Bagel n.

Zero points, especially on a bonus. [A bagel looks like a zero.]

Binary flip-flop n.

Incorrectly answering a question where only two answers are possible. For example, answering gymnosperms when the answer should be angiosperms.

Botticelli n.

(jacked from the UC Berkeley Lexicon) Good game for car rides at least two hours long. One player thinks of a person, dead or alive, real or fictional, and tells the others the first letter of that person's name. The other players then have to ask "stumper" questions. An example would consist of one player thinking of Einstein, in which case a stumper question might be something like "Are you a Greek playwright?" A correct answer would be something like "No, I'm not Euripides," (or any other Greek playwright whose name starts with "E"). If the player who is being asked the stumper is unable to answer it correctly, and if at least one other player besides the one who asked the stumper is able to answer the stumper question correctly, the rest of the players get to ask a yes/no question about the individual that the first player has in mind. The game goes on until someone guesses what that player is thinking of.

Buzzer race n.

A question which becomes answerable by several players in the room at approximately the same instant. See gunfighter reflexes.

Cadbury's Creme Egg n.

1. A delicious confectionery. 2. A good, well-crafted question. [A lesser form of Fabergé Egg. This lexicon entry restored by popular demand.]

Can of Greed and Shame n.

The repository into which one must place monetary fines exacted to penalize wrongdoing, e.g. vulturing, q.v.

Ceiling, The n.

1. The overhead inside lining of a room; material used to ceil a wall or roof of a room. 2. While staying at a cheap motel near Stanford, quizbowl member Jim Karnesky decided to leap from one bed to another in order to access the bathroom (there were other players on the floor, blocking the path). He didn't see the beam in the ceiling, whacked his head in it, and fell to the floor. After bleeding over much of the bathroom, he was taken to the ER and had staples put into his head. This also ruined his plans to get drunk that night.

Clubbing baby seals ger.

Playing teams far below your level, e.g. Berkeley against a sophomore high school team. Coined by Joe Jewell at the 2001 Riverside tournament where half the games had over 250 point differentials.

Cult of Speed n.

Belief that moderators, esp. in timed tournaments, should read as fast as possible and that the more questions read in a round, the better. Taken to extremes, it has destructive consequences, as moderators try to go so fast they cannot be understood.

Dance with the one that brung ya v.

See ride the pony.

Dark Side n.

1. The evil aspect of the Force. 2. Knowledge acquired solely through studying for quizbowl, e.g., answering a question based on rote memorization of Nobel Prize winners by date. [See Force.]

DDR n.

1. Die Deutsche Demokratische Republik, a now defunct Soviet-bloc nation whose highest achievement was the Trabi. 2. A loud, bright, flashy annoyance that sits in SAC 65, but one that kills time until people show up for practice. 3. What Cecilia was doing while answering a question on Samurai Pizza Cats. 4. No, you can't play a game while we're in here; we reserved the room.

Defensive bonus n.

A bonus question on material in which the opposing team is expert, but the team actually answering the bonus is not. The inexpert team can take comfort in considering that, although they may convert few points on this bonus, merely by receiving it they have denied a large point gain to their opponents. [Coined by Chris Nolte. See defensive struggle.]

Defensive struggle n.

1. A game characterized by many defensive bonii (q.v.). 2. A low-scoring game. 3. A low scoring game of this variety is often referred to as a "cheese melter" by our friends in the North for some unknown reason.

Epsilon Points n.

Points awarded for (1) wrong answers that somehow or other merit some form of positive reward; (2) Points awarded for answering the other team's bonus, usually in practices. These points are worth nothing (see less than epsilon), but are fun and may be used for tiebreakers in practice rounds. Interchangable with imaginary points.

Fabergé Egg n.

1. A particularly excellent, intricate, or ingenious question (in the eyes of its writer); a question requiring an unusual amount of time or effort to write. 2. The addiction of "Bleeding Gums Murphy."

Feast or Famine n.

Dramatic variation in a player's scoring from one round to another. See yo-yo award. [Proximate source is a comment by Brian Moore of ASU.]

Fezzik's Law n.

Strategic principle of quizbowl singles tournaments, formulated by Richard Mason, stating that, other things being equal, you should buzz more aggressively during the multiplayer seeding rounds, more cautiously during the one-on-one elimination rounds. [Fezzik the Giant in The Princess Bride:"You see, you use different moves when you're fighting half a dozen people, than when you only have to worry about one."]

Force, the n.

A mystical power binding all life and knowledge in the universe. See using the Force. Some have reported sensing a disturbance in the Force, and fear that certain Caltech frosh may have turned to the dark side, q.v., and taken to reading BenŽt's.

Geneism n.

Act of buzzing in accidentally while toying with a buzzer. [From Gene Smith.]

Giant-killer award n.

Award given to the team who engineers the greatest single-match upset at a tournament. Long hypothesized, such an award was finally actually given at Technophobia 3, to an underpowered Stanford team which beat R. Hentzel.

Go, go Gadget . . . imperative phr.

1. A phrase used by the zany Inspector Gadget to activate one of his titular devices. 2. A phrase uttered by Kevin Costello to conjure up helpful spirits to answer a question. Heisenberg? Go, go Gadget commutators!

Gogol, Nikolay Vasilyevich n.

1. A Russian playwright and author whose full name was required at the 2001 Riverside tournament. 2. Overzealous underlining by packet writers / editors.

Guerrilla quizbowl n.

Irregular, radical, or unconventional quizbowl. Guerrilla tournaments differ from regular quizbowl tournaments in that they do not charge outrageously high entrance fees (or any entrance fees at all), and the host school does not edit packets or provide extensive staff. Participating teams moderate during rounds they are not playing. [First coined by Richard Mason to describe Caltech's Quesadilla One. Quesadilla One was possibly the first true guerrilla tournament, although the BASQUE tournament a year earlier had no centralized editing, and other tournaments such as BYU's Perpetual Motion 1-5 had charged no entrance fee.]

Gunfighter reflexes n.

1. Quality or skill demonstrable by being the first to hit the buzzer when an easy clue reveals the answer to everyone at once. 2. A way to make simple speed sound glamorous. A person with gunfighter reflexes is a gunfighter and a question where everyone slaps their buzzers at once is a gunfight. After winning a buzzer race, it may be appropriate to rapidly draw imaginary six-shooters and make gunshot noises while blasting away at an invisible target.

Hentzelism n.

1. Act of giving answers in a correct but esoteric form, especially in a language other than English, e.g. the title of a foreign work in its original language, or the name of a foreign city in the language of its inhabitants. 2. Act of insisting on the correct pronunciation of a foreign name or word. 3. What Jordan does to piss off all the people who don't know German/Russian. [From R. Hentzel.]

Imaginary Points n.

See epsilon points. [An imaginary number, i, is the squareroot of -1, and is thus not "real", but does have practical significance.]

In the car prep.

1. Things we learned ~ Information which appears in practice questions read in the car on the way to a tournament, and then reappears in questions at the tournament. This occurs more often than you might expect. 2. Math 1a dictation ~ As an extension, it may be applied to homework done via dictation from / reading aloud to the driver of the car because no one else can drive. 3. They're in the back seat ~ A woeful expression describing books directly mentioned in a tournament that you meant to read on the way to a tournament but didn't.

Is there anything it can't do? esp. Science fiction, is there anything it can't do? interj.

Expression denoting wonder when knowledge derived from a seemingly useless hobby, e.g. science fiction, enables one to answer questions about apparently unrelated subjects, e.g. T. S. Eliot, bumblebees, Indonesia. [Derived from a comment on donuts by Homer Simpson.]

Jordan's Widow n.p.

Irene Ying's title, despite Jordan Boyd-Graber being quite alive. Coined by Xiao Peng one night while Irene was complaining about taking over Jordan's work: "When I look at you working for quizbowl, I think you're like Jordan's widow, and quizbowl is this company he left behind, and you have to take care of it."

Judge me by my size? interj.

A thing to say after successfully using the Force, q.v. [A truncated form of "Judge me by my size, do you? Hm? Mmmm. And well you should not. For my ally is the Force. And a powerful ally it is."]

Knee-JERK n.

Someone who pays no attention to the rest of the question but only buzzes because of a single word response, e.g. always saying Erasmus when hearing the word "folly." Of course, when this strategy results in a correct answer, the knee-jerk usually attributes the response to a deep and intimate knowledge of the subject matter.

Less than epsilon n.

Zero, esp. zero points. [A truncated form of "less than epsilon, where epsilon is an arbitrarily small positive number."]

Maribeth Current Events n.

Things that happened after 1920.

Maribeth Pop Culture n.

1. Subject matter (as of a question) alleged to be "popular culture", but in fact too excruciatingly highbrow and/or obscure to have any popular appeal whatsoever, e.g. Italian film of the 1930s. 2. The pop culture of previous centuries. 3. In a weaker sense, anything that Maribeth might write a pop culture question about. This includes senses (1) and (2) but might also include such things as "All My Children".

Olive Garden n.

1. A chain of mid-range eateries required by federal law to play Sinatra every fifteen minutes. 2. An employer of overly polite but unintelligent waiters. 3. Due to embarrasements, pranks, and other sundry affairs, places that Jordan and Irene cannot return to in several California cities.

Our Fearless Leader n.p.

Someone who can't seem to find the way to ... well, anywhere we want to go. See Quizbowl Travel Uncertain Principle. [Title bestowed by Kevin Costello upon Jordan Boyd-Graber; note that Jim Karnesky does not receive this title just yet]

Our Friends in the North n.

Collective term for the Berkeley/Stanford quizbowl crowd. [Also the title of a gritty 1997 BBC drama.]

(Modified) Prussian. n.

(jacked from the UC Berkeley Lexicon) A quiz bowl format developed by Mike Usher. It involves every player playing for himself on tossups. If a player gets a tossup, he has a chance to either take the bonus on his own or to nominate a champion to help him out on the bonus. If the player takes the bonus on his own, whatever points he doesn't get on the bonus accrue to the moderator. If the player elects to split the bonus with a champion, he and the champion split the points evenly. The goal is to beat the moderator, as well as the other players. Due to the prevalence of greed, the moderator frequently wins.

Quizbowl Drinking Game n.

The act of getting most of the team in one room, writing questions while getting tipsy. Has resulted in destroying at least one keyboard.

Quizbowl on $5 a Day ex.

Due to being excessively broke, the Caltech Quizbowl team was being extremely stingy during NAQT nationals. We stayed with friends and relatives instead of hotels, ate only free food, etc. Upon hearing the details, Eric (of Stanford) commented, "I thought Motel 6 was roughing it ... you guys are like Quiz Bowl on $5 a day."

Reservation n.

1. What is required to use a room at Caltech. 2. What, when asked, we always claim to have. 3. What, thanks to the proximity of Jordan's room to SAC 65, we can always procure (thanks to the online system) faster than anyone can check otherwise. 4. A feature for which we hope Donut never adds timestamps.

Résumé question n.

Dull and inferior type of question (beloved by dull and inferior question writers) in which the early clues detail the birth, education, and career appointments of the person who is the answer to the question; esp. when these facts are not particularly unusual, interesting, or remarkable in any way. "Born in 1804 in Wittenberg, he was educated at Halle and Gottingen. In 1831 he became a professor at Gottingen and in 1843 he became a professor at the University of Leipzig. For 10 points--name this physicist who has a magnetic unit named after him."

Ride the pony v. (also ride the horse)

A strategy for achieving some points on a bonus where the team has no idea on the actual components, but has a general idea. For example, guessing "Grant" on every question on a "Civil War Generals" bonus. Problems emerge when: 1. The answer is correct, forcing the team to come up with another guess. 2. None of the answers are the chosen "pony," causing extreme consternation.

Rule of 1975 n.

Etiquette rule according to which no team member shall directly or indirectly suggest that he or she was not alive in 1975. Violations of the rule are often associated with claims not to have seen some TV show or movie, e.g. the original run of Star Wars. This rule is intended to spare the sensibilities of those team members who are closer to death. Sometimes stronger forms are proposed, e.g. the Rule of 1970.

Science fiction n.

See is there anything it can't do?

Some neurons were firing interj.

Expression uttered when an answer is bizarrely wrong, yet bears a resemblance to the correct answer which shows that the answerer was in some sense on the right track, e.g. an answer of "Richard Daley" when the correct answer is "Daley Thompson."

Smacking the locals around v.

Playing NTN at Domenico's in Old Town Pasadena.

Stupid human tricks n.

1. A popular Letterman segment. 2. Kevin Costello performing a mental math calculation like inverting a 3x3 matrix in his head.

Taiwan n.

As per the official Caltech Quiz Bowl "one China plicy," an integral part of China that has no claim to administrative sovereignty. Get over it, Grace.

Quiz Bowl Travel Uncertainty Principle n.

1. You can know where you are or where you're going, but you can't know both simultaneously. [A corollary of the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle which states that you can know momentum or position, but not both] 2. Jordan's rationale for not knowing what interstate we are on. Also see Our Fearless Leader.

Using the Force ger.

Correctly answering a question through apparent pure luck, blind instinct, or supernatural intuition without any actual knowledge, e.g., "I have no idea who Sardanapalus actually is; I was just using the Force." After successfully using the Force, it may be appropriate to make a light-saber noise or ask, "Judge me by my size?" (q.v.) If someone else successfully uses the Force, it may be appropriate to say, "The Force is strong in that one."

Vulture v.

To buzz in and answer a question after the other team has unsuccessfully buzzed, but before the question is over, when other team members know the answer but are waiting for the question to end. Apparently called a "swoop" or "pickoff" in other parts of the country. Either the offender or a teammate may acknowledge vulturing by (1) uttering a croaking birdcall; (2) imitating a member of the French Foreign Legion dying parched in the desert; (3) loudly noting that most land animals are not capable of subsisting entirely on carrion, but the vulture is able to fly and thus search a wider expanse of territory for the dead and dying.

Vulture n.

One who vultures.

Yao Ming n.

A really tall Chinese guy who became the idol of a nation.

Yo-yo award n.

Hypothetical award given to the player with the most inconsistent scoring record at a tournament, as measured by PPG standard deviation or some similar statistic. See Feast or Famine.