Qui Es: Ep. 01
A quiz night is not a trivia night. Trivia asks you to recall. A quiz asks you to think—to connect a clue about a 10th-century Danish king to the Bluetooth logo, to recognize a hairstyle before you recognize the face. Trivia rewards memory. Quizzing rewards the kind of intelligence that knows things it was never taught and can't explain when it learned them.
On that note—do you know where the word "quiz" comes from?
One story has a Dublin theatre manager chalking four meaningless letters on every wall in the city overnight to win a bar bet. Another is older and quieter: in 18th-century British grammar schools, a schoolmaster would begin every oral examination with the Latin phrase "qui es?"—who are you? Qui es perhaps became quies became quiz. The word that once meant "who are you?" became the word for finding out what you know. And it started, as these things tend to, with a question.
This is one of those nights.
Expect questions you almost know. Answers on the tip of your tongue. A teammate screaming the right one a second after the buzzer. At least one round where you'll wonder how you ever graduated.
Bring your neurons—snacks and mental stimulation are on us.
→ Show up. Sit down. Feed your head.
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