Pierre is the State Capital of South Dakota. Here in the UK that cannot be considered Universal Knowledge. It’s something I learnt over 25 years ago, when I memorized all 50 States and their Capitals. Apart from dedicated quizzers, how many people would be able to name all 100 places? Very few, I suspect.

Back in 2016 I posted this mnemonic piece, based on the way that I memorized the 50 States and their Capitals. As I wrote back then, “Most of us have heard of each of the 50 US States, but some of the Capitals are rather obscure”. Pierre, Bismarck, Juneau, Montpelier: these place names do not appear regularly in my day-to-day life.

The prompt for this Word of the Week piece is a question in a recent episode of TV quiz show “University Challenge”:

What is the only US State Capital whose name does not contain any of the letters in the name of the State itself?

The answer, as you can probably guess based on what has gone before, is Pierre (South Dakota).

One of the contestants answered correctly. I wondered how long it would have taken me to work it out from scratch. I could have done so eventually, working through all 50 states, but probably not quick enough for a quiz show.

An alternative question about which capitals contain all of the letters that are in the name of the state would be easier to work out: Indiana (Indianapolis) and Oklahama City (Oklahoma).

This quiz question is likely to stay in my mind, especially as I have chosen to write a Blog Post about it. I will be interested to see when it comes up again. Pierre can sit alongside Forty (which I wrote about in this piece last year) and Belsize Park (the only tube station whose name contains the letter “Z”) as answers to quiz questions that you can work out if given enough time, but if you’ve heard the question a few times the answer should come to you immediately.