--- In quizbowl_at_yahoogroups.com, walter_shandy <no_reply_at_y...> wrote: > > > Once again: A tossup that no one gets is, empirically, too hard. > Whether > > people SHOULD know the answer is irrelevant. No, it's not irrelevant at all. Sometimes people don't get questions that they can reasonably be expected to get, and sometimes those questions are just too obscure. There's a difference, though in this case I'm guessing that this question really was too obscure. > Empirically? Perhaps. But in the absence of documented evidence > that people do not know who Hroswitha was, you can't expect someone > to just intuit that nobody will. Hroswitha is pretty major -- at > least as major as some authors who have become QB canon. I don't know much about Hroswitha, or, in fact, any other medieval female writer, but I do know what the word "major" means and it seems to me that we have differences there. Whatever Hroswitha is, she's not "major." Someone who is a major figure in history is someone who is reasonably well known of by educated, well-read people. I am willing to bet not-insignificant amounts of money that most educated, well-read people have not heard of Hroswitha. Dostoevsky is major. King Henry VIII is major. Albert Einstein is major. Hroswitha is minor; judging by the general mood in this forum, she's very, very minor. So minor, in fact, that it appears that no one who has not studied medieval literature knows who she is. Whether or not she is a significant literary figure of the Middle Ages is up to others to decide, but her introduction into the canon should have been better thought out. Ironically, after this debate, everyone will know who Hroswitha is. I would refer to this phenomenon as "expansion through sucking" because a lame answer has now been added to the canon by the very virtue of its awfulness. I would also submit that the Hroswitha tossup wouldn't have been nearly as bad had it been surrounded by quality questions. Instead, according to those who have read the packet, it seems to be just the last bad question in a whole packet of bad questions. A hard question will be far more palatable when surrounded by well-written gettable questions, and if the UCI packet had had that, I bet there would have been far less criticism.
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