by A. J. Jacobs
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 "un-fucking-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 of two. 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 totally 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.
I've got to have exceptional will like Ben Hogan. No matter what, Julie and I are going to have a child--and if we can't biologically, then we'll battle through the paperwork and adopt one.
Holland Tunnel
Here, some good, calming information. One less thing to worry about. The Holland Tunnel--which connects Manhattan and New Jersey and which, by the way, was not named for the country, but for an engineer, Clifford Holland--has a remarkable ventilation system. It refreshes all the air in the tunnel in ninety seconds. Remember my mortal fear of carbon-monoxide-induced brain damage? Well, it still lingers, twenty years later, and I tense up whenever we drive through a tunnel. So this information is good stuff.
Hollywood
This was founded by a man named Horace Wilcox, "a prohibitionist who envisioned it a community based on his sober religious principles." Well, I know that a lot of Hollywood types are in AA. But other than that, Mr. Wilcox would probably not be overjoyed.
hoop skirts
In the 18th century, some hoop skirts were an astounding eighteen feet wide. And satirists talked of hoop skirts that were twenty-four feet wide. Frankly, I think those satirists need a little punching up. Adding six feet just doesn't do it for me. Maybe they could have gone with twenty-eight or twenty-nine feet. Then they'd be funny.
Hoover, Herbert
We were walking along Columbus Avenue, and I asked Julie to quiz me today, to see how my memory was doing. She gave me Gibraltar. I had a good response: it's the only place in Europe to have wild monkeys. She nodded her head, sort of impressed. She asked me about Herbert Hoover. I replied he was president--and an orphan. Raised by an uncle. She asked me about Halifax. This one was a little foggier.
"It's a town in England," I say.
"Noooo," she says. She looks at me, concerned.
"Is it one of the Carolinas? A town in North or South Carolina?"
"No."
"I don't know. Where is it?"
"It's a town in Canada. You didn't know that?"
Oh, yes. I knew that, I tell her.
When I got home, I looked up Halifax. There were three separate entries for Halifax. There's a Halifax, England; a Halifax, North Carolina; and a Halifax, Canada. I had just filled my brain up with the two piddling Halifaxes and neglected the big Halifax, the one everyone knows. My mind is working in strange ways.
hummingbird
Hummingbirds beat their wings up to eighty times a second, which is astounding. But even more astounding: they are extremely territorial, and have been known to chase off crows, hawks, and even humans. They've got what my father's mother called chutzpah. These birds the size of grapes take on humans--and win. An inspiration to tiny organisms everywhere, including my wife's favorite actor.
humor
You had to be there. That is what I've learned from the history of humor. If you don't believe me, try to tell this Japanese joke from the 1700s in the locker room: "The boss of the monkeys orders his one thousand monkey followers to get the moon that's reflected in the water. They all try and fail. Finally, one of the monkeys gets the moon in the water and respectfully offers it to the boss. 'This is what you asked for,' he says. The boss is delighted and says, 'What an exploit! You have distinguished yourself!' The monkey then asks, 'By the way, Master, what are you going to do with the moon from the water?' And the master says, 'Well, yes...I didn't think of that.' "
I tried it on my fellow Esquire editors Andy and Brendan, who coined a new name for me: the Great Conversation Stopper.
hunting
People sure do love to kill animals. Kings of Central European countries seemed especially fond of the practice. The Britannica says that John George II the ruler of Saxony in the 17th century, killed an astonishing total of 42,649 red deer. "He refused the crown of Bohemia not for political reasons but because Bohemian stags were smaller than Saxon ones"--and he erected a fence between Saxony and Bohemia to keep out those stu
nted Bohemian mammals. Louis XV of France was another fan of the chase: in 1726, he spent a total of 276 days hunting. He worked fewer days than George W. Bush.
I've never been a fan of hunting myself--for one thing, I don't like loud noises or sports that require a lot of equipment. Also I try to avoid gutting mammal innards in my leisure time.
But in my bleaker moments, I feel like hunting is the most appropriate metaphor for my quest. I'm worried I'm not much better than John of Saxony. I'm just trying to fill my wall with the stuffed heads of deer and lions and bears, though in my case, my wall would be filled with facts about lions and bears (e.g., bears are not true hibernators--their body temperature doesn't dive and they are easily awakened. You want true hibernators, think bats and hedgehogs and squirrels.) Is this all a macho accumulation?
hurling
My friend Jamie has invited me to come with him to the American Crossword Puzzle Tournament. This is an invitation I wasn't expecting. I met Jamie years ago--he was my editor at Entertainment Weekly--and I thought I knew his secrets. I knew he had seen and enjoyed the Spice Girls movie. I knew he had a handful of stalkers--he writes a funny sex column for a local magazine that inspires overzealous fans. I even knew he liked atonal jazz. But his crossword puzzle hobby--that was new to me.
Jamie tells me he's been a fan for a long time. He's spent dozens of Saturday nights at home deciphering clues. "It's easier than meeting people," he tells me, "and more enjoyable." (He pretends to be a misanthrope.)
I decide to accept his invitation. I'm no crossword expert. I've sampled maybe three in my life--nothing against them, I just never got in the habit, the same way I never got interested in racquetball or methamphetamines. But I did have that glorious victory with Julie and Frederick Austerlitz, so I figure this will be an excellent test of newly acquired knowledge. I'll teach these pencil-pushing dorks a thing or two.
