The Know-It-All

by A. J. Jacobs

  All this was interesting enough, but it wasn’t the most notable lesson I took away from the Pythagoras sections (he is featured in his own write-up but also gets some ink in the philosophy entry). The most notable lesson came when I was reading about the Pythagoreans’ love of something called a gnomon. This square was constructed out of dots or pebbles, and was meant to represent certain numbers. The number 16, for instance, looked like this:

  A perfect square. Using the gnomon, the Pythagoreans figured out the square root. The square root of 16? That would be the four dots at the bottom of the square. In other words, the square root is actually a square root. The word “square” in the phrase is not just some coincidence.

  This was a revelation to me. Did everyone know this? Is this so startlingly obvious that I should I be ashamed I had never made the connection? Maybe. But I’m happy, at least, that I understand it now.

  I’ve come to realize that dozens of words and phrases have been detached from their origins, and the Britannica is helping me put them back together. “Cupboard” is a place to board cups. “Holiday” is a holy day. “Fiberglass” is a fiber made from glass. “Marshmallow” was originally made with the marshmallow root. I keep these facts in a computer file that I’ve labeled, wittily enough, “Duh.”

  Pythagoras was a loon and bean hater, but I’m glad I know about him and his perfectly sensible square roots.

  Q

  qa

  THIS WORD—A Babylonian liquid measurement—could be the best Scrabble word I’ve encountered in my life. So already the Qs are shaping up to be helpful. I’m very much looking forward to this Q chapter, which clocks in at a gloriously short thirty-nine pages. A little grapefruit sorbet between the rich courses of P and R. A few pages of Arab leaders followed by quail and quicksand, and boom, you’re done. A breeze.

  I will read every word of Q. I make that pledge because, well, I’ve been bad. In the last handful of letters—namely M, N, O, and P— I did some felony-level skimming. Not a huge amount, but enough to make me feel guilty. The Macropaedia entries on optimization, plate tectonics, plants, and Portuguese literature—those took the heaviest hits. Earlier in the alphabet, I’d breezed through some paragraphs, going too fast for full comprehension—but now I’ve progressed to another, more disturbing level of skimming. With this method, I unfocus my eyes and try to take in the whole page at once. I rationalize to myself that since I see every word on the page, even if I don’t process every word, I am still—by some definitions—reading every word. I know. Very Clintonian. I feel like going on TV and making an apologetic speech to the American public.

  So I’m here to reform myself in the Qs.

  Quaker

  Originally, the word “Quaker” was an insult. It was coined to make fun of the members of the Society of Friends for trembling at the word of God. As George Fox, founder of the society in England, wrote in 1650, “Justice Bennet of Derby first called us quakers because we bid them tremble.” Despite early derisive use, the Friends adopted the term themselves. Now, of course, it carries no negative connotation.

  I love these stories—the ones where an underdog group co-opts an insult and makes it their own. It’s got a great mischievous Bugs Bunny feel to it. I loved when the gay movement stole the word “queer” and took all its power away from the seething homophobes. And the Britannica is packed with other examples: A journalist came up with the term “Impressionism” as a jeer, but Monet and his pals stole it as their own. A group of Oxford students in the 18th century were derisively called “Methodists” because of their methodical habits of study and devotion. Muckraking was originally an insult derived from John Bunyan’s The Pilgrim’s Progress, which referred to the Man with the Muckrake “who could look no way but downward,” always searching for worldly gain in the cow dung, never bothering to look to heaven. The early crusading journalists stole it and made it their own. Me, I’m still trying to figure out how to co-opt my eighth-grade nickname, Douchebag.

  quarantine

  Ships in the Middle Ages were isolated for thirty days; the period of time was later increased to forty days, to equal the amount time that Jesus was in the wilderness. Not exactly the product of rigorous logical thinking. I wonder how many total days were wasted because they decided the ship-Jesus thing was a handy metaphor.

  quill pen

  It’s Sunday, and I decide to take a tour of the museum at the New-York Historical Society. Not only is it about fourteen steps from my apartment, but they have a great permanent exhibition of antique furniture, Revolutionary War costumes, and paintings of old New Yorkers signing historic documents (the best quill pens, by the way, were made from the second or third outer feather from the left wing of a crow).

  Our guide is a prim lady named Nancy with straw-colored hair, a tiny pocketbook, and a bad case of hay fever. You can tell she used to be a teacher—her tone is a mixture of kindness and condescension, with a little I’ll-send-you-to-the-vice-principal sternness thrown in. I’m joined by about a dozen fellow tour takers, most of them pushing sixty.

  Our first stop is a series of Audubon paintings of North American birds. The Historical Society has the largest collection of Audubons in America, explains Nancy, having snapped them up from his estate soon after his death. I know I should probably keep my trap shut and nod politely, but I feel compelled to speak up. I’ve got some Audubon information, and that information wants to be free.

  “You know,” I say, “Audubon was quite the bastard.” Nancy seems startled. “What I mean is, Audubon was a literal bastard. Illegitimate.”

  “Oh yes,” she says, relieved. “Yes, he was illegitimate.” Nancy acts as if she knew about Audubon’s birth heritage, but I’m not convinced. I continue: “Also Jean Genet and Alexandre Dumas were bastards. Lots of bastards running around throughout history.”

  I chuckle, and look around for approval from the crowd. I don’t get it. The other tour takers are regarding me warily, as if I might decide to take off my pants or lick the glass display cases. I have miscalculated. I was working blue before I had gained their trust.

  Nancy leads us to a painting of colonial businessmen in their wigs and three-corner hats.

  “Does anyone know when the first stock exchange in New York was?” she asks.

  I don’t know, but I think I’ll offer up a related fact: “The first stock exchange was under a tree,” I say.

  “Yes, that’s true,” says Nancy.

  I’m feeling semitriumphant—the head of the class—when I hear a deep voice. It belongs to a fellow tour taker, a man in a gray sweater who’s even taller and skinnier than I am.

  “A buttonwood tree,” he says.

  Who the hell is this guy? I don’t like him at all. First off, he raises his right index finger when he talks, like he’s hailing an imaginary cab. What kind of person does that? And second, that seems just crass, this naming the variety of tree just to top me. And third, what in God’s name is buttonwood?

  “Yes, it was a buttonwood tree,” she says. “But then it moved to a coffeehouse, the Starbucks of the day.” And it was 1792, by the way.

  Nancy—in between sneezes—leads to a painting of Peter Stuyvesant, the peg-legged Dutchman who was an early governor of New York.

  “Anyone know where Suriname is?”

  Suriname. Damn—I should know. Though I’m not up to the Ss, so I sort of have an excuse. Uh-oh. Manute Bol in the gray sweater is raising his index finger again. “It’s in South America, near Brazil.”

  He is correct. A small country on the northern coast of South America, formerly known as Dutch Guiana.

  “Very good,” says Nancy. She proceeds to tell us what is, admittedly, a great fact. In 1667, the Dutch engaged in perhaps the worst deal in real estate history: they traded Manhattan to the British in exchange for Suriname. It seemed like a good idea back at the time, since Suriname had lots of sugar plantations. But unfortunately for them, Suriname didn’t become the commercial center of the Western Hemisphere. The
Suriname Times didn’t become the newspaper of record for the free world.

  I’m feeling threatened. I need to redeem myself. We get to a painting of Peter Minuit, who bought Manhattan for that famous sum of $24. Here I see my chance. I raise my finger—a deft satire of Mr. Buttonwood Tree over there—and say: “Actually, the Indians got paid a lot more than twenty-four dollars. More like $120.”

  Which is true. The Britannica said that Minuit bought Manhattan for sixty guilders, which equaled about a pound and a half of silver. For some reason, I had decided to click on Google and see what a pound and a half of silver would sell for today. The total: One hundred twenty bucks. So the Indians were ripped off slightly less badly than most people think, and I had successfully wasted five minutes of my life.

  Nancy refuses to be rattled. “Yes, some people say that it was more in the range of a hundred dollars.” I hear at least one “Isn’t that interesting?” from the crowd. I flash a smug smile at my competition.

  A few paintings, a couple of statues, and an antique chair later, Nancy pauses to ask a question. “Now who knows when was the first insanity plea in U.S. history?”

  “The Stanford White trial!” My decibel level is alarmingly high—more suited to, say, alerting my fellow colonists about approaching Redcoats—but I’m just so pleased to know the answer. Stanford White, the colorful and lady-loving New York architect, was killed by a jealous husband.

  Nancy smiles and shakes her head. “A lot of people think it was the Stanford White trial. But actually, it was a Civil War general named James Sickling.”

  What a sucker. I have fallen right into Nancy’s trap. Perhaps it’s punishment for my Peter Minuit hubris. Stanford White is the wrong answer, but it provides her the segue she needs: White designed Madison Square Garden, which had a statue of the Greek goddess Diana on top. White’s assassin—a man named Harry Thaw—thought that White modeled the Diana statue on his wife, and went ballistic.

  “And the irony,” says Nancy, “is that Diana is the goddess of what?”

  Diana, Diana …

  “She’s the goddess of chastity,” says my rival.

  I spend the rest of the tour silently sulking in the back, beaten. By the end, the bald guy is giving mini lectures on the lampposts of New York, explaining that you can still spot olde-style lampposts on the Upper East Side at Sixty-second Street.

  “You know a lot about New York,” marvels Nancy. She loves him. She’d like to take him home and make him wear nothing but a stovepipe hat and have him whisper to her about Tammany Hall.

  What a bastard, and I’m not talking about the Audubon kind. I’m jealous, I’m discouraged, and most of all, I’m troubled: am I as annoying to the rest of the world as this guy is to me?

  quiz show

  Still no word from Millionaire. I guess I wasn’t good-looking enough for daytime television.

  quodilibet

  Julie and I are up at our friends John and Jen’s house for a Saturday summer barbecue and some quodlibet (free-ranging conversation on any topic that pleases us; Louis IX, for instance, allowed his courtiers to engage in quodlibet after meals). It’s not an ordinary Saturday, though. At 1 P.M., the nurse at our fertility clinic was supposed to call Julie’s cell phone to let us know if she’s pregnant. Right now it’s 1:45. No call. I’m flipping out.

  I’m trying not to read anything into the thundering silence of Julie’s cell phone, but that’s an impossible task. Too nervous to socialize with John and Jen, Julie and I have wandered over to a hammock in their yard. They must think we’re antisocial schmucks. So be it. As they grill some shish kebab, Julie and I lie silently in the hammock, rocking back and forth, staring at her Nokia.

  I trot out some calming-the-nerves material—all the reasons to be thankful, whether or not we have a child. Life expectancy in ancient Rome was twenty-nine years, so we’re lucky to be breathing at all.

  “That’s a good way to look at things,” she says.

  Maybe it’s because we’re vulnerable, or maybe it’s because my speech didn’t involve planetary storm systems, but that information goes over well. No one-dollar fines here. I’m sort of helping, or at least helping to pass the time.

  The race does not go to the swift, I tell Julie, nor the battle to strong, nor bread to the wise, nor babies to those who would make really good prents and read Dr. Seuss to them every night, but time and chance happen to them all.

  And … the phone is chirping!

  “Hello,” says Julie.

  The nurse apologizes for calling late—the blood-testing machine was broken for thirty-five minutes. Okay. Maybe we could hear about the blood-testing-repair anecdote another time. Maybe now would be a good time to tell us: is Julie finally pregnant?

  Julie gives the thumbs-up. Yes! My seed has found purchase. The mitosis has begun. If she were a hamster, she’d be in labor right now. This is a great day. We hug hard, happier than we’ve been in days, weeks, months, years. We say nothing for several minutes. I have finally been rendered silent.

  R

  rabbit

  STILL CAN’T BELIEVE Julie’s pregnant. Maybe that stuffed rabbit—the symbol of fertility— finally kicked in its magic. I’m delirious. Of course, I’ve also got a whole universe of new things to worry about: miscarriage, Klinefelter’s syndrome (when there’s XXY instead of XY chromosomes), cri-du-chat syndrome (congenital heart disease that causes a high-pitched cry like that of a cat). Horrible.

  No, I’ve got to think good thoughts: Julie’s pregnant.

  raccoon

  It washes its food before eating. My new favorite animal.

  raspberry

  Our friends Paul and Lisa are staying the weekend—they live in Washington these days. Paul tells us over dinner that he just got in an argument with his uncle over the definition of a fruit.

  I have to break it to Paul: his uncle was right. A fruit is, botanically speaking, anything with seeds. So yes, tomatoes are fruit. Paul is no shlub, intellectually speaking—he graduated from Yale Law School—but for some reason, he has never heard the widespread classic about tomatoes being a fruit.

  But that’s baby stuff. I know something that will really freak him out.

  “What about this one,” I ask Paul. “Is a strawberry a berry?”

  Yes … he ventures.

  “Nope. A strawberry is not a berry. Neither is a blackberry or a raspberry.”

  “What are they?”

  “They’re aggregate fruits. Aggregate fruits.” I repeat this as if I am a professor and Paul is taking notes for a quiz. “So what is a berry?” I continue in my postdoctoral tone. “I’ll tell you. A banana is a berry. So is an orange. So is a pumpkin.”

  Paul is, in fact, impressed, if a little confused. So what’s the definition of a berry?

  “Botanically speaking, a berry requires a single ovary with lots of seeds,” I say.

  At this point, I am hoping they will stop asking questions, because I have reached the frontier of my knowledge about berries.

  “How do you tell if it’s a single ovary?” asks Julie.

  “Very carefully,” I say. Ancient joke, as old as the Fig Tree chert fossil from South Africa (3.1 billion years old, the oldest on record). But I don’t know what else to say.

  “That’s insane,” says Paul. “Wouldn’t it be easier to just change the definition of ‘berry’? I mean, it’s gone beyond any usefulness. A pumpkin as a berry? What about eighteen-wheel trucks—are they berries?”

  “No, I don’t believe so.”

  “What about tables and chairs? Are they berries?

  “No, I believe those are legumes,” I say.

  The truth can be controversial.

  Rasputin

  An illiterate peasant, Rasputin rose to become a powerful mystic and adviser to the Russian czar and the czarina. It was his death, though, that struck me most. Rasputin was well hated by the aristocrats in the czar’s inner circle, who resented the sway he had over the czarina (she believed Rasputin kne
w how to treat her son’s hemophilia). In 1905, a group of conspirators decided to murder him. And what a murder it was. This was a man who did not go gentle into that good night. First, Rasputin was given poisoned wine and tea cakes. That didn’t kill him. So a frantic conspirator shot him. Still Rasputin didn’t die—he collapsed, got up again, and ran out into the courtyard. There, another conspirator shot him again. Not dead yet. Finally, the conspirators bound Rasputin and threw him through a hole in the ice into the river, where he finally died by drowning (they hoped).

  His was among the more unusual expirings. But just one of dozens, hundreds, thousands I’ve read about over the months. I’ve read about blues singer Robert Johnson, who died after drinking strychnine-laced whiskey in a juke joint. And Marie Blanchard, an aviation pioneer who died when her hot air balloon was set ablaze by fireworks. Explorer David Livingstone died of hemorrhoids(!); poet Henry Longfellow’s wife’s dress caught on fire; the Greek philosopher Peregrinus Proteus threw himself into the flames of the Olympic Games; the French revolutionary Jean-Paul Marat was stabbed in his bath by a female assassin. Samuel Johnson said, “The frequent contemplation of death is necessary to moderate the passions.” Well, be assured: my passions are quite moderate. I know that at any minute I could leave the building for a whole number of reasons. I could keel over from uremic poisoning, like Jean Harlow. Or slightly less likely, but still within the realm of possibility, I could be thrown out of my window by eunuchs and then eaten by dogs, like the Bible’s Jezebel. It’s memento mori after memento mori.

  But then there’s the biggest memento mori of them all: when someone in your family dies. We got a call a couple of days ago from Julie’s mom that her aunt Marcia had passed away. Today was the funeral.

  I didn’t know Marcia well—maybe met her three times—but I learned from the speeches at the memorial service that hers was an extraordinary life, with a childhood spent under the floorboards of a chicken coop in Poland, hiding from the Nazis. All the speeches had the same theme: Marcia was a giver. When Marcia was sick in the hospital with cancer that was eating away at her body, a friend called with some troubles; Marcia asked how she could help the friend. Or more precisely whispered it, because she was in such pain she couldn’t talk. It reminds me of that Horace Mann quote: “Be ashamed to die until you have won some victory for humanity.” Marcia seemed to have won some victories for humanity. Nothing on an epic scale, but small victories, every day.