Yob Hone Men

Just because you know what you mean, it can be dangerous to assume that everyone, or even anyone else does. When I was a young child in the end of the 60s and the beginning of the 70s, we had a real life Steptoe and Son style rag and bone man who’d drive his horse and cart down our street once a week. Periodically he would cry out what I think must have been ‘Any Old Bone?”. But that’s not what I heard. No, the way that he shouted it sounded to me like “Yob hone!” So to me he became ‘the yob hone man’. I distinctly remember when my mum said something or other was knackered and needed to be thrown out I told my mother – you can give it to the yob hone man. After some discussion she worked out what I was talking about and put me right.

Well, one of my pet peeves in a quiz is where a question master asks a question in such a way that you have to try to work out exactly what he’s talking about before you answer it. For example, on Thursday night our question master asked – name all of the English managers in the Premier League When he read out the answers he did not include Liam Rosenior. When we protested he replied – Well, he wasn’t Chelsea’s manager when I wrote the quiz! How the hell were we supposed to know he meant name all the English managers in the Premier league up to 31^st December 2025, when he didn’t actually say so?

Two other questions on Thursday night brought out the pedant in me. How about this one? The Treaty that ended World War 1 was named after which French Palace? Now, you know that he meant Versailles, and so did we and that’s what we wrote down. But it’s annoying because that was only the treaty with Germany. The treaty with Austria was named after the Chateau de St. Germain en Laye. The Treaty with Hungary was named after the Trianon Chateau. And so it goes. Would it have hurt to specify the treaty with Germany? When I was handing out the LAMMY awards in December I said that I would like to give one to question masters who aren’t in my team, but they don’t deserve it. This sort of thing is one of the reasons why.

In the same quiz the question master asked “Who was the key figure behind the Russian Revolution?” Now again, you know he meant Lenin, and we wrote down Lenin. But really! For one thing there were two Russian Revolutions of 1917, and Lenin wasn’t even in Russia when it started, and knew bugger all about it before it did. It’s just a needlessly messy question, which betrays the question master’s lack of thoroughness in preparing his questions. Even if you do prepare carefully, now and again mistakes are going to creep in. But if you don’t prepare carefully I’d say it’s pretty much guaranteed.