As dead as a station in the Australian outback, the unstaffed railway station in Denton, Manchester has got to be Britain’s most redundant railway stop. One train per week stops at Denton on Saturday mornings. But be warned: Denton is a request stop, so it may be necessary to flag the train down using your arms. To make matters worse, there are no return tickets to Denton—the weekly service runs only in one direction. You can leave, but you won’t be coming back again in a hurry.
Bedrooms are a relatively modern concept: before the eighteenth century, beds simply stood in the living room, being used as couches by day. Four-poster beds were by-products of this dual function, for they allowed curtains to hang around the bed during the night to keep out draughts and to offer privacy.
Needless to say, 21st-century houses come equipped with both bedrooms and insulation, making the four-post element of these beds redundant. Yet they remain popular, with almost all furniture shops offering various forms of curtained, elaborate and ornate four-poster beds.
We all know that capital letters indicate the start of each sentence. But why do we need to mark the start of a sentence when the humble full stop has already marked the end? The limited use of capital letters in text speak or in casual emails indicates that capitals are a superfluity to the language, rather than a necessity. In fact, the majority of writing systems—including Georgian, Arabic, Hebrew and Chinese—do not have an upper and lower case system.
The in- prefix of inflammable means ‘into’, rather than ‘not’, leaving us with two words—flammable and inflammable—with exactly the same meaning. But not only is the word inflammable needless, it is also dangerous. When labelling commercial and industrial products, ‘flammable’ is considered to be the safer choice because of the potentially disastrous consequences of misinterpreting ‘inflammable’.
To add to the confusion, the word most frequently used to convey the opposite meaning to flammable is nonflammable, but noninflammable also exists.
The system request key (SysRq), which now shares its place with the Print Screen button, has sat on the top row of keyboards since the very first PCs were made. Way back then, it was included on the keyboard in case anyone wanted to reach the main operating system without interrupting the running software. Nobody ever did. It is a redundant fixture, serving no purpose in Windows or any other operating system.
Ties once served a sociological purpose: archaeological evidence in China suggests that the ancient elite hung fabric around their necks as a means of marking their elevated status. But now that mankind has invented other ways of exhibiting wealth—the Ferrari parked in the driveway, or the penthouse in Park Lane—ties no longer serve such a function. So dangling coloured material from around the neck does what, exactly?
The pointlessness of the tie is perhaps beaten only by that sixteenth-century folly: the neck ruff. At their most extreme, starched ruffs could reach a foot or more in diameter and had to be propped by specially made wires. Fortunately, they fell out of fashion as quickly as they entered it.
[at the Cold Weather Training Center in the Austrian Alps]
Doctor: Should we go straight to the frozen penis?
[The three groan]
Doctor: He'd been walking with it hanging out of his trousers.
Richard: How do you walk with your willy hanging out?
Doctor: Which comes down to organisation and teamwork.
Richard: Well, it's more than disorganised-
Jeremy: It's a good job he didn't do it on the London Underground—he'd be arrested for permanently getting on public transport with it hanging out...
Jeremy: I admire Hammond for doing what he's doing. I admire all Arctic explorers. But I think the time has now come for the world to say let's see how easily we can get to the top of Everest. Let's see how easily we can get to the North Pole. I think we could forge a career as the world's worst explorers. [voiceover] Surprisingly, James was ahead of me on that one.
James: What would really make it nice would be a gin and tonic. Would you like one?
Jeremy: What?
James: A gin and tonic.
Jeremy: Yes, I would like a gin and tonic, but we can't have a gin and tonic because we're in the Arctic Ocean.
James: I'll make you one.
Jeremy: What?
[James produces the necessary items and ingredients]
Jeremy: Hahahahahahaha! You've got gin!
James: I have.
Jeremy: And because we're in international waters there's no drink-drive laws.
James: Exactly.
Jeremy: Got any ice? (looks around him)That's a stupid question, isn't it?
James: Could you just slow down so I can slice the lemon for the gin and tonic?
Jeremy: Now this is Arctic exploration.