The Know-It-All

by A. J. Jacobs

  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 IS 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 …

  Whoa, nelly! Wait just an Ivy League second. Robert Frost as a graduate of Harvard? I flip back to the Fs, because I distinctly remember that—yes, it’s true, right there next to his picture—Robert Frost dropped out of Harvard. Attendee, yes. But graduate? I think not, you nutty gold-embossed volume.

  This is a very exciting moment for me. In fact, it’s embarrassing how exciting this is for me. I find mistakes rarely—maybe once every four hundred pages—but when I do, I feel like an astronomer spotting a comet (perhaps even the Tago-Sato-Kosaka comet, which, by the way, passes by earth only once every 420,000 years). I feel like the middling student with a C average who has somehow busted the smartest kid in the class as he was writing an equation on the blackboard. I still remember fondly when I discovered that the entry on Dvur Kralove, a Czech city, had a backward quotation mark.

  And this find is disputable, but I throw it out anyway because it made me proud: The Britannica was discussing grammar, and mentioned something called an “infix,” which is a cousin of the suffix and the prefix, except that it occurs inside a word. The Britannica stated that the infix occurs in Greek and Tagalog, but not in English. I somehow summoned up from my college linguistics course the fact that there is, actually, one infix in the English language: “fucking.” As in “in-fucking-credible,” or “unfucking-believable,” or “Bri-fucking-tannica.” It may not be polite English, but it still counts, at least according to my liberal college professor.

  Since it’s the work of humans—even if they are high-IQ humans—the Britannica has a long history of mistakes. I came across a 1999 Wall Street Journal article by Michael J. McCarthy that gives an entertaining peek at the foibles of fact checking such an immense product. The first edition was particularly riddled with misinformation and half-truths, such as this entry on California: “California is a large country of the West Indies. It is uncertain whether it be a peninsula or an island.” Ha! Even your average movie star knows this is absurd, at least after you explain to him the definition of a peninsula.

  The
EB has since fixed California but other errors have popped up, as readers have been delighted to point out. Apparently, there’s a whole group of people—and by people I mean losers—who also comb the Britannica looking for mistakes. The Journal article reports that, for years, the Britannica bought into the widely held myth that the emperor Caligula appointed his horse to the Roman Senate. After researching classical sources at the suggestion of a reader, the Britannica nixed the reference. Caligula’s steed never held government office, though he did have an ivory manger and a marble stall, which isn’t too bad. Another victim of close inspection: the story of Martin Luther nailing his ninety-five theses to the church door. Turns out he just passed the pages around. The Britannica also caused a hubbub in Scotland recently when its CD-ROM mistakenly reported that the country had no parliament. A British newspaper headlined its article about the gaffe “Encyclopedia Twit-annica.” Tough stuff. Of course, not all complaints have merit. One misguided reader wrote the editors an outraged, obscenity-packed missive claiming the Ostrogoths—an obscure medieval ethnic group—did not assimilate, as the Britannica claimed. Perhaps he believed he was an Ostrogoth-American.

  To be fair, the Britannica is admirably anal in its attempts at accuracy. The fact-checking department got a photocopy of Houdini’s birth certificate to prove he was born in Budapest, not Wisconsin, as he had claimed. And in 1986, they barely avoided a massive factual meltdown. That was the year a disgruntled laid-off editor tampered with the database, inserting a reference to his boss as Rambo and replacing all references to Jesus with Allah—a real howler. When the Britannica threatened legal action, the editor fessed up to all his unauthorized tweaking.

  Still, for all their thoroughness, bloopers slip through. And thank God. It’s good to know that even the brainiest among us, even the weightiest institutions, make mistakes. Just to be sure on the Robert Frost situation, I run him through Nexis. He did drop out—but later got an honorary degree. Huh. I decide that still does not make him a graduate. Though I could be mistaken.

  Hawthorne, Nathaniel

  I may have known quite a bit about Hawthorne at one point in high school. As an adult, I know only the very basics: (1) He wrote The Scarlet Letter. (2) That letter was A. (3) The book had a sad ending. (And I only remember that last one thanks to Demi Moore. When she turned the book into a movie and slapped a happy ending on it, she justified it by saying, “Not many people have read the book.” Which, in my case, was sadly true.)

  Turns out that Hawthorne had an unhappy life, even for a 19th-century writer. His dad, a ship captain, died at sea when Hawthorne was four. Hawthorne was weighed down with guilt because one of his forefathers was a judge at the Salem witch trials. He had a complicated friendship with Herman Melville that ended badly—Melville thought Hawthorne was too distant, so Melville wrote a poem satirizing him. Hawthorne was bitter about being fired from his job at the customhouse. And toward the end of his life, “he took to writing the figure ‘64’ compulsively on scraps of paper.”

  I reread that sentence several times. That’s what it says, right there in the encyclopedia—Hawthorne compulsively wrote the number 64 on scraps of paper. There’s no explanation, no mention of why he wrote 64 instead of, say, 65 or, even crazier, 63. I’m thinking some ambitious grad student needs to explore this topic and write a thesis called “The Scarlet Number: Hawthorne and the Eschatological Implications of the Repeating 64.”

  In the meantime, this strange fact stays with me. Maybe it’s because I’ve got plenty of my own compulsions. I don’t have any special affinity for the number 64, but I do like to swallow in pairs. If I take a bite of a peach, for instance, I make sure to gulp half the pulp in one swallow, but save half of it for a second swallow. Or there’s my radio ritual. When I turn off the radio, the last word I hear has to be a noun. No verbs, no prepositions, no adjectives—I need a noun, preferably a good, solid noun, something you can hold in your hands. So I’ll stand over my shower radio, dripping, pushing the power button on and off and on and off till I catch Nina Totenberg saying something like “bottle” or “car.” Only then can I get out of the shower and get dressed.

  I’d prefer to kick these tics altogether, but since that’s not going to happen without some time-consuming therapy, I’m delighted to learn about other people’s compulsions. So reading the encyclopedia is good for me. It’s packed with personality quirks, and we’re not just talking the compulsions of John Q. Obsessive. We’re talking about the compulsions of the most brilliant men and women in history.

  head flattening

  This is just what it sounds like: the ritual deformation of the human skull, as formerly practiced by some Pacific Northwest Indians. The desired flat-head effect is achieved by fastening the infant’s skull to the cradle board. Some Indians from the Southeast practiced another method: placing a bag of sand against the infant’s forehead.

  I actually remember head flattening from back in the Bs. It made a cameo in the article on body modifications and mutilations, which, if I may reminisce a bit, was one of the weirdest entries in the Britannica. The variety of ways that humans have found to distort their bodies is truly remarkable. It makes your jaw drop, assuming the jaw hasn’t been deformed by some ritual.

  Over the centuries, cultures have put bands on various parts of the skull to squeeze it into an hourglass shape. Humans gone to town on their own teeth, chipping them, putting pegs in them, blackening them, carving relief designs into them. The Mayan Indians considered crossed eyes beautiful, and induced the condition by hanging an object between the baby’s eyes.

  The tongue has seen some rough times, getting slashed (some Australian tribes) and having a cord of thorns pulled through it (the Aztecs). Labia have been elongated. Necks have been stretched like a mound of pasta dough (the Padaung woman wear a fifteen-inch brass neck ring that pulls four vertebrae into the neck).

  The breasts have been compressed (in 17th-century Spain), distended (in Paraguay)—and systematically enlarged by the tribe members of the modern United States.

  That was a jolt. I was reading along, thinking to myself how mystifying these primitive cultures are with their need to squeeze and pull the human body into contorted shapes. And then, bam—a sentence about gel implants and boob jobs. We’re not so different. We’re just another of the world’s cultures with our own weird fetish—one that happens to involve boobs the size a female blue whale (the largest recorded animal, weighing in at two hundred tons, with a heart of fifteen hundred pounds).

  Heisman, John

  The man who gave his name to the Heisman trophy was a famed football coach for Georgia Tech. During the off season, however, Heisman supported himself as a Shakespearean actor, a job that inspired him to use Elizabethan polysyllabic language in his coaching (for example, he called the football a “prolate spheroid”). Why aren’t there any Shakespearean football coaches nowadays? Now all we get is Bill “the Tuna” Parcells and his love of Henrik Ibsen. Okay, we don’t even have that because I made that up. My point is, John Heisman is proof—just in case you needed it—of how far we’ve slid into dumbness.

  heroin

  Heroin was first developed by the Bayer company. That’ll whisk your headache away faster than a couple of dozen aspirin. Take two syringefuls and call me in the morning. Or late afternoon.

  hip-hop

  “Influential early deejays include DJ Kool Herc, Grand Wizard Theodore and Grandmaster Flash.” I’ve heard of Grandmaster Flash, but Kool Herc? Grand Wizard Theodore? Holy shit—I don’t recognize either. Let me tell you: it’s a sad, sad day when the Encyclopaedia Britannica is hipper than you. I’m annoyed I’ve never heard of those guys. Back in high school, I was actually an early fan of rap music, thanks to the influence of my friend Eric, who called himself M. C. Milano. (Get it? White on the outside, black on the inside.) But obviously, we weren’t listening to the authentic stuff, because we missed Kool Herc and Grand Wizard Theodore.

  And yet just as I was feeling pathetic and to
tally un-phat, I read the Britannica’s assertion that Public Enemy and Wu-Tang Clan “were among the popular purveyors of rap during the 1980s and 1990s.” Purveyors of rap? Now that’s got to be the whitest phrase I’ve ever read. Yo, what up, dawg? Just hanging with my posse, drinking my Chivas, purveying some rap.

  Hogan, Ben

  Hogan was the most famous golfer from the forties. The Britannica says: “His exceptional will enabled him to play winning golf after an automobile accident in which he was injured so severely that he was not expected to walk again.”

  What a sentence.

  I need this sentence. I need some positive overcoming-hurdles stories. I’ve got hurdles aplenty in my own life, the tallest of which seems to be whatever is preventing Julie and me from getting pregnant. We try not to talk about it too much, but it’s always there, permeating our apartment. The apartment has three bedrooms, one for us and two for the kids that don’t exist. So those empty rooms are an ever-present and expensive reminder of our infertility. Oh, and then there’s that little apocalypse hanging over our head: it looks like we’re going to war with Iraq, and God knows what’s going to happen.

  So thank the Lord for Ben Hogan and his exceptional will. And thank the Lord for all his fellow overcomers. There are heaps of dismaying stuff in these volumes, but there are also these incredibly inspiring stories compressed down to a paragraph or a single sentence. It’s like watching a particularly sappy Robin Williams movie in ten seconds.

  The great Greek orator Demosthenes suffered from a speech defect—he stammered and had terrible pronunciation—but he overcame it by speaking with pebbles in his mouth. John Fielding—one of the founders of the London police—was blind but could identify three thousand thieves by their voices, sort of a primitive but effective fingerprinting system. It’s like chicken soup for the soul, the microwave version. Francis Ford Coppola got interested in directing when he was laid up with polio and put on puppet shows for himself. Chester Carlson, inventor of the Xerox machine, was turned down by more than twenty companies before he finally sold it. And on and on. Did you know that Che Guevara had asthma? So you shouldn’t let wheezing stop you from leading a violent revolution.