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

to you from the QI offices in Covert Garden.

My name is Dan Schreiber and I'm sitting here with Anich Zyski, 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 no particular order here we go starting with you, James.

Okay my fat this week is that there is a special language in Papu New Guinea that is only

used when gathering nuts.

It's very weird.

So can you only use it when gathering nuts?

It's really picking the nut or when you're on your way to pick the nut or when you're

in the general nut picking area.

So if you try and use it outside the area where the trees are then there's a worry that

mountain spirits might come down and investigate and then cause problems with the nuts.

Okay.

And basically this is a taboo language, this is relatively common around the world and you

change your language whenever you're doing anything as a superstition and eventually it becomes

an actual language or an actual vocabulary of more than 1000 words in this case.

And what's the idea that the spirits will steal the nuts from you?

What's the fear here?

So some normal words that you might use like say I don't know I'm making these up but

like wither or dry or dead or whatever they might be bad for the plants, they might be

unhealthy for the plants and so you have to use alternative words that wouldn't be generally

...