The Know-it-All: One Man's Humble Quest to Become the Smartest Person in the World

by A. J. Jacobs

  This is one of those times. As an editor, I have to read each of the articles in my section about forty-three times, until the sentences are sucked of all meaning and become weird little black marks on the page. Today's article--a man's guide to shining shoes, military style--has long ago passed into the nonsensical state. "Whorl"? That's a strange word, I think to myself. Whore-l. Wore-ell. Wooorl.

  But at least the Britannica reading has given me some new perspective on my job. It's given me awareness of the power of editing. I'm thinking, for instance, of the Ems telegram in 1870. Prussian chancellor Otto van Bismarck edited the report of a diplomatic meeting to purposely offend the French and start the Franco-Prussian War. I'm not saying that as an editor, I want to start a war, but it's nice to know I could.

  Or better yet, there's the Wicked Bible, which I learned about back in the Bs. This was an infamous edition of the Bible from 1631. The problem? It omitted the word "not" in Exodus 20:14, resulting in the commandment "Thou shalt commit adultery." See that? One small editing error and you get a whole country fornicating with their neighbors' wives.

  The average British peasant no doubt read the Wicked Bible and thought to himself: Okay, I'm not going to kill anyone. Won't worship a false idol. I'll make sure to have sexual congress with a married woman. Adultery. Now that's a commandment I can get behind. I wonder if God would rather I beget with Farmer John's wife or Parson Jebediah's wife.

  I'm curious whether the editors of the Wicked Bible--who, incidentally, were fined three hundred pounds for their error--made an honest mistake, or if they were playing an immature little practical joke with God's words. Maybe they thought of changing "Thou shalt not kill" to "Thou shalt not spill"--which would have caused a lot of very carefully poured glasses of tea and a few hundred more homicides--but settled on the adultery commandment instead.

  I ponder all this as I read Esquire's own shoe-related commandment: use "small circles that tighten the whorl." What if I changed "small" to "large" circles? I'd be sending hundreds of Esquire-reading men into their offices with improperly polished shoes. The power! I cross out the word "small" in the sentence, then stet it, newly aware of my responsibility.

  graham crackers

  Another in the thousands of forgotten controversies: Sylvester Graham, inventor of the graham cracker, was an eccentric health guru of his day who preached the virtues of hard mattresses, cold showers, and homemade bread. That last one got him attacked by a mob of outraged bakers.

  Grateful Dead

  I'm no Deadhead--I attended one Dead show, which I found about as interesting as the diagram in the fungi article charting the life cycle of bread mold. Still, I know enough about the classic stoner band to hold my own. I know about Jerry Garcia, LSD-laced punches, Terrapin Station, etc. And I certainly know more than my mom, who called me the day Garcia died to ask me if I knew who "Jerry" was. She came home to a barely coherent ten-minute message on her answering machine from a Deadhead at a gas station. He had just heard the news about Jerry and was apparently too bummed out to dial the phone correctly. In any case, I probably already know everything the Britannica has to say about the Grateful Dead.

  I start to read: "In folktales of many cultures, the spirit of the deceased person..." Well, I'm not even through the first sentence and I feel like quite the moron. I had always figured Jerry and Co. had come up with the name the Grateful Dead out of their acid-addled heads. But no, it's a sly allusion. Just so you know, the grateful dead folktale goes like this: A traveler finds a corpse of a man who was denied a burial because he had too many unpaid debts. The nice traveler pays for a burial, and goes on his way. Sometime later, the spirit of the corpse appears to the traveler in the form of an animal and saves him from some danger. Finally, the animal reveals himself to be the grateful spirit of the dead man and offers the traveler two free tickets to Red Rock and some really awesome hash brownies. Well, I embellished there at the end. But you get the idea.

  The Grateful Dead bait and switch is not unusual. I have a similar forehead-slapping revelation every few pages, and they always make me feel dumb as a box of extrusive igneous rocks. It's making me paranoid. I'm realizing there are dozens, hundreds, thousands of allusions I'm missing every day. They're hiding everywhere--in my medicine cabinet, on my bookshelf, on my TV screen--just waiting to make me look stupid. I'm not talking about Finnegan's Wake. I wouldn't feel too bad about missing a couple of Joycean allusions to druidic runes. I'm talking about everyday things like Lorna Doone, which I thought was a Nabisco cookie, but turns out to be a famous swashbuckling novel by Scottish novelist Richard Blackmore. Or corvette, which isn't just a car but a small naval vessel.

  Sadly, the Grateful Dead isn't even the first band name I learned about in the Britannica. I got the same feeling when I read about Eurythmics--which isn't just Annie Lennox's eighties band, but was originally an early 20th-century method of teaching music involving the tapping of feet and clapping of hands. Or about Supertramp, which came from the title of a William Davies book called The Autobiography of a Super-Tramp.

  I'm not up to N yet, but I figure 'N Sync is a revolutionary faction in the Ottoman Empire or something.

  grease

  Have I gotten across the mind-blowing diversity of everything? Whatever the topic--bottles, lakes, rodents--the Britannica seems to have hundreds and hundreds of varieties you never knew about. It's like discovering for the first time that there's a world beyond chocolate and vanilla, like walking into a Ben & Jerry's-type ice cream boutique to gaze upon its buckets of mango-loganberry sorbets, rutabaga fudge, and so on.

  Consider grease. I figured, as I venture most of my friends and family do, that grease is grease. But no, there's a whole marvelous, disgusting world of grease, with endless flavors to choose from. There's white grease, made from inedible hog fat; yellow grease, made from darker parts of the hog; brown grease, containing beef and mutton fats; fleshing grease, from the fatty material on pelts. And don't forget bone grease and garbage grease! And that's just your fat-based greases. You've also got your mineral greases, which consist of a liquid lubricant such as petroleum mixed with soap or inorganic gels. Delicious.

  There's always more diversity than you think. Even if you figure you've got a good grasp of a topic, the Britannica still manages to surprise you. Back in high school, I memorized the various ways of classifying organisms: kingdom, phylum, class, order, family, genus, species--a list I still remember thanks to the mnemonic "King Philip came over from Germany Saturday." So I was feeling pretty good until I got to the Macropaedia entry on biological sciences, where I was disturbed to find out that I knew exactly squat about taxonomy. In addition to my precious phylum and friends, there's also brigade, cohort, section, and tribe. There are also subphyla and superclasses and suborders. You get the idea. There's a lot of freaking diversity.

  Since I'm on the topic of taxonomy, let me talk about that for a second. Because here's something I've realized: the Britannica is doing for my mind what Julie has done for the rest of my life. By which I mean organizing it.

  As I've mentioned, Julie is the single most organized person in America. She lives in a world of four-color notebooks, Post-it notes, Magic Markers, hanging files, and three-hole punchers. She keeps an Excel spreadsheet charting every movie we've seen, and whether we saw it on DVD, tape, or in the theater. She has, in the past, kept lists of every outfit she's worn and every celebrity she's spotted (Monty Hall in a Tel Aviv hotel!). She still remembers our entire wedding list. One night a few months ago she spent twenty minutes breaking down the guests by first name: five Davids, three Michaels, et cetera. Our kitchen is a thing of beauty. On our counter, there's a three-ring notebook containing the menus of every restaurant that will deliver to our house, organized with color tabs listing the various cuisines. I once pointed out to her that the cuisines were not properly alphabetized; the Italian menus came before the Indian menus. She told me that she had organized it geographically, with the westernmost countries first, an
d then working east.

  At first, I laughed at Julie's organizing fetish. But slowly, over the last couple of years, without even trying, she's converted me. I now put things in folders and make endless lists. At work, I have a four-color notebook of my own, though I hide it whenever my boss comes by my office, since I feel it's embarrassingly unmanly, akin to the practice of putting smiley faces over i's. But it makes me feel better. Everything in its proper place. Life may be chaotic, and the second law of thermodynamics (discovered by Rudolf Clausius) will win out in the end, but we can fight it while we're here.

  But back to the Britannica. Thanks to my reading, I feel like my brain is becoming beautifully organized, filled with little hanging folders inside my skull. The Britannica has helped me organize the world into rational categories. It excels at taxonomy. Consider card games. There must be hundreds of them, but the Britannica points out that they all fall into one of two categories: those based on rank (such as bridge) and those based on combinations (such as poker). Maybe this is obvious, and maybe I'm a mouth-breathing moron, but I'd never thought of it. The world of card games suddenly seems more manageable--just two neat categories. Same has happened with cereals (which come in just four varieties: flaked, puffed, shredded, and granular), cakes, fires, types of abbreviation--all sorts of things. Even the subject of taxonomy itself has its own taxonomy, but don't get me started.

  Greek system

  I shelved my G volume long enough to join Julie at the movies. We chose Old School, a comedy about a bunch of thirty-something guys who start their own fraternity. (By the way, the first true frat was Kappa Alpha, begun at Union College in 1825.) I figured it was a good choice: it had the word "school" in the title, so it sort of related to my quest for intelligence.

  We get there half an hour early, as we always do. Usually, this is a smart idea--we avoid getting stuck in the front row and staring at the actors' manhole-sized nostrils for two hours--but in this case, it backfires in a spectacular fashion. As soon as we take our seats, a couple sits down behind us. I take an immediate dislike to the male half of the couple. He is young and cocky and loud as an emu in heat (they have a specially constructed trachea for noisy vocalizations).

  He feels it necessary to make a business call on his cell--he works for a record label, I surmise--during which he makes it clear that everyone in his office but him is a complete dimwit who couldn't operate a spoon. He hangs up, and whines to his girlfriend for making him come to this movie, which he knows is going to be stupid. He segues into a complaint about the Grammy Awards, which he has been pressed into attending, the poor man, and which he knows will be chock-full of morons and jackasses (well, maybe he is right about that one). He makes another cell phone call, during which he abuses another colleague. At which point his girlfriend makes--in my mind--the heroic suggestion that he stop treating everyone like peons.

  "You don't even know what 'peon' means," says the guy.

  "It's a servant or lowly person," says his girlfriend.

  Good for her, I think to myself. He thinks differently.

  "No, that's wrong," he says. "It has nothing to do with social position."

  "What is it then?"

  "It means a small person. Small in stature. Like a midget." He has a fine mixture of condescension, confidence, and ennui going.

  "Really?" says his girlfriend. "I could swear it's a servant."

  "Nope. The actual definition is 'small in stature.' People misuse it all the time."

  He is not joking.

  A peon is a midget? Is this true? I'm not up to the Ps, so I haven't yet read about peons and yet I am 96 percent sure that he is wrong. I am almost positive that the only thing small in stature is his cerebral cortex. But that 4 percent of uncertainty keeps me from turning around and telling him to please use his cell phone as a suppository device. Well, that and a lifelong aversion to confrontation. I flash to that scene in Annie Hall when Woody Allen pulls Marshall MacLuhan out from behind a display and gets him to personally dress down the offending gasbag. I don't need Marshall MacLuhan. All I need is a dictionary.

  When Julie and I get home from Old School--which turned out to be entertaining, though a little light on academic rigor--I look up "peon" in my dictionary. No mention of midgets, dwarves, hobbits, or Dustin Hoffman. "Peon" means farm laborer, servant, or poor person. The etymology is from Spanish peon, or peasant, which in turn is from the Latin word for a man who goes on foot.

  Another reminder that many of your everyday know-it-alls are complete and total imbeciles. I vow that when I become smart again, I will use my knowledge for good, not for evil--for enlightenment, not for condescension.

  Green, Hetty

  The Witch of Wall Street they called her. Not a beloved woman. Hetty lived in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, and through clever, and sometimes vulturelike, investments, she became the richest woman of her day. Also the cheapest. She wore shabby clothes, lived in a small apartment in Hoboken, and allegedly refused to hire a doctor to treat her son's hurt leg, a decision that eventually led to its amputation. Which she probably liked, since that meant fewer socks to buy.

  Personally, I've never been a cheapskate. I'm not a free spender, mind you, but I do buy decent clothes from midlevel chains like Banana Republic, would probably pay a doctor to save my son's limbs if the kid asked nicely, and unless the waiter spills cappuccino on my lap or tells me I look like Lyle Lovett, have always given a respectable, 15 percent tip.

  I'd say I'm right in the middle on the stinginess scale. Or I was. The Britannica has nudged me to be ever so slightly less cheap. For the last few weeks, I've started tipping more, in the range of 20 to 25 percent. That's one clear-cut--if very small--way the Britannica has changed me, probably for the better. I noticed the change after reading about marginal utility theory in the economics section. I probably learned all about marginal utility theory in college, but it didn't sink in, just as most things in college didn't sink in, unless they involved new and more efficient ways to get hammered.

  For those foggy on their microeconomics: marginal utility theory says that consumers differ in the amount of satisfaction they derive from each unit of a commodity. When a man with only seven slices of bread gets offered another slice, that one extra slice gives him a lot of happiness. But if a man has a couple of hundred slices of bread--enough bread to keep him waist deep in sandwiches for months--another slice of bread won't send his spirits soaring.

  In short, money means more to those who don't have it. I know this verges on common sense. But there's something about seeing it in the Britannica, expressed as a rock-hard economic law, that makes it more powerful to me. So, for instance, today, when I took a cab home in the snow, even though the driver tested my nerves by spending the entire time telling me about his favorite Dunkin' Donuts flavors (he's partial to crullers), I gave him $6 instead of the usual $5. I probably have more money than he does in my bank account, so the dollar will provide him greater happiness than it would me. A simple, logical conclusion. I know it smacks of noblesse oblige, of extreme condescension. But I don't care--it makes me feel better. Of course, the real right thing to do would be to give away 90 percent of my bank account, but what can I do? I like my Banana Republic khakis and my cappuccinos.

  Greenland

  A mystery solved. I've always wondered why Greenland--which is basically a massive sheet of white ice--is called Greenland. Turns out the country's name was coined by an Erik the Red, who had been banished from Iceland in 982 A.D. for manslaughter. He called his new home Greenland in order to entice more people to join him there. In other words, it was all a shady PR ploy by a felon. Shady, but smart. No doubt he got more takers than if he'd gone with something more accurate, like Bleakland or Depressingland or Youllstarveland.

  gymnasium

  The literal Greek translation is "school for naked exercise." Which made toweling off the stationary bike even more important.

  H

  haboob

  The haboob i
s a hot wind in the Sahara Desert that stirs up huge quantities of sand. The sand forms a dense wall that can reach a height of three thousand feet. Jesus. It kind of reminds me of my life. It's my own damn fault, but I've found myself in an information haboob. A dense wall I can't see out of. I'm not even a third of the way to those glorious Zs, and my life consists of work and reading, reading and work, with a little sleep and a bowl of Life cereal in between.

  I found a couple of minutes to call my parents for a brief catch-up. My mother spent most of the time telling me about her new crusade against multitasking. She hates when people check their e-mails while talking on the phone. It means they're not listening. "Uh-huh," I told her, "that's interesting," as I opened another of my AOL e-mails.

  Hanson, John

  He's sometimes referred to as the first president of the United States, thanks to his role as president of the Continental Congress in 1781. The first president wasn't George Washington--that's a good fact to mention at the bar, assuming you want to get kicked in the groin and have your glasses broken.

  Harrison, William Henry

  The ninth president--or the tenth if you count John Hanson--campaigned by passing out free hard cider to voters. The man basically bought his way into the presidency with booze. It backfired on him, though; he died a month into office.

  Harvard

  As if I needed reminding that everyone who is important in world history went to Harvard. My alma mater, Brown, isn't a bad school, but when it comes to famous attendees, I can only think of S. J. Perelman, a couple of Kennedys, and, uh, let's see, Kara Dukakis, the daughter of former presidential candidate Michael Dukakis, who lived in my dorm and whose roommate had very loud sex in the dorm shower. But Harvard, my God. Presidents aplenty, countless members of Congress, and pretty much every great American writer. The Britannica lists just some of the graduates who went on to literary fame: Henry James, T. S. Eliot, E. E. Cummings, Robert Frost, John Dos Passos...