Stock clue

Stock clues are clues that have been used since approximately the days of the GE College Bowl radio show, or at least the 1990s. For whatever reason, these clues are still recycled today as lead-in clues by inexperienced teams who don't know any better, and passed through the final editing stage by editors who should know better. Stock clues being used as lead-ins is a form of transparency.

Stock clues are often closely related to biographical clues. They can also result from excessive name-dropping of a term for continuous years.

This list of stock clues is provided in the hope that people stop using them as lead-ins, or perhaps ever.

List of Stock Clues and Their Immediately Buzzable Answers

Literature

• "Her childhood friend Truman Capote": Harper Lee (also, anything involving Dill being based on Capote).
• "Planned to attend Juilliard, but lost her tuition money on a New York subway train": Carson McCullers
• "wounded at the Battle of Lepanto": Miguel de Cervantes
• "refused the 1926 Pulitzer Prize": Sinclair Lewis

History

• "tutored by Bairam Khan": Akbar
• "exiled in Mongolia": Molotov
• "cup-bearer to the king of Kish": Sargon the Great
• "wrote The Army of the Future" Charles de Gaulle

Science

• "son of a sailmaker": Victor Grignard
• "Ideal Percent Alcohol Content of Vodka": Dmitri Mendeleev
• "apprenticed to a bookbinder": Michael Faraday
• "Advocated high doses of Vitamin C": Linus Pauling
• "Pre-exponential factor": Arrhenius equation
• "Goldman-Hodgkins-Katz Equation": Nernst equation (still a good middle clue)
• "1% of the world's energy": Haber-Bosch Process
• "Kearns-Sayre Syndrome": Mitochondria

Fine Arts

• "research on aldehydes": Aleksandr Borodin
• "The Contest Between Harmony and Invention": The Four Seasons (or Antonio Vivaldi)
• "Taught at an all girls school": Gustav Holst

Religion/Mythology/Philosophy

• "Originally studied mechanical engineering": Ludwig Wittgenstein
• "Collections of these include the Blue Cliff Record and Gateless Gate": koans

Social Science

• "written on a napkin": Laffer Curve
• "thesis on Indo-European languages": Ferdinand de Saussure
• "pin factory": The Wealth of Nations
• "worked in a machine shop": Otto Rank