Hello and welcome to another episode of No Such Thing as a Fish, a weekly podcast coming

to you from the QI offices in Covenant Garden.

My name is Dan Schreiber, I am sitting here with Anich Zenski, Andrew Hunter Murray and

James Harkin, and once again we have gathered around the microphones with our four favorite

facts from the last seven days and in a particular order, here we go, starting with you,

Shazenski. My fact this week is that the reason Merlin isn't called Merlin is to avoid confusion

with a 12th century word for feces. That's amazing.

Yeah, so the wizard Merlin of Sword and the Stone fame, he would have been called Merlin.

And so the story is that Merlin was originally created in the form we know him by Jeffrey

of Monmouth who was sort of a Norman Welsh guy in the 12th century. And he based the

character of Merlin on this Welsh medieval mythical figure called Merlin, M-Y-R-D-I-N.

But because he has sort of Norman origins, because he was from the Nebility probably,

and so a lot of people were speaking French in his social circles, it was thought Merlin

would be really easily confused with Merlin, which is the same as it is today, which is

the word for pooh. It feels like he's missed a chance for a lot of puddles and poo jokes,

doesn't it? I changed that name, he's lost a lot of his joke material.

Yes. It does.

Yeah, he could have been the tracer of his time.

Yeah, I just don't know if that was the style he was going for.

Okay, do you know that in the 17th century, the word Merd was English?

Yes, really.

It was just a common English word for poo Merd, and then it just kind of disappeared in the 18th

...