Via both Nag on the Lake and TYWKIWDBI (with lots more on offer as well), we are introduced to a new tradition coming just ahead of the holiday break that has been issued to students at King William’s College near Castletown on the Isle of Man (and to make one feel worse—that’s college in the sense of a finishing school for pupils to eighteen years of age) since 1904 in the form of a quiz—now voluntary and shared with the broader public—of notorious difficulty that the students are expected to research over the break and present once classes resume in the new year.
The annual paper is introduced with the Latin motto: Scire ubi aliquid invenire possis, ea demum maxima pars eruditionis est—that is, “the better part of erudition is knowing where one can find anything.” The answers are not quite at one’s fingertips, and of course it’s impossibly difficult but nonetheless something I feel we ought to have been assaying all along. While a few of the clues and prompts did seem adjacent to something we knew, I really couldn’t get any of these right off the bat. How about you? The quiz can be found at the links above as well as on the college’s website—where the answers will be published next month.