Stock clue

Not to be confused with the food-themed side event There Will Be Stock Clues.

The term "stock clues" originally referred to clues that lack academic importance and yet routinely occurred in quizbowl questions. Most examples of stock clues are biographical clues (especially in science questions) or trivia.

Stock clues are extinct in modern good quizbowl (as of the early 2010s) due to high standards for academic importance. Despite stock clues being a historical relic, the term is still used and has become an ambiguous anachronism.

Etymology

The English adjective "stock" means "routinely used" or "cliché." In particular, a stock answer or phrase is one "that is always used and so is not really useful." See also stock character.

The chiefly British English (or Commonwealth English) phrase "chestnut" or "old chestnut" may also refer to stock clues.

History

Stock clues proliferated in pre-modern good quizbowl when inexperienced question writers and editors who didn't know any better recycled clues from past questions. Players often learned stock clues through osmosis or deliberate memorization, but not real knowledge.

By the early 2010s, awareness of and conformance to the core values of good quizbowl grew to the point where stock clues became obsolete.

Semantic drift and misuse

Once stock clues no longer existed, the signifier "stock clues" had no signified. It gained other meanings due to growing ignorance of quizbowl history and the definition of the English word "stock."

Now, the term "stock clues" is often misused to mean any clue that a player remembers from previous questions, regardless of how important it is, how frequently it has appeared before, or where the clue is placed in the question.

	important (academic, relevant)	not important (trivial)
proportionate (deserved)	important clue, famous clue
excessively frequent		stock clue

Important clues used in excess of their actual importance are not stock clues, because they fail the first criterion of being unimportant.

Although semantic drift is part of the natural evolution of language, help communicate clearly by not saying "stock," a term that is now doubly no longer useful because: 1. "stock" in the original sense is likely misapplied because stock clues are extinct in modern quizbowl; 2. it is ambiguous, so people won't know which sense is meant. Instead, try: common, stale, overused, misplaced, easy, frequently used, popular, often mined, well-trodden, reused, trendy, canonical.

Examples

This is a list of some "old-style" stock clues that may have existed in pre-modern quizbowl.

• "wounded at the Battle of Lepanto": Miguel de Cervantes
• "son of a sailmaker": Victor Grignard
• "researched the ideal percent alcohol content of vodka": Dmitri Mendeleev
• "apprenticed to a bookbinder": Michael Faraday
• "written on a napkin": Laffer Curve
• "worked in a machine shop": Otto Rank

Perhaps they could be considered second-order stock clues themselves, having been invoked so often in questions or discussions about stock clues.

Non-examples

• "begins with a clarinet glissando": Rhapsody in Blue
• "thesis on Indo-European languages": Ferdinand de Saussure