by A. J. Jacobs
I get my collection over with quickly. Being smarter doesn't necessarily help with this task. Though I will say that, having read about the Bible, I believe that, technically, what I did does not qualify as the sin of Onan. The sin of Onan means that you "let your seed fall to the ground." Since mine falls into a specimen cup, I think I'm safe.
I notice the door has a little yellow smiley face with the motto "Thank you for coming." Some angry collector has scrawled in pen next to it: "Very tacky!" I actually thought the smiley face was a nice touch. On the other hand, the layout of the fertility office could use some work. I have to drop off my specimen cup and its 3 x 108 swimmers at a nurse's station--which requires me to do a perp walk right through the waiting room filled with women reading magazines and chatting on their cell phones.
I can't believe how much work it is to have a baby. Or more specifically, how much work it is for me and Julie. It's baffling to me that all our friends actually got pregnant by having a pleasant bit of sexual intercourse. And here I am, smuggling my bodily fluids around like a felon.
Kierkegaard, Soren
Man, did the world's favorite 19th-century Danish philosopher have some problems. Self-loathing, depression, guilt, anger, father hatred. Kierkegaard was haunted by the fact that his dad--when he was a struggling tenant farmer--stood on a hill and solemnly cursed God, an act that Kierkegaard believed doomed the entire family. But that wasn't even Kierkegaard's biggest issue. In my opinion, that was his inability to say no.
Julie is always telling me I have this problem as well. I end up in all sorts of unpleasant scenarios because I don't want to offend anyone. "A nude whitewater rafting trip in the Yukon in February? Sure, sounds fun." When I was single, this translated into an inability to break up with women. I'd go out with a totally inappropriate partner for eight months too long because I couldn't figure out how to break it off. Things got so bad, I went to see a shrink, a Freudian woman who resembled Janet Reno, to learn how to confront situations like an adult. After about a dozen sessions, I stopped going. I canceled by leaving a message on her machine at 2 A.M. and then wrote her a letter that said: "Thank you for helping me with my issues about confrontation. I think we made a lot of progress." I was aware of the irony.
I thought about this as I read about poor Soren. In his late twenties, Kierkegaard fell in love with a young girl named Regine, and the two got engaged. But then, soon after, he had second thoughts, aware of the age gap between them, not to mention the gap in their mental states. Kierkegaard wrote in his diary, "I was a thousand years too old for her.... If I had explained things to her, I would have had to initiate her into terrible things, my relationship with my father, his melancholy, the eternal night that broods over me, my despair, lusts and excesses, which perhaps in God's eyes were not so heinous."
So not the perfect match, obviously. Kierkegaard decided to try to break off the engagement. Problem was, Regine wasn't hearing it and clung to the skinny philosopher's side. So Kierkegaard resorted to a breakup strategy worthy of sitcom: he dropped her, then staged what the Britannica calls "an elaborate show of caddishness" to preserve her reputation. Nice, but way over the top.
king's evil
A swelling from tuberculosis, once thought to be curable by the touch of royalty. In England, Charles II is said to have touched more than ninety thousand victims. Another reason to be thankful I'm not a king in the 18th century. Because of my germ phobia, I hate shaking hands with anyone, even healthy people with no visible swellings. When I greet friends I do an air shake, which is like an air kiss, but with handshakes--it's a trend I'm trying to start. So to sum up monarchy: Unlimited power and untold wealth--good. Fondling TB sores--bad.
kissing
Julie's in the kitchen, chopping carrots for a vegetarian chili.
I sneak up beside her, press my nose against her cheek, and inhale deeply.
"What are you doing?"
"Just kissing you the way the Lapland people of Scandinavia kiss."
I press my nose against her cheek again and suck in through my nostrils. She stops choppng the carrots and looks at me. It's the look a dog might get if it kept trying to hump her leg.
"Uh, they also do this kind of kissing in southeastern India. So it's not just the Laplanders."
"I'm kind of busy here, honey."
Knox, John
Knox was a 16th-century Scottish priest who wrote a work with the hard-to-forget title First Blast of the Trumpet Against the Monstruous Regiment of Women. Unfortunately for him, Elizabeth I came to power just as the work was published, and Knox got himself a monstrous shellacking.
First Blast is quite a title, but it's not my favorite so far in the Britannica. My favorite title comes from a book written by Robert Fitzroy, captain of the HMS Beagle, the boat that Darwin took to the Galapagos. It's called Narrative of the Surveying Voyages of His Majesty's Ships Adventure and Beagle Between the Years 1826 and 1836, Describing Their Examination of the Southern Shores of South America and the Beagle's Circumnavigation of the Globe.
I haven't read Narrative of the Surveying Voyages of His Majesty's Ships Adventure and Beagle Between the Years 1826 and 1836, Describing Their Examination of the Southern Shores of South Americana and the Beagle's Circumnavigation of the Globe, but I hear it's quite good. I wonder if my sister-in-law Alexandra's book club might want some copies of Narrative of the--okay, I'll stop cutting and pasting Mr. Fitzroy's title. I spent a good minute or so punching it into my computer, so I thought I'd get the most out of it. But you get the idea: It's long. Almost as long as the entire text of the Mahabharata (the Hindu sacred book that comes in at a hundred thousand verses).
And yet, I have to like it. No cutesiness or coyness or irony or false advertising. Fitzroy doesn't try to dazzle you with wordplay, he just tells it like it is. You know exactly what you're getting. I've noticed a lot of old-time titles do this. There are a lot of Narratives of and True Stories of that go on for a paragraph summing up the book. And when I write another book, I'm going to call it Occasional Reflections on Several Subjects, which is the title used by Anglo-Irish chemist Robert Boyle for his book of moral essays. I love that one, too. It's the best one-size-fits-all title in the history of publishing.
Kyd, Thomas
A freelance writer I know pitched me an article today. He wants to write about a fringe director who remade Raiders of the Lost Ark--but had kids playing all the starring roles. A prepubescent Indiana Jones, an eight-year-old Nazi, and so on. I file it under "Eerie Echo of the Past," number 341. It's the exact same concept as children's companies, groups of children who put on plays by the likes of Shakespeare and Ben Jonson and Thomas Kyd in the 1600s. They came to be loathed by adult acting troupes, because audiences apparently preferred seeing cute miniature humans recite iambic pentameter to watching their fully grown counterparts.
Still, the article's not right for Esquire. I send him a brief rejection e-mail. I decide to spare him the Shakespeare stuff. The poor guy is already getting his idea squashed; he probably doesn't want a history lecture too. In general, I'm trying very hard to be more selective in what knowledge I impart. I've started to realize that not everybody appreciates brilliant 17th-century parallels.
L
La Rochefoucauld, Francois 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, Rene
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 com
e 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).
Rene 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 thin
king 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.
