Hello, and welcome to another episode of No Such Thing as a Fish,
a weekly podcast coming to you from the QI offices in Covent Garden.
My name is Dan Schreiber, and I am sitting here with Anna Chazitzky,
Andrew Hunter Murray, and James Harkin, and once again,
we have gathered round 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 fact this week is that there is a special language in Papua New Guinea that is only used when gathering nuts.
It's very weird.
So can you only use it when gathering nuts?
Literally picking the nut, or when you're on your way to pick the nut?
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.
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 a thousand 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,