[If some of the bits below sound familiar, I may may be that I’ve written about them before. If so, I don’t apologize, since it’s so easy for you to hit delete.]
I sometimes miss the difficulty of uncovering obscure knowledge. I mean, it’s too friggin’ easy these days to find out almost anything, no challenge at all. (Past ignorance may be a weird thing to have nostalgia for, but at least it’s a basic American trait.)
Fortunately, even in this era of ubiquitous knowledge it can sometimes be hard to track stuff down. And when you do manage to find the elusive Aha!, it’s often the result of a slap of serendipity.
An example: Many years back in freelancerdom I was asked to update a dozen or so slim texts for middle-school students. Each book covered the history and customs of a single county or a group of small adjacent nations.
One was dedicated to the Caribbean-island country of Trinidad and Tobago. There was’t much that needed to be updated, but one question nagged at me.
The Trinidadian population was evenly divided between Black and East Indian. Among the Indian sector, young teen girls were routinely pushed into arranged marriages, a kind of misuse of the young and of women that pisses me off no end. So I wondered: might this have improved in the decades since the book was put together?
The internet was youngish when I searched for the answer, and trying every combination of terms for the country’s name, population breakdown, and local customs, I uncovered not a single reference to marriage arrangements among the Indians. Then, about to give up, I stumbled on a breakdown of the country’s suicide rate, broken down by age and population.
Where was it highest? Among young teen Indian girls.
That answered my question, though not in a pleasant way or one that would meet legal or scientific certainty. I had not the least doubt that, yes, these girls were forced into arranged marriages, so no change to make in the book.
But now I wonder, is the kind of unproven assumption I made also of the sort that, in different situations, can lead to conspiracy theories? Here, it led to nothing but the further deflation of my respect for humanity.
* * * *
Subhead on recent news article:
“Data reveals at peak of pandemic in 2020, people in prisons died almost three and a half times more frequently than those outside”
And I thought dying just once was bad enough!
* * * *
Two Russians were walking down the road. One could calculate square roots in his head, the other could not. The one who could not calculate square roots in his head asked the one who could: “How is it you can calculate square roots in your head?” The other replied: “That is very simple. First I grasp the trunk. Once I have the trunk, it is quite easy to proceed to the root, by digging down. This, of course, provides you only with the round root, but once you have the round root, you merely trim the bark to gain the square root.” The first was amazed, but also perplexed: “That is indeed a most remarkable method, but how do you grasp the trunk to begin?” The other smiled sadly: “That can too often prove a problem. I still have not devised a way to grasp the trunk without first retrieving it at the the reservation counter of the railway station. By then, of course, the person who has requested the square root has in most cases already looked the answer up in the Vast Compendious Table of All Known Square Roots, which is kept in the root-cellar of the library. The failures which result from this problem can make me seem an incompetent fool.” The first Russian, feeling sympathetic to his plight, offered to buy him an extensive set of trunks from a friend who dealt in antique transportation materials. The second Russian is now able to calculate in his head the square roots of several numbers which had previously escaped him, including 17, 3, 634, and 19,760. He discovered one trunk that leads to the square root of -1, but he has since lost the key.
* * * *
How often have you bought a workshop tool and had to wade through 6-10 pages of “warnings” in the supposed operations manual before you got to the actual instructions on how to use the tool?
It’s bad enough that these warnings assume your elemental stupidity (“don’t stick your finger or any part of you body in the socket”), but do you know what creates the worst danger of injury from a tool? – not knowing how to operate it, instructions for which are half-way back in the manual and missing half the essential operational details.
* * * *
Recent ad headline:
“This TikTok-Famous Veggie Slicer Is Half Off Today”
When a veggie slicer is half-off, what exactly is left for slicing vegetables?
* * * *
Linda and I have read a fair number of Lee Child’s Jack Reacher novels and enjoyed them muchly. But after a half dozen or so it got to me that they all had insipid, almost indistinguishable titles. I’d find a listing for a Reacher title and wonder “Did we read this? Didn’t we?” No way to tell unless I had a copy in hand to flip through.
Then one day I began to wonder: could this be a deliberate marketing gimmick to get people to quickly snap up a “new” title only to realize, damn, I read this two years ago. That would seem a pretty sneaky way to bring in extra profit, but I’ve read that Child is very happy churning out highly commercial, very remunerative work, so… why not?
I mean, his given name is James Dover Grant, only choosing Lee Child as his pen name once he starting writing mystery novels. By some lucky chance, this slips his work between Raymond Chandler and Agatha Christie on bookstore mystery shelves.
So was it lucky chance? I’ve seen a convoluted explanation that the adopted name arises from something he used to say in his childhood. I’ve also read that it was indeed a deliberate marketing ploy.
Hell, I’ll take a clever, nefarious ploy over lucky chance any day.
In recent years, Lee’s handed the Reacher series off to his brother, Andrew Grant (now Andrew Child). May the lord Grant them both great sales.
* * * *
A suggestion:
Make a deepfake of Trump singing:
I wanta be near me,
I’m the one for me, for me,
I wanta be near me,
I’m the one for me-e-e.
Problem is, would anyone ever believe it was a fake?
* * * *
How many dictionaries have you accumulated over the years?
By my count, I’ve picked up four “unabridged,” though I’m currently down to one – and it’s very happy sitting alone on its tall reading stand, a birthday gift from Linda.
After years of fumbling through the Merriam Webster Collegiate – which always put me off for some reason – while I was working at the UPenn bookstore I picked up the Webster’s Third International (unabridged), because, as an employee, I could get it at cost.
Wow! A brand new, freshly-minted, up-to-the-minute international compendium of all known English words! Except I quickly discovered it was nothing of the sort. This “update” actually dropped thousands of words from the universally loved Second International.
What the hell was going on? It’s never been clear to me, but I think the compilers lost interest in the importance of etymology and literate history, so if a term was no longer in current use, they just canned it.
Well, shit. I look to dictionaries to give me not just the definition, but the whole schmear – the word’s place in the world.
A couple years later (though maybe I’ve got the timing a bit wrong), an entirely new major dictionary appeared, the Random House Dictionary of the English Language, Unabridged.
I liked it. Despite not having a century-plus of American publishing history behind it, here was a weighty lexicographical collection with entries that just begged you to read them. Good enough for me, by gosh. I snapped it up and it took pride of place on Linda’s reading stand. The Third International went somewhere.
So what came next – and why?
1971 saw one of the most remarkable (and, in retrospect, rather strange) publishing endeavors, the release of the Oxford English Dictionary – the most exhaustive dictionary of the language ever produced – photographically reduced to a two-volume format of minuscule type that you could read only using the accompanying rectangular magnifying glass. Yes – the entire 13-volume first-edition, including supplement – shrunken to ant tracks on near onion-skin paper.
So of course I had to have it.
Which I did, once it went on steep sale. I loved having it, loved fiddling with the magnifying glass, loved the idea of having it. But I probably looked up no more than five words in the thing, because, despite my interest in etymology, I really didn’t need to know how Aethelfark the Ungracious may have used “besotted” in the 6th century. And that magnifying glass – a damned good one, but a strain on the eyes.
I sold the shrunken OED or gave it away a few years later, though for some reason I still have the magnifier, so I’m not sure how this person can read the scratchings.
Since then, the OED second edition was further shrunken to near invisibility – 9 original pages crammed onto one printed page. I can’t imagine anyone trying to deal with this. But now the OED is online (at oed.com) while in the midst of an ever-evolving third edition. You can look up the convoluted history of any word in seconds.
After handing off the OED, I held on to the Random House dictionary. I mean, I do want to look up words, right, if not needing to know every use ever made of the word under consideration.
And my tale of lexicographical absurdity did not end there, boys and girls. For, after my brother Rod’s death in 2009 – one of the saddest days of my life – his widow, Ginny, bestowed on me his Webster’s Second International, alway open on a bedroom table of their house.
Let me tell you, this is the true king of English dictionaries. It has all those words later cast into oblivion by the Third International, along with clear yet detailed notes on derivation and etymology. This is the dictionary to have for actual daily use. It now sits on that lovely reading stand, replacing the Random House, which I recently donated to the local library.
Yet, like most everyone else in these instant-gratification days, when I’m sitting here at my MacBookPro and want a quick check on a definition, I first look online. And where am I sent by default?
To the damned Merriam-Webster Collegiate.
Having just turned 85, I’m definitely older, but hardly wiser.
lickhaven 