As I mentioned last week, a list of Latin and Greek words which have entered the English language through medical terminology (which is all this series of Youtube videos is: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7) is not particularly useful for circuit quiz bowl, but is fantastically useful for televised quiz bowl.
The science questions of televised quiz bowl are often simply vocabulary questions, especially where the possible answers are displayed on a monitor. If you know the answer of the three presented on screen, that's fine; if you don't, deducing the root words allows you to guess. So why is this chosen? There must be a reason for doing this, besides simply having the technology available.
Using this construction is a conscious decision of the writer, to use the technology they have available in a television studio, and to improve the odds that a team will answer it correctly. Because the possible answers are displayed for the players, the possibility of botched moderator pronunciation is reduced. Since such language training relies on both spoken and written communication, there's little chance of the clues of root words being misinterpreted.
The television writer is accustomed to making multiple ways for a team to answer correctly, either through simple knowledge of the term, or through roots. The circuit does not think in terms of multiple choice in the same way, we are never explicit in using the construction, though it's often used implicitly. "Okay, the clues have narrowed it down to an opera in Wagner's Ring Cycle, but which one?" A circuit writer would make the wrong answers implausible by details.
From the circuit, outside the television station, we deride that as lazy, uninspired writing, and manage to display a great deal of hubris and snobbery to people we should be recruiting. But inside television production it serves their purposes quite well. Sponsors have latched on to STEM education as something necessary to include in programs they sponsor. Television writers do this to create a science question that can be answered correctly even if the team's not specialized in science.
The question of specialization is actually one that would never occur inside televised competition. The critical split between circuit quiz bowl and most other forms of academic competitions occurred in the 1980's with the introduction of subject distribution in packets as a control on packet submissions. Once tournament questions were created and edited in separate locations, by separate people, it became necessary to coordinate the submissions so the editor could produce a unified final product across the whole tournament. But televised quiz bowl existed for decades prior without a fixed subject distribution, and it was able to develop its own style without that being a necessary condition.
One of the major themes of my finished book was "once a subject distribution is chosen, how can you exploit it?" So I found intriguing the idea of a competition which emerged without what I had thought was a first principle. So what do I think they use in its place? After watching hundreds of hours of these competitions, I can say that televised quiz bowl functions with a mix of simple repeatable patterns of answers, and a distribution not necessarily of subjects but of styles of questions, some of which tend towards subjects we would recognize. Vocabulary questions which resemble science questions. But if you understand the styles of questions, you can study their methods, if not specialize in their subjects.
The ancient among you may recognize the term "Colvin Science" for this phenomenon, and I suppose we owe a debt to Matt for defining it, and tirelessly pushing the circuit against its presence. But in doing so, we lost the ability to use these as a bridge between television and circuit. If you can use word origins, you can use other forms of memorization. The process is applicable in both competitions, even if the knowledge isn't. But it would have made recruiting after 2020 easier if we still had a little more common ground.
In other news, the list is progressing, I had a couple people submit additions to the list this week (thank you!) and now I'm hoping we'll be on the correct side of 1000 this year.
Stuff to Look at
Michelangelo's The Last Judgement
UniWatch covers the history of uniforms and logos in sports, and this article on forgotten NHL teams is a good introduction. Terminated teams are surprisingly early clues for lots of things, so knowing them gives you a leg up in sports categories.
Stuff to get straight in your head
At some point I began collecting information down on actual, physical notecards that could be useful for teams. One of them still to be written is just the differnces between meson/baryon/hadrons/leptons etc. This article is a start on that.
Stuff to Read
There's enough information in this brief about the properties of honey to spawn plenty of bee references, but I confess, I never saw the bees meme as anything other than statistical quirk, with even weirder examples of more frequent stuff that never got traction. Instead, I'll go even farther back to an ACF nationals packet by Albert Whited which used the meter of the Kalevala to write a tossup on honey in mythology.
This is one of the most quizbowl-famous papers in science, because it's a pun. Otherwise it would only be a correctly famous paper.
The Articles I Learned From This Week
A map which shows the history of the Mississippi River
This expands on my knowledge of Zoroastrianism [9] so it has to expand on your knowledge.
The Articles You Can Learn From This Week
Borrowing from the Lucky Peach archive again: The History of Pho, because dammit I'm hungry for it.
The story of the Lost Colony is always quiz bowl interesting, but this gives a new hook.
The Anarchy in England, not UK, I guess this should be a Queens of Infamy, but Matilda may not be infamous enough.
Didn’t You Learn Anything From the Last Time?
1
After defeating the Aequians, who threatened to invade Rome, this general resigned his dictatorship and returned to working his fields.
A. Name this Roman General whose name is borrowed for a city in southwest Ohio.
answer: Lucius Quintus Cincinnatus
B. In numerous works and references, including Houdon's statue in the Virginia state capitol, this Revolutionary War general is depicted as Cincinnatus.
answer: George Washington
C. This poet praised Washington as the Cincinnatus of the West, in his "Ode to Napoleon."
answer: George Gordon, Lord Byron
2
Following an assassination in Pont Larnage, this country was split into a northern section ruled by Henri Christophe, and a southern state ruled by Alexandre Petion.
A. Name this nation which had earlier gained independence from France following a slave revolt.
answer: Haiti
B. Petion and Henri Christophe split Haiti between them after the death of Emperor of Haiti and lieutenant of Toussaint L'Overture.
answer: Jean-Jacques Dessalines
C. Henri Christophe later styled himself Henri I, King of Haiti and ordered the construction of this palace near the Citadel Laferriere, which shares its name with Frederick the Great's palace in Potsdam. In 1820, Henri I used a silver bullet to retire himself on this site.
answer: Sans-Souci
3
The ancient theory of humourism divides personality types into four temperaments, which are associated with four classical elements.
A. The melancholic temperament is associated with this element described by Aristotle as cold and dry.
answer: earth
B. Raphael Sadeler's depiction of this temperament uses Mars and Ceres to represent it. In Adriaen Collaert's depiction, a phoenix approaches Helios.
answer: Choleric temperament
C. Collaert's depiction of the Choleric temperament also includes an image of this lizard-like amphibian long associated with fire.
answer: salamander
4
An obscenity trial resulted after the punk band the Dead Kennedys used his Landscape XX, depicting rows of genetalia, as album art.
A. Name this Swiss artist.
answer: H(ans) R(uedi) Giger
B. Giger's biomechanical surrealist style served to design the antagonist in this 1979 science fiction film, for which he won an Oscar.
answer: Alien
C. Giger's other works used for album covers includes an image of a face and skull on this prog-rock trio's Brain Salad Surgery.
answer: Emerson Lake and Palmer or ELP
5
In Ploughing in the Nivernais, two teams of oxen till the soil.
A. The painting, which was exhibited in the Salon of 1848, was by this painter who specialized in depicting animals.
answer: Rosa Bonheur
B. Another depiction of ploughing in art was this Frenchman's "Man with a Hoe." He depicted post-plowing and post-harvesting field work in "The Gleaners."
answer: Jean-Francois Millet
C. All the paintings mentioned in this bonus are exemplars of this movement which depicted everyday matters in direct reaction and opposition to Romanticism.
answer: Realism