Posts Tagged ‘answers’
“Judge a man by his questions rather than his answers”*…
Fun with facts…
It’s officially time to socialize again. But maybe . . . you’ve forgotten how? Here’s one way to break the ice/pass the time/celebrate your vaccinations with your book-reading friends: organize a day of literary Jeopardy!. (You can also just play by yourself, right here, right now.) To facilitate, I combed through this insane archive of every game of Jeopardy!ever played (YEP) and picked out 100 literary questions of varying difficulties. (You may notice that all of these clues are from the first 9 seasons (1984-1993), for no reason other than that’s how long it took me, haphazardly clicking through, to find 100 interesting ones. Test your brain (and your friends)…
Answer: Pasternak’s Moscow medic
Question:
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Answer: Long-time companion of Dashiell Hammett, she was played in “Julia” by Jane Fonda
Question:
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Answer: Sophocles’ “complex tragedy”
Question:
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97 more answers in search of a query at “100 Literary Jeopardy Clues from Real Episodes of Jeopardy!” (Answers– that is, questions– provided.)
* Voltaire
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As we reach for the buzzer, we might respond to the answer “this great American novel of teen angst and alienation was published on this date in 1951” with the question “What is J. D. Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye?” Consistently listed as one of the best novels of the twentieth century, it was named by Modern Library and its readers as one of the 100 best English-language novels of the 20th century, was listed at number 15 on the BBC’s survey The Big Read, and still sells about 1 million copies per year.
“Google can bring you back 100,000 answers; a librarian can bring you back the right one”*
Recently some folks at the New York Public Library discovered a box containing old reference questions from the 1940s to the 1980s. They’re posting the questions to their Instagram account each Monday, noting that “we were Google before Google existed.” Some of the examples include answers; others are… well, probably unanswerable– but all are a reminder of the extraordinary value of the Library and its reference librarians.
People still use an updated version of the service, Ask NYPL; the Library reports that they receive about 1,700 reference questions a month via chat, email, and phone.
Read more at “Before Google, Here’s What New Yorkers Asked The NYPL.”
* Neil Gaiman
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As we keep it down, we might send bibliographic birthday greetings to Archibald MacLeish; he was born on this date in 1892. A Pulitzer Prize-winning poet (Conquistador) and dramatist (JB), MacLeish became “America’s Reference Librarian”– the Librarian of Congress– in 1939.
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