Omnibus: The Know-It-All, The Year of Living Biblically, My Life as an Experiment

by A. J. Jacobs

  Some say that the African variety of gerbils carry the bubonic plague. The gerbil—of all rodents—does not need more negative publicity. There’s enough antigerbil Hollywood gossip out there.

  Gettysburg Address

  Like everyone with an IQ over two score and three, I knew the phrase “four score and seven years ago.” But I hadn’t read the rest of Lincoln’s speech since high school. The Britannica printed it in full, and for that I am grateful. It’s a beautiful speech, worthy of its reputation. Maybe it’s even too good. Lincoln says, “The world will little note, nor long remember what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here.” Whereas, in truth, the world did note and did long remember what Lincoln said, perhaps even more clearly than the details of the battle itself. Did I recognize that little irony in high school? I must have, but I had no recollection of it.

  Still, that wasn’t the most surprising thing I learned (or relearned) about the Gettysburg Address. I learned that despite being president of the United States, Lincoln wasn’t the main speaker that day. The big attraction was a two-hour speech by Edward Everett, a former Massachusetts congressman and president of Harvard, who was considered the greatest orator of his day.

  Poor Everett. He probably spent weeks working on his speech, tweaking it, trying it out on his wife. On the big day, he went up to the podium, gesticulated and orated and exhorted for two straight hours, mopping his brow, maybe pausing to take some sips of water, finishing with a big rhetorical flourish. He probably thought he blew everyone away. Then Lincoln goes up to the podium. Two minutes later, Lincoln steps down and Everett is a historical footnote, some guy who gassed on before the Gettysburg Address.

  Two hours versus two minutes. This is fantastic. Now I’ve got the perfect historical anecdote to back up my oft-mocked contention that shorter is better. Even 140 years ago, before attention spans shrunk to the size of the pygmy shrew (the smallest mammal, weighing less than a dime)—even 140 years ago, people liked the quick take. I’ve been on board this bus for years. I can’t sit still when a movie drags past ninety minutes. By the time the entrees are served, I’m ready for the check. I have such trouble watching even a half-hour sitcom, I’ve figured out a secret, which I share with you now: if you put on the closed captioning and press fast forward on the VCR or TiVo, you can still read all the dialogue. I read sitcoms in eight minutes flat. So now, when my colleagues at Esquire make fun of me for preferring the bite-sized item to the four-thousand-word magnum opus, I’ve got poor old Edward Everett in my quiver. But I’ve droned on about this topic enough. So let’s move on.

  giraffe

  “The voice has so rarely been heard, that the animal is supposed to be voiceless; but it is capable of low call notes and moans.” Good to know next time I’m playing with kids: “A cow says moo, a cat says meow, the giraffe says [imitate nonsexual low moan here].”

  glottal stop

  In phonetics, this is a momentary stoppage of the airstream, caused by closing the glottis. When those with Brooklyn and Cockney accents pronounce “bottle” as bah-ul, they are using the glottal stop. There’s a cruel little irony here—those who use the glottal stop can’t even pronounce it correctly. They say “glah-ul stop.” I wonder if the people who named the glottal stop did this on purpose, the scamps.

  Glyndwr

  A district in Wales. Please buy a vowel.

  Goethe

  Once in a blue moon (a blue moon, by the way, is caused by the dust in the air following a forest fire), I’ll read a section or two from the Britannica CD-ROM. Such was the case with the Goethe entry. I was at the office, I had my laptop, I had some rare free time at lunch—the temptation was just too great. I always feel a little cheap afterwards, as if I’ve had an affair with a younger, flashier woman. I feel like apologizing to my good old crinkly-paper-and-ink volumes when I get home, maybe bring them some flowers.

  But anyway, Goethe. Before the Britannica I knew, at least, the semi-proper pronunciation of his name. For a couple weeks in high school, I thought there were two people—a German writer named Gerta that Mr. Bender kept talking about, and some guy named Goethe (Go-eetha) I was reading about in my textbook. I figured out they were the same person when it turned out they both wrote The Sorrows of Young Werther. That was a tip-off even for me.

  What I didn’t know was Goethe’s curriculum vitae. When Goethe wasn’t busy explaining to people how to pronounce his name, he found time to be a critic, journalist, lawyer, painter, theater manager, statesman, educationalist, alchemist, soldier, astrologer, novelist, songwriter, philosopher, botanist, biologist, color theorist, mine inspector, and issuer of military uniforms.

  Well, at least he didn’t supervise irrigation schemes, that slacker. Oh wait. My mistake. He was also a supervisor of irrigation schemes.

  I was familiar with the phrase “Renaissance Man,” but Goethe is like a Renaissance Man with access to amphetamines. I can’t figure out how he fit all these jobs into a single life, much less the one-page single-spaced résumé that employers generally request. He makes Leonardo da Vinci look like a lazy bum.

  And he makes me extremely jealous. I’ve always wanted to be a generalist, to snack off the pupu platter of life without committing to any particular entree. In college, I specialized in introductory courses—intro to sociology, anthropology, math, whatever. By senior year, when my friends had all progressed to taking seminars like “The Semiotics of Ornithology in Cervantes’s Oeuvre,” I was sitting with a bunch of freshmen in “Psychology for Those Who Can Barely Speak English.” After college, I became a journalist partly because I could remain something of a generalist. That, and I had no other job offers. But even journalism is a long way from the life of a Renaissance Man. In my ten years in the business, I have yet to do any deep thinking on color theory and I rarely get asked to supervise an irrigation system.

  My dad wanted to be a Renaissance Man too, as evidenced by his overabundance of diplomas—diplomas he’d still be getting if my mom hadn’t put her foot down and made him get a job.

  My dad and I live in the wrong era, apparently. Everyone before the 20th century held at least one second job that had absolutely nothing to do with the first. Witness these actual job combinations I’ve read about thus far:

  poet/meteorologist

  lawyer/astronomer

  shipowner/sociologist

  lyricist/mollusk scientist

  typographer/puppeteer

  buccaneer/scientist

  Nowadays, not only do you have to specialize, but you have to specialize within your specialty. There probably aren’t any general mollusk scientists anymore. You have to be a Northeastern digger clam reproductive scientist. I suppose my encyclopedia adventure is an attempt to fight the forces of specialization, to reclaim the title of Renaissance Man. But I read about Goethe, and I realize I’d be lucky to have 4 percent of his range, which is sad.

  Did I mention that Goethe’s writings on science alone fill fourteen volumes? And that he also found time to write fifteen hundred passionate letters to Charlotte von Stein, the wife of a court official whom he had a crush on? I did know enough about Goethe from high school to remember that his Faust was all about the dangers of the quest for knowledge. But judging from his life, he had an insatiable thirst for knowledge and did just fine.

  gospel

  Sometimes my day job can be exhilarating. I’m thinking, for instance, of when vineyards send me free bottles of wine hoping for coverage in the monthly wine column. That’s always interesting. (By the way—in case any vineyard owners are reading this—Esquire’s address: 1790 Broadway, 13th floor, New York, NY 10019. I’m partial to sauvignon blanc.) But a lot of times, my workday can be boring. Dull as watching the grass grow, even grass with cool names like creeping bent grass or turkey beard.

  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 th
e 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, and 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).