What is a Quizzer?

In a comment posted on the review of last Monday’s Mastermind, George asked the question ‘What is a quizzer?’. Good question. I mean, it’s not a term like doctor, where you can only call yourself one once you’ve passed the exams, is it? Well, a quick google suggests that a quizzer is someone who takes part in a quiz. Well, I’ll be honest, when I use the term in the blog, I have a bit of a narrower definition. After all, if we take the widest definition, then everyone who takes part on a TV quiz is a quizzer, because by its very nature they are playing in a quiz.

When I use the term in the blog in a review, then I tend to mean a regular quizzer, which would be somebody who plays regularly in a quiz (not necessarily a quiz league quiz) and regularly watched some quizzes on television. When I speculate whether a contender on Mastermind is a quizzer or not, I would mean, are they the sort of person who would complete the sentence – The question master is . .  . “  with the words ‘always right’, rather than a term of abuse. A person who has been around the quiz block enough to have picked up a smattering of quiz lore, and to have acquired a proportion of that body of quiz knowledge that the non-quizzer just wouldn’t encounter in their day to day lives.

This still leaves a large amount of room for interpretation. It covers all of us from the world champion right down to people who only play in their one quiz a week, and the only quizzes they watch are Pointless/The Chase and House of Games. (Nothing wrong with that. If you’re going to watch a quiz, watch something good, I say.)