by A. J. Jacobs
L
La Rochefoucauld, François de
Perhaps the greatest writer of maximes in French history. Among them: “Crimes are made innocent and virtuous by their number.” “Virtues are lost in self-interest as rivers are lost in the sea.” You’ve got to like maximes, the 17th-century literary equivalent of bumper stickers.
Lacoste, René
Some things in this world have gotten better, but one thing has definitely gone south: sports nicknames. I first noticed it when my fellow Esquire editor Andy “Hammering Homunculus” Ward mentioned this in the pages of our magazine, but the Britannica drives the point home.
What happened to names like Cool Papa Bell (a baseball player in the twenties)? Or the Bounding Basque (a tennis pro) or the Galloping Ghost (Red Grange)? Why can’t we come up with nicknames like the Game Chicken (an 19th-century prizefighter)? Nowadays, we’ve got A-Rod and Shaq and “Hey, dildo!” They’ve got all the spunk and appeal of farmer’s lung (a pulmonary disorder resulting from dust inhalation, related to pigeon breeder’s lung and cheesewasher’s lung).
René Lacoste was from the golden age of nicknames. A Parisian tennis player in the twenties, known for his methodical style, he helped lead the French to six Davis Cup victories. They called him the Crocodile. The American press gave him his reptilian nickname, partly for his tenacity and partly because he won a set of fancy crocodile luggage in a bet.
I hadn’t known about Lacoste the tennis player. But I did know the shirts, which the Britannica discusses at the end of the entry: Lacoste, it says, founded a line of “sportshirts and other items of apparel with his ‘crocodile’ emblem (although somehow changed to an alligator).”
This is odd, I thought. What happened? Why did the crocodile suddenly switch to the alligator side? Did Lacoste’s marketing department discover a big difference? The public finds alligators intelligent and sexy, but crocodiles lazy and untrustworthy?
I should have kept reading my Britannica. The Lacoste alligator is not a profound epistemological mystery along the lines of “Is there a God?” or “What is the definition of evil?” or “Why is David Pelzer allowed to publish books?” But I kind of wanted to find out the truth. Growing up, my mother had outfitted me with dozens of Lacoste shirts (often paired with bold plaid pants that would embarrass a Connecticut dentist), so there was a personal angle. Plus, I had been reading for four hours straight, and my eyes were about to start bleeding.
I riffle through Julie’s bureau drawer and find her periwinkle Lacoste shirt. I study the emblem. I know from my trusty Britannica the difference between alligators and crocodiles: in crocodiles, the fourth tooth in each side of the lower jaw projects outside the snout when the mouth is closed. Is there protrusion? I can’t tell, because the reptilian bastard has his mouth open. Great. Next, I check the Lacoste Web site. The Web site does indeed call the logo an alligator—but is suspiciously mum on its crocodile past. Hmm. Have I stumbled onto a cover-up?
I decide I need to do some old-fashioned reporting; I need to talk to someone at Lacoste. I call up the New York headquarters, and am connected to Gigi, a nice Southern-accented woman in charge of media relations. Before I can finish asking my question, she stops me: “It’s a crocodile.”
But the Web site says…
“Well, then the Web site needs to be fixed,” she says. “It’s definitely a crocodile. It’s always been a crocodile. It’s a croc!”
This is very disconcerting for a man who’s trying to know it all. I’m up to my snout in conflicting sources. If I can’t know for sure about the silly Lacoste icon, what does this say about knowledge as a whole? My best attempt at a conclusion: the Lacoste emblem is a crocodile, but Americans think of it as an alligator. I’ll have to be satisfied with that. I’m just hoping Joe Camel isn’t a llama.
Langley, Samuel
A Connecticut-based inventor who finished a heavier-than-air machine nine days before the Wright Brothers. When he launched it from a catapult, it got snagged and crashed into the Potomac River; if not, many think he would have gone down in history as the first. How many times a day you reckon he thought about that snag? Probably every hour for the rest of his life.
Langley belongs to another heartbreaking niche of historical figures, just as sad as George Darwin and his band of loser relatives: the close-but-no-cigar crowd. One snag meant the difference between centuries-long fame and almost total obscurity. Langley can commiserate with Elisha Gray, who filed papers with the patent office on February 14, 1876, for his telephone device—just a couple of hours after Alexander Graham Bell filed his. Gray really should have rearranged his schedule: first, the patent application, then the grocery store.
language
Today I’ve got Sunday lunch at Grandma and Grandpa’s. Once a month, my parents and I drive up to my grandparents’ house in the suburb of Riverdale, where we spend the afternoon eating chicken and roast potatoes at the largest table I’ve ever seen. It’s huge. My grandfather told me that it was once owned by an obscure Bonaparte, but he could have told me that it used to serve as the main dance floor at the Copacabana, and I would have believed him.
This brunch, we’ve got two special guest stars, my aunt Jane and her eleven-year-old son, Douglas. Jane’s widely acknowledged to be the egghead in my mom’s family—a graduate of Harvard, a Fulbright scholar, a speaker of most languages on the European continent (not counting Votic, a Finno-Ugric tongue that has fewer than a hundred remaining speakers). Douglas is equally brilliant. I’ve never met anyone who takes more after-school classes than he does—German classes, chess classes, fencing classes, and classes in something called Lego robotics. I’m still not sure what Lego robotics is—I guess it has something to do with building robots out of Lego blocks. But it’s nice to know, if this journalism thing doesn’t work out, there is a career to be had as a Lego robotics instructor.
When we arrive, we sit at Grandma and Grandpa’s enormous antique walnut table. Down at the other end, Douglas, who has brought his laptop along, is busy playing a word game. “It’s just so good to have everyone here!” says Grandma. “Look at my two grandsons! My two smart grandsons!” Douglas nods and gets back to the word game.
The rest of the family talks about the usual fare—jobs and holidays. Fortunately, the acoustics are good enough that I can hear what my family is saying, even though we’re separated by an expanse of dark wood.
Grandma starts passing around the bowls of food. “This is less potatoes than usual,” she apologizes.
Douglas suddenly stops pecking away on his computer and looks up.
“Hold it!” he says. “That’s incorrect!” Douglas takes out a piece of paper and pencil, checks something off, then leans across the table and slides the paper toward Grandma.
I pick it up. It’s something called a “grammar citation.” It’s got a list of grammar infractions like “free gift” and “ ‘impact’ misused as a verb.” Douglas has checked off a box that says “ ‘fewer/less’ abuse.” Apparently, grandma should have said “fewer potatoes than usual” instead of “less potatoes than usual.”
“Douglas has gotten into grammar,” explains Jane. “He’s an officer in something called the grammar police.”
“Word police,” corrects Douglas.
“Isn’t that something,” says Grandma, chuckling.
“He gave a citation to his teacher last week,” says Jane.
“What’d she do?” says Grandpa.
“She said, ‘Between you and I.’ ” replies Douglas. He shakes his head, no doubt feeling both sorrow and pity at her pronoun abuse.
“Tell them some other things you’ve learned in your books,” prompts Jane.
Douglas clicks pause on his word game to give us some nuggets. “Well, everyone’s heard of antonyms and synonyms. But there’s also capitonyms. That’s when the meaning of the word changes according to whether it starts with a capital letter.”
I’m not understanding.
“Like Herb and herb,”
says Douglas, “or Polish and polish.”
“I never knew that,” my father says.
“Good for you, Douglas,” says Grandpa.
It’s true. That’s a damn good fact. I decide I better try to match my eleven-year-old cousin. I search my mental file for some English language trivia.
“Did you know, in Old English, the gh in the word ‘light’ was not silent? And in some areas of Scotland, they still pronounce it licht.”
No one seems particularly blown away by my brichtness.
“Also, there’s something called miranyms,” continues Douglas, unfazed “That’s the word in between two opposites.”
The adults around the table are confused.
“Like when you have ‘convex’ and ‘concave’, the miranym is ‘flat,’ ” says Douglas, patiently.
Right now, I’ve got a mixed bag of emotions. On the one hand, I’m proud. Here we’ve got a bona fide prodigy, a fellow athlete of the mind, and he shares my blood. It’s quite possible that he really does have the genius IQ that I deluded myself into thinking I had back when I was his age. On the other hand, I’m jealous and threatened. Whenever I try to correct people or throw out bits of trivia, I feel about as welcome as an assassin bug at a Sunday barbecue (the assassin bug, by the way, can shoot a stream of blinding saliva up to twelve inches). When Douglas corrects people or throws out trivia, he gets a pat on a head and a smile. Why do know-it-alls turn from cute to obnoxious as soon as their voices turn and they sprout body hair?
“Or with ‘hot’ and ‘cold’, the miranym is ‘room temperature,’ ” continues Douglas.
“Well, on behalf of myself, I find that very unique,” I say. I’ve decided to switch my strategy. I won’t compete with Douglas on facts; I’ll drive him nuts by mauling his beloved English language. Mature, I know.
Douglas digs out his grammar citation, checks off a couple of boxes, and slides one over to me.
“What’d I get one of these for?” I say.
Douglas gets out another, checks off “dangler” and slides it over.
“But I didn’t say nothing wrong!”
Douglas looks at me. He’s caught on. “You’re just trying to get them, aren’t you?”
“No I ain’t.”
“What is the longest word you know in the English language?” Douglas challenges me.
“ ‘Smiles,’ ” I say. “Because there’s a mile between the first and last letter.”
Backed into a corner, I had whipped out a joke I learned when I was Douglas’s age. Douglas shakes his head.
“What about ‘pneumonoultramicroscopicsilicovolcanoconiosis.’ ”
I’ve got to give it to him. He knows his English.
“It’s a disease you get from the silica dust when volcanoes erupt. I know how to spell it too.” He begins spitting out the letters in a rapid monotone staccato. “P-n-e-u-m-o-n…” Game over.
Las Vegas
Mormons were the first settlers. Not sure Joseph Smith would approve of today’s topless showgirls and liquor. Though he would like the volcano at the Mirage. Everybody likes the volcano.
Lascaux Grotto
A noted French cave with dozens of Paleolithic paintings, including one of a bird man with an erect phallus. I realize halfway through the article that I’ve been to this cave, though, of course, I’d forgotten its name. (Thanks, Ebbinghaus.)
Julie and I stopped at the Lascaux grotto on our bike tour of southern France a couple of years ago. This was one of those bike tours where you pay a third of your annual salary to huff up hills with a bunch of other helmeted Americans, most of them dermatologists, though with a sprinkling of periodontists to spice things up. We’ve been on a couple of these tours, and it’s always an exercise in humiliation for me. I never train enough beforehand, and end up spraining my knee or ankle, which means I get shuttled from stop to stop in the company van, sandwiched in between the spare parts and picnic supplies. So that’s bad enough. But then there’s always the eighty-two-year-old retired dermatologist, who rode forty miles without breaking a sweat, who will ask, “How’s your knee doing, young fella?” By which he means to say, “What the hell is wrong with you, boy? I’ve got hemorrhoids older than you, and I still pedaled up those hills, you nelly.” At least that’s the way I interpret it.
Anyway, I remember pulling up to the Lascaux grotto on our fancy bikes with their—no exaggeration—forty-two gears. (The first successful bicycles in the 1860s, incidentally, had only one gear, and riding them was such a bumpy experience, they were called “bone shakers.”) At the cave entrance, we were met by the skinny French anthropologist who was to be our tour guide. He gave us a five-minute course in human evolution—he seemed particularly interested in telling us about humanoid cranial capacity, which has grown over the years from 800 cubic centimeters to 1350 cubic centimeters. He then led us through the tunnel to the prehistoric art gallery.
“Regard the outline of this bull,” said our French anthropologist.
The dermatologists all nodded and murmured.
“The horns on this bull are very well defined,” he said.
“Where? I can’t see it.” I said.
“There,” he said, pointing. “Those lines.”
“Sorry—where, exactly?”
“Don’t worry about him,” Julie said. “He only has 800 cubic centimeters of cranial capacity.”
Our guide laughed his French laugh. “Très bien,” he said. “Très bien.”
I never did figure out which were the horns on that bull, but all the talk of humanoid evolution reminded my tiny brain of something that has haunted me since I was a kid. If humans manage to survive another few thousand years, they’ll continue to grow larger and larger craniums. Which means no matter how smart I am, no matter how much I know, how much I read, how much I absorb, how much I think, I’ll still be a member of the species that couldn’t do differential calculus in their heads. “Oh, look at the way Homo sapiens solved Fermat’s last theorem! And it took them only three hundred years. Isn’t that cute!”
Which makes me question my current venture. Even if I’m smarter by the end and write a brilliant book about the experience, I’ll still be doing the 21st-century equivalent of scrawling bird men with erect phalluses on cave walls.
last words
Another reason I’ll never make it into the Britannica, in addition to the fact that I’m not an Arctic explorer or a Swedish botanist: I can’t talk like these guys. I don’t have the conviction, the passion. This is clearest to me when I read about the last words of great men. Like Georges Danton, a leader of the French Revolution who was beheaded for opposing the extremist faction. When he was about to be guillotined, Danton told the executioner, “Show my head to the people. It is worth the trouble.” As opposed to what I would have told the executioner: “Holy fuck! Holy shit!” Or if you want to get technical, “Holy merde!”
Danton has plenty of company. Men like Giordano Bruno, an Italian philosopher and astronomer in the late 1500s, who went beyond the Copernican heliocentric view of the universe, instead arguing that space contained a multiplicity of worlds like the earth. For this, the Catholic Church gagged him and burned him at the stake. When the judges read Bruno his sentence, he told them: “Perhaps your fear in passing judgment on me is greater than mine in receiving it.” How can he be that cool under pressure? He’s just been told that he’s going to be flambéed, and he responds with a noble, coherent, brilliant quotation. Again, I believe my reaction would be, “Listen, I was just kidding about that multiplicity of worlds stuff. Just joking around. Only one world. I take it all back.”
learning
There is a short section on IQs in the learning section. It says that high IQs “are strongly associated with the 35-yard dash and balancing on one foot.” This is one of the most strangely specific pieces of information in the encyclopedia. Why a thirty-five-yard-dash? I’ve never even heard of that. Why not a fifty? Why balancing on one foot? What about tether ball? Is that strongl
y associated with high IQ? Because that would make as much sense. Also, it seems totally counterintuitive; what happened to the stereotype of the sickly weakling genius? But most of all, it seems unfair. It seems wrong that nature makes people smart and fast and well balanced. Can’t nature divide those things equally among her brood? Since I don’t have the highest IQ—as evidenced by the Mensa test debacle—I should at least be able to be do that balancing crane stance in kung fu.
lector
I had to skip my morning Britannica reading today. A handful of the Esquire editors were required to show up at the ungodly (for us) hour of 9 A.M. to make a presentation to the magazine’s advertising staff. We are supposed to present our plans for Esquire’s future issues. Sounds relatively simple. Problem is, I’ve never been a great speech giver, and I’m moderately stressed out about my presentation.
I’ve been half hoping the Britannica would help me with my oratory. And the volumes are, in fact, packed with information on classical rhetorical devices. My favorite is one called “aposiopesis”—the deliberate failure to complete a sentence, as in “Why, you…” or “Why, I ought to…” (possible Business Idea: print T-shirts with the motto “Aposiopesis makes me want to…” and sell them to rhetorical scholars for a killing). But outside of sputtering fathers in fifties sitcoms and classical debate lovers, aposiopesis wouldn’t seem to be very useful in modern society.
I’m also a fan of inversion, the transportation of normal word order, as in the first lines from Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s poem “Kubla Khan”: “In Xanadu did Kubla Khan / A stately pleasure-dome decree.” There’s something great about that sentence—slightly disorienting, but majestic. Yet when I tried to write something with inversion for today’s presentation, it just came out weird: “In the pages of our magazine will appear women with little clothing.” I sounded like a perverted Yoda.