don't make corrections unless you're actually correct yourself

[calimac]

As a licensed pedant, regularly ready to correct commonly-believed statements that are not actually true, I find nothing irritates me more than the abuse of this power: when it's the "correction" that's false and the commonly-believed statement that's actually true.

I wrote about a bunch of these way back here, but here's another one: a video clip from an intellectual UK quiz show. The clip begins with some clever self-referential jokes about rhetorical questions, but then quizmaster Stephen Fry, for whom my respect has dropped significantly now that I've seen this, poses the stumper "How many states are there in the USA?" for the sole purpose of dropping the buzzer on the sap who says "50" on the grounds that there's only 46 because four of them are called "commonwealths".

It's true that four of them are called "commonwealths" and they even have the right four, but that doesn't mean they're not states. The question to which the proper answer is "46" is "How many of the 50 U.S. states are officially called states?" Not "How many states are there?"

This is not just a matter of casual reference, but of legal definition. The U.S. Constitution speaks of states. It says, for instance, that "The Senate of the United States shall be composed of two Senators from each State" (Article 1, Section 3). There's nothing about commonwealths. If the so-called commonwealths were not legally states, they wouldn't be entitled to senators. That would mean we could kiss Mitch McConnell goodbye, but we'd also have to boot Elizabeth Warren.

There's 50 states, not 46. Don't make corrections unless you're actually correct yourself.

Comments

[whswhs.livejournal.com]

If he's going that route, did he also exclude the California Republic?

[kalimac.livejournal.com]

Not its official name. Used for an unrecognized pre-state entity, and then resurrected for the flag only.

[whswhs.livejournal.com]

Fair enough. Though if someone got the other point wrong he might have gotten that one wrong too.

[kalimac.livejournal.com]

His error was mistaking the name for the thing. He got the names right.

[wild-irises.livejournal.com]

How many legs does a sheep have if I call a tail a leg?

[kalimac.livejournal.com]

Three, because this particular sheep had a leg cut off by some doofus who thought he was docking its tail.

[davesmusictank.livejournal.com]

I have seen that programme and cringed a bit about the gaff. John Lloyd one of the producers and quiz gurus of the programme should be ashamed too.

[steepholm.livejournal.com]

If you're giving up on QI you might do worse than try Only Connect. To give you a flavour of this show, in the first series contestants chose which category of question they wanted by selecting a letter of Greek alphabet, but station bosses deemed this too elitist. Consequently, contestants are now forced to choose an Egyptian hieroglyph.

[kalimac.livejournal.com]

I detest the phrase "only connect." I detest it with a white-hot passion. I detest it because it doesn't mean anything, and yet people use it as if it were deeply meaningful. I know it doesn't mean anything, because nobody can explain what it means. Here is a post in which I ask what it means, followed by a huge number of comments by people trying to explain it, and utterly failing to do so.

So I'm not too hot on a show using it as its title. Not that I won't watch this, but only having a couple of minutes to sample right now, I wish they'd get to the point, and not have the host chatter with the team captains with the kind of talk one would expect if they were about to play a football match.

I didn't give up on QI, though. Shame for that one thing, and a few other buzzer-catchers, but I watched some other clips, and the general level of intelligence on display makes most US talk shows look like jabbering monkeys. Unsurprisingly. And I really liked the one where they - correctly! - used the error buzzer on President Obama.

[steepholm.livejournal.com]

I'm glad you're not giving up on QI: it's got many things wrong over the years, but sometimes it revisits them and does them right later, which I like.

I know what I understand by the Forsterian "only connect", but in this case it simply means "only connect four apparently random items to win a point", which at least has the merit of being unambiguous. The awkwardness of the banter at the start of the show is, I'm 99% sure, pretty deliberate (as signalled by the random inconsequentiality of the "interesting facts" they reveal about each player in the introductions), but I agree it goes on too long. Feel free to skip. (Victoria Coren is a very interesting person, though, and I'd guess rather more intelligent than Stephen Fry, if it matters.)

[sturgeonslawyer.livejournal.com]

Yeah, that's up there with "George Washington wasn't the first President of the United States."

[kalimac.livejournal.com]

Or "There was once someone who served as President of the United States for one day." Or "Alaska is the easternmost (as well as the westernmost and northernmost) US state." Or "Illinois is west of the Mississippi River."