@TRiG Well, it’s sometimes uneven, but I in general like it. I’ve gotten a bit weary of all the dick-jokes this season, though. Yes, I’ve listened to David’s show before.

@tchrist I no longer have access to television (not quite true), so I tend to see little extracts of QI out of order on YouTube. I've probably not seen many of this season's episodes.

@TRiG I haven’t had TV service in longer than you have been alive. But one can find these things if one tries. I liked the 2011 Christmas episode with Brian Blessed.

@tchrist I was brought up without TV, but my housemates had one, in the last shared house I was living in.

I like some of the guests more than others. Some I rather dislike.

Daniel Radcliff was surprisingly interesting.

I thought he would be tedious and slow-witted and full of himself, but he was none of those things.

Jack Whitehall I was sure would be horrible, but he wasn’t. And he was almost cute when he kept flirting with Stephen.

@tchrist I have never seen Daniel Radcliff act. I've seen none of his films. But I quite like the character he presents in interviews. He gave an excellent interview to the gay magazine Attitude a few years back.

I do not like Jimmy Carr or Johnny Vegas.

And he seems interested, engaged, and very human on TV talk shows and suchlike.

@TRiG Yes, I read it.

@tchrist Jimmy Carr's humour is often too nasty for my taste, and I find a very little Johnny Vegas goes a long way.

Dara Ó Briain, Bill Bailey, and Rob Brydon do a good job.

And of course, Phill Jupitus.

@tchrist They do. And I'm not sure what I think of Lee Mack.

Jeremy Clarkson is sometime tedious, sometimes funny.

Lee Mack is not all that funny. He is on that other show with David Mitchell and Rob Brydon.

I’m actually coming to like Ross Noble, which surprises me.

@tchrist I've seen a bit of the one with Jack Whitehall, and it seemed good. Must watch the full episode.

@tchrist "Would I Lie to You?" He's better on that. It suits him better.

The gay guests are funnier in the female flavor than the male one.

Sue Perkins and Sandi Toksvig are better than Julian Clary (who isn’t?) and Graham Norton. Graham can be funny on his own show.

Because he called her Mother instead of Mom?

@tchrist Emma Thompson was a good guest, especially when she terrified Stephen.

Yes, she was hilarious.

@tchrist No, because he said "Mother", not "my mother".

He wasn’t talking about serving tea, was he? :)

@tchrist "Shall I be mother?" No, he wasn't.

I'm looking for the episode now.

Can you imagine Emma and Stephen and Hugh at Cambridge? :)

@tchrist I think I can.

Did you see the one where Phill was imitating Hugh?

The thing about Emma and Stephen and Hugh is that they actually seem like real people still in interviews, not assholes. I cannot understand how that happened.

Who was the boy from the Sherlock episode, Hound of the Baskervilles?

"You're succeeding in making David seem positively working class."

He was on the 24h QI thing.

Hah.

Clive Anderson has a poshness to him. It comes from having worn a wig. :)

Context:

And full episode:

Russell Tovey.

@tchrist Found it.

Yup, that’s it.

He certainly has Fans, eh?

@tchrist I'd not heard of him.

David Walliams is the campiest straight man I have ever seen. It’s like he wants Dame Edna’s job.

And I've not seen the full 24h episode.

Walliams was on Graham Norton’s show with Zac Efron, and it was pretty funny.

@tchrist Pretty boy collection?

Walliams was being cuddly with Efron, who took it in good humor.

Lily of the Valley is poisonous, just FYI.

Salty water freezes at 0F, regular water at 0C. Well, presuming it has the impurities needed to form crystals.

@tchrist And the triple point of water is not 0C, as Dara learned on QI.

Exactly.

But they moved it.

To 0.01C.

There was something on Science Friday yesterday about negative temperatures.

I have no idea how that would work.

I comes before E when you spell the alphabet backwards.

Simple.

Scientists have cooled potassium gas to one billionth of a degree below absolute zero. But in the quantum world, that's actually hotter than the Sun. It's hotter, even, than infinity degrees Kelvin. Vladan Vuletić, a quantum physicist at MIT, talks about this 'Bizarro World' temperature.

I have to run. Back in a bit.

@tchrist Mwa? My brain hurts

@Kit I've tried writing limericks starting with the punchline, like you said. It definitely makes it easier to finish, but harder to start. Overall I think it's better.

@MattЭллен Example?

@Robusto here's one I made earlier

by better, I mean easier to write.

Interesting.

@TRiG The two “best of” compilation shows for QI are out. Here is the second. Trims down the lame bits.

@tchrist Thanks.

I swear Bill Bailey pronounces hawk as though it were hoke.

@tchrist Juan Fernandes tit tyrant.

Aye.

@TRiG I do not understand why Jack saying Mother was class-marked.

@tchrist Very very upper class.

Hm.

But that is her name.

the only thing higher would be "mater"

"Mummy", "Mum", etc. are okay, but "Mother" needs a possessive pronoun.

It is how my family has always spoken of our mothers.

Not in my family. It is standard.

Honest.

Well, the English side, not the Danish side.

Dangles!

It sounds well, not weird to recast it, but wholly unnecessary.

This is really odd.

I'm Irish, but with English parents. We went with "Mummy" and/or "Mammy" (usually the later, which is more Irish).

@tchrist When you cut your knee falling off your bike, who did you yell for?

And my family has never been more than upper middle class, if that.

Well, usually that.

As a little child, perhaps Mommy.

@AndrewLeach Of course, if you want to be really Irish, you call her "the auld one".

But as an adult, one calls her in the other room with Mother, not Mommy.

Of course, the British Royal Family always refer to their mothers as Mummy. Prince Charles and Prince Andrew have been on television saying that.

@tchrist Modes of address are different to modes of reference, aren't they? (I don't know the right terminology here.) What would you call her if you were talking about her?

Mother.

Well, sometimes.

Mom, others.

The English side of my family is descended from Thomas Halsey [1591-1679] of Hertfordshire and later Long Island.

We have always been deans and professors and physicians and such.

It is normal to call Mother Mother for me.

I had no earthly idea that this was associated with class.

The Danish side always uses Mom, though.

Perhaps it's only classifying in our class-ridden islands over here.

Mom is common, but Mother sounds ever so slightly formal or serious. It does not have a class connotation here that I can fathom. Unless it happens and I am oblivious.

As I said, Mother is common on the English side. It may not occur on the Danish side.

I am hardly socially adroit, especially with respect to people who differ from me in education (what you might call class), so perhaps I would not notice if there were some big difference.

My brother always refers to our parents as Mother and Father.

Not as Mom and Dad.

But he is an overeducated professor with a chair of some sort.

Not my idea of education, but still.

I try not to open my mouth in certain neighborhoods. I don’t know how to pretend to be working class. My speech betrays me.

I think it's culturally different in the States. It's not all that long ago that children would address their father as Sir. Perhaps they still do. That would never happen over here.

Ah, that is something else.

It would never happen where I am from either.

It is Mason–Dixon Line thing.

The Southerners talk that way. It would be offensive in the North to address one’s parents as Sir or Maam.

I've no idea where the Mason-Dixon line went.

Or goes.

When my maternal parent heard a Southern friend of mine do that to his own progenitress, she soon thereafter informed me that she would surely burst into tears if I ever treated her so sternly as to call her Maam. It would be mean.

The Mason–Dixon Line was the one that separated the North from the South, or us from them, or free and slave, or Union and Confederacy, or yankees and traitors nés rebels.

So what in the South was and indeed apparently still is an expected politeness is in the North a rude distancing.

You use Sir/Maam with people you do not know or do not like, or both.

Much the same over here with Mother and Father: it's distant.

To do so to one’s parents says to us Northerners that one no longer knows, or no longer likes, one’s parents.

The Southerners do not understand why we feel this way.

Yes, Mother and Father is more distant than Mom and Dad. That is certainly true.

I can’t imagine what my fingers are thinking.

@tchrist It's interesting the differences. I wouldn't think of myself as very class-aware, but Jack's "I met them through Mother" immediately set off the same alerts in my head as it did for his fellow-guests on the panel.

The clip's title is some what priming, in that regard.

Ayup.

It is weird what you can, and cannot, fine on the net.

I think it's partly the way Jack said it

if he'd been an old man with a Yorkshire accent, it probably wouldn't sound so posh

Maybe the faaamily thing that came right before?

Did you just collocate Yorkshire and posh in the same sentence?

and n't

I see young Jack is in the news again.

... well-spoken comic Jack Whitehall ...

Well-spoken? Is that a code phrase for something?

as in posh voice with clear enunciation

@tchrist Well, that Irish Times page crashed Chrome.

@tchrist It could be a code, if if so I don't know what for. I suspect @MattЭллен is right, and it just means that his diction is clear.

@AndrewLeach It didn't give SeaMonkey any problems.

It seems an odd thing for someone to be known for, that he doesn’t mumble or fumble his words.

@TRiG I think it was failing to get some script or other. Oh well. What's the Daily Mail's beef now?

It's an adjective, meaning that someone "speaks politely". It seems to me to be a perfectly ordinary and common expression, although I accept it may be a regionalism.

It seems a good thing, not a bad thing.

yep

@DavidWallace It is, though, an odd description to find in a newspaper column.

Like saying someone has good manners.

@TRiG Do you think so?

Do we know which newspaper?

Irish Times.

@DavidWallace The Irish Times. A broadsheet. But I think this was a newspaper blog, not in the actual paper itself.

No, actually, I wouldn't be surprised to read it in any newspaper. And the more I think about it, the more I think that it is NOT a regionalism. Perhaps it's just not used in North America, or maybe just not in the northern USA. It would be interesting to hear from a Canadian, or from a Southerner.

What? Saying someone is well-spoken is a simple enough compliment, albeit uncommon insofar as it is uncommon to find people with good manners and good diction. I just wanted to understand if it was some veiled allusion to class.

At which point, it is no longer a compliment, but a dig.

I could read the first two paragraphs while I was waiting for Chrome to respond. I reckon you have analysed it correctly.

@tchrist Here it is not. In England, it might be, but it seems unlikely. Maybe @Matt has an opinion?

seemed like a compliment to me.