I'm too used to the high standards of SDMB ignorance-fighting

The BBQ Pit
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So tonight I went, as I have been doing regularly on Tuesdays for about three months, to “pub quiz” at a local pub. Basically, you go with a team, answer 7 rounds of 10 questions each, and the winning teams for each round, and for the entirity win a prize from whatever company’s sponsoring the evening.

My team has a few regular members and some transients, but we all have a good time. We haven’t won yet, but come consistantly in the top 5 or 6 teams.

Tonight one of the questions was: what language is spoken by the most people as a first language?

Now, we spent a lot of time and energy trying to decide amongst ourselves whether it was Mandarin, Cantonese, or some other language (Spanish was also bandied about).

So, eventually we decided on Mandarin, wrote it down, turned in the answer sheet.

Know what the answer was? Mandarin, “but we’ll also accept Chinese.”

WTF!?!?!?

Now, this ain’t about winning. We don’t play to win, we play to have fun, but what kind of game accepts wrong answers? Chinese is wrong. Don’t accept it just because you don’t know the difference! What if I had put “Indian”? I bet there are more people who speak “Indian” than who speak Mandarin. Oh, but wait, India is a country, not a language!

Lame rant perhaps, but I just can’t believe the ignorance being propagated here. Use this opportunity to tell the people who didn’t know the answer that they’re wrong, better luck next time bubs, instead of letting them believe that they know something that they don’t damn well know!!!

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If you can’t write in American, don’t post to this message board fucker.

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More correctly, the answer is “Mandarin Chinese”

Chinese has several dialects. IIRC, it’s WRITTEN the same in all dialects, but it’s spoken so differently that if you put a Mandarin and a Cantoneese speaker in the same room, they wouldn’t be able to understand each other (unless they wrote it down)

4

What about the Language of Love?
I know what you mean, man… I was playing Trivial Pursuit the other day and came across not one, not two, but THREE answers that were wrong! I knew because I had seen them all on The Dope within the past week or so. Try telling that to a group of beer swilling faux intellectuals, though.

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Ummm. Kinda.

There are many linguists, especially Chinese ones, who group all the languages that use the hanzi (characters) as “Chinese.”

“Mandarin” itself has a number of subdialects that vary as widely as the various romance languages. The official language is the Beijing dialect, which the gov’t calls “Mandarin;” but they also claim that Shanghainese is “Mandarin,” and it is clearly somewhat different. Cantonese, OTOH, is clearly significantly more different … but it’s still not a completely separate language like Japanese or Korean.

All things considered, I’d say they were about right.

http://www.lmp.ucla.edu/profiles/profm02.htm

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Doesn’t the PRC government call the official language Putonghua?

Oh, and, depending on your viewpoint, the so-called dialects of Chinese are languages.

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Languages are just dialects which have their own armies.

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“I give you very best duck, Eonwe.”

9

Wouldn’t ‘Baby Talk’ be the correct answer?

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Most Tuesdays, I play similar games at an Irish-style pub here in Austin. EVERY week, it’s a safe bet that two of the answers the host gives will be wrong (out of 80 questions total).

Now, I COULD get outraged over this (in fact, the first few weeks, I DID get outraged), but in the end, it’s not worth it. Most of their mistakes hurt me and my team, but a few helped me. And if I didn’t raise a ruckus when their mistakes helped me, I’d be a bit hypocritical to complain when they hurt me.

It’s like a football game- you EXPECT the refs to blow a call or two. You just hope the errors in your favor and the errors that go against you balance out over the long run. And you hope they don’t blow a BIG one that costs you the game.

As for me, I won a trip to Ireland through that pub trivia game last Spring. You think maybe that’s why I’m so willing to be philosophical about the whole thing?

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I was once playing Trivial Pursuit with my friends, who have agreed to subscribe to the ‘Moops, Baby’ rule* The question was ‘Who killed Cleopatra?’ We debated for a while, we all knew that she killed herself by holding an asp to her chest. But we couldn’t guess whether the card would say ‘Cleopatra’ or ‘An Asp’.

You know where this is going … we said ‘the asp’, the card said ‘cleopatra.’ I’m still bitter. personally I am not a fan of the Moops, Baby rule.

Another weird TP story: in November 2001 we were playing a fairly recent edition and there was a question about the WTC bombing ??!!! That was fast, said we ! (it was referring to the other WTC bombing.) how bizarre.

  • from the Seinfeld ‘Bubble Boy’ episode when the boy in the bubble answered ‘Moors’, but the card had a typo and said ‘Moops’ - so he didn’t get the answer. The rule is that what’s on the card is correct (even if it’s clearly wrong) - it’s the only way to avoid eternal arguments.
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Ok, the rest of you smart-asses can go back to wherever you came from! It’s all right when I want to correct someone, but I don’t remember issuing you guys a “lisence to correct.” See, I’ve got one, which means I can complain. If you’d like to be issued one, send $50 dollars to me (checks are ok), and I’ll happily send you one. I’ll laminate it even. :slight_smile:

And astorian, I’m not actually outraged, and certainly not because other teams got points for something I don’t think they should have. It just seems that trivia quizes should facilitate the amassing of correct knowledge. It’s like if there were a wrong answer on Jeopardy. If Mr. Trebek won’t stand for it, then neither will I!

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At my brownies, they had a General Knowledge quiz. One of the questions was:

What is the capital of the USA?

Against all the wishes and advice of my team, I insisted on “Washington.”

But no, Brown Owl told us the correct answer was “New York”, and we lost.

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“I think they were speaking… Asian!”

— 911 call by Ben Stiller’s character in The Cable Guy.

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All the Mandarine speakers i know say they speak Chinese and can’t understand Cantonese. All the Canto speakers i know say they speak Chinese and can’t understand Mandarin. i don’t know anyone who speaks Wu, Gan, Xiang, Bakka, or Min, but i bet they say the same thing.

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I thought it was “Moogs”
Anywho, is one of those TV in every corner games and every table has a control pad thingie?

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But if the question was phrased with “who”, then the asp would have been incorrect–which it was. An asp is a “what” not a “who.”

I think we can agree, though, that no matter who or what killed Cleopatra, she definitely made an asp out of herself. :wink:

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**Skip *boa * that just sucks.

:stuck_out_tongue:

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No, Shirley, that bites.

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I hate having to read bad puns. Fangs alot.