Project info for GDM

Share This Created 23 Feb 2000 at 15:07 UTC by mkp, last modified 23 Feb 2000 at 15:15 UTC by mkp.



During the past 100 years careful study of the human mind has led to the establishment of the well known IQ standard for measuring intelligence. However, the idea of having a well defined scale for cleverness is by no means new.

In Denmark, a medieval intelligence measure is still widely in use: The cereal bowl.

Albeit being much more coarse grained than the modern IQ, the cereal bowl provides a simple measure to distinguish less clueful individuals from intelligent ones.

A common phrase in danish is ``He sure didn't invent the cereal bowl'', which indicates that a person is severely intellectually challenged.

Futhermore, the term ``reinventing the cereal bowl'' is somewhat similar to the english saying ``reinventing the wheel''. Since the cereal bowl represents the ultimate in intelligence, reinventing it is generally considered stupid and an utter waste of time.

Although slightly overshadowed by the use of IQ in scientific texts, the cereal bowl measure is still widely used in the spoken danish language. For instance a particularly clueful scholar might be described like this:

``Hey, you sass that hoopy Linus Torvalds? There's a frood who really knows where his cereal bowl is.''

Statements like this also bear proof that although the cereal bowl notion is several hundred years of age, it is indeed adaptable to the modern language. Thus, there are no signs of the cereal bowl disappearing from danish within foreseeable future.

License: GPL

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