing that fascinates people so much? There is
no single answer. But to me, quizzing is a lot like life itself. Lots of
questions. You know the answers to some questions, you get the answers to some
questions from others, and you leave at the end with several questions
unanswered.
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