LET US NOW praise famous men! Judge Seddon Cripps, to be precise: a senior circuit judge who also presides over the immigration services tribunal. Last week our hero interrupted a fraud trial in St Albans with a question. What, he asked, is a sofa-bed? When a witness tried to explain, he asked for clarification: “How can a bed be turned into a sofa?” He listened, it seems, attentively. Earlier on he had been fazed by the word “futon”. Modern bedsit furniture is not His Honour’s strong point.

The standard response is to giggle and haul out other judicial questions that have delighted us over the years: Lord Irvine’s ignorance of B&Q; Judge Dunn’s confusion over Pelé; Judge Aglionby who asked “What is a Teletubby?”; and others who at various times have asked enlightenment regarding Gazza, Oasis, Jordan, Linford Christie’s lunchbox, the Rolling Stones and even Barbie. My response differs: it consists of three rousing and un-ironic cheers. Such judges, in their fearlessness and lack of self-preserving subterfuge, show the way to all of us. No human quality is more intelligent, honest and useful than a willingness to ask when you don’t know. We should be less afraid of it.

After all, why should a judge, paid to know the law and reflect on public ethics, be expected to riffle through the style supplements and waste good thinking-time on marshmallow media drivel about soap actors, sporting “heroes”, Jude Law’s nanny, pop musicians and TV for infants? Why should he? He’s not a contestant in some feeble-minded quiz like The Weakest Link, which places cultural dross on the same level as lasting fact. Of course judges need to understand the serious aspects of modernity — like a multiracial society or the weakened status of marriage — but there is no reason to feel embarrassed if they don’t know who Jade from Big Brother is. Indeed sometimes the very question — asked perhaps with sly ingenuity — is the trigger for a clarification of thought. A bewigged figure solemnly inquiring “Who is Madonna?” gives the court and the nation a chance to stop and weigh how important the answer actually is, sub specie aeternitatis.

But better than that, the willingness of judges to ask potentially ludicrous questions about futons should give the rest of us courage to ask more straight questions and stop pretending, out of pure embarrassment, that we know things. When I was a Today reporter in the 1970s, a favourite game was bursting into the office at the start of one’s shift saying: “What are we doing on the earthquake?” (Or floods, or siege or any drama which had not actually happened.) The more insecure and self-conscious the day’s producer, the more likely he or she was to bark: “We’re on it!” and sidle surreptitiously over to the telex machines a few minutes later to find out what we meant. Really good, confident, experienced producers would play no such game. They would just say tiredly, “What earthquake?”, and the jokester was rumbled.

Nodding stupidly, pretending to understand, is one of the curses of this age of jargon and information-overload. Comparing notes at the weekend, several people admitted to having once nodded at some impenetrable fusillade of business-school Birtspeak and not realised what it meant until the tumbrils actually rolled. In medicine, an experienced audiology expert bravely stopped a meeting to ask what on earth a “CarNet” was (Clinical Audiological Research Network). Another senior NHS worker spent some time listening baffled to a debate about “2WWs”, who turned out to be patients who had waited a fortnight; he also bemoaned the fact that someone jabbering about “PID” could be discussing pelvic inflammatory disease in one ward but a prolapsed inter-vertebral disc in another. It was, they agreed, always worth swallowing natural embarrassment to admit that you need a translation.

In other fields the peril of not asking simple questions — either out of laziness or embarrassment — is immense. If the Prime Minister had demanded to know what kind of chemical /biological weapons Saddam could deploy in 45 minutes — battlefield or long-distance? — much trouble might have been prevented. It was admitted in February that he did not ask. How many other times have ministers not had the face or the directness to ask their civil servants simple questions? As an SNP minister recently said with scorn in the context of the Holyrood debacle, the rule is “civil servants do not tell and ministers do not ask”.

We should be bold; ask the obvious question even if it makes us feel stupid. Children do, boldly asking “Why does water, which is clear, make rainclouds look black?” or “Why do I have red hair and not my brother?”. Even that natural curiosity is often discouraged now, thanks to overcrowded classrooms, harassed teachers and a narrow-railed curriculum. One of the most sinister interviews I ever read was with a woman who said her four-year-old definitely had attention deficit disorder and needed Ritalin, because he was “always asking questions, then when you answer he thinks of another, it goes on all day”. She got her drugs, and her child got the message that there’s no point asking.

Too many of us wander the modern world in a daze of vague incomprehension. It makes us vacuously accepting of lies and half-truths, and parlously slow to demand explanations when we find we have swallowed a fib. Why didn’t the police immediately contradict those stories about Mr de Menezes vaulting the barrier? Why didn’t the nursing home correct the nonsense about the Piano Man playing long beautiful sonatas, when it now turns out he could barely hit a note? Does truth not matter?

So here’s a mantra for the new season. Next time someone says something incomprehensible or odd, and you’re the only person in the room not nodding, ask. There is no disgrace in being innocent of Teletubbies, Gazza, futons or “co-localised intersourcing”. The disgrace lies not in asking, but in bluffing. The judges show us the way.

Join the Debate

Send your e-mails via www.timesonline.co.uk/debate

Times Recommends

• Britain doesn’t need a dose of shock therapy
• Why the sea eagle has no right to land here
• Let older women have a voice at the BBC