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.

Semantic drift and misuse

Once stock clues no longer existed, the signifier "stock clues" had no signified. It latched onto other meanings as ignorance of quizbowl history and the definition of the English word "stock" grew.

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.

Examples

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

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
• "purchases Little Shirley Beans": Holden Caulfield

General History

• "tutored by Bairam Khan": Akbar the Great
• "exiled in Mongolia": Vyacheslav Molotov
• "cup-bearer to the king of Kish": Sargon the Great
• "wrote The Army of the Future": Charles de Gaulle
• "accused of having a gold spoon in his mouth": Martin Van Buren
• "said 'Because it's 2015'": Justin Trudeau

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
• "1% of the world's energy": Haber-Bosch Process
• "Offered presidency of Israel": Albert Einstein

Fine Arts

• "research on aldehydes": Aleksandr Borodin
• "Taught at an all girls school": Gustav Holst
• "Ira Gitler called his playing 'sheets of sound'": John Coltrane

Religion/Mythology/Philosophy

• "Originally studied mechanical engineering": Ludwig Wittgenstein

Social Science

• "written on a napkin": Laffer Curve
• "worked in a machine shop": Otto Rank

Non-examples

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