It’s been a hundred years since the Panama-California Exposition drew 3 million visitors to a town that counted only 45,000 residents. As we celebrate the centennial of Balboa Park, the jewel in the crown of our shining city, let us realize that the English romantic poet John Keats got it all wrong. To conclude his sonnet “On First Looking Into Chapman’s Homer,” the luminous poet wrote:
Or like stout Cortez, when with eagle eyes,
He star’d at the Pacific – and all his men
Look’d at each other with a wild surmise –
Silent upon a peak in Darien.
Here Keats famously misidentified the first European to set eyes on the Pacific Ocean. It was actually the Spanish conquistador Vasco Nuñez de Balboa who did the staring. Balboa’s countryman Hernan Cortes wasn’t even in the neighborhood during the 1513 crossing of the Isthmus of Panama to reach the Pacific Ocean.
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Congratulations and a heaping bag of oats to California-connected American Pharoah, who outgalloped the field at the Kentucky Derby and the Preakness — and apparently outran the Spellchecker. Here’s to a third triumph this afternoon.
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Reader’s Digest is publishing a new library of condensed books. Popular titles include Charles Dickens, “A Tale of One City,” Alexandre Dumas, “The Two Musketeers,” Agatha Christie, “Five Little Indians,” Solomon Northrup, “Six Years a Slave,” Reginald Rose, “Six Angry Men,” Joseph Heller, “Catch-11,” E.L. James, “Twenty-Five Shades of Grey,” Dodie Smith, “51 Dalmatians” and Jules Verne, “Around the World in Forty Days” and “Ten Thousand Leagues Under the Sea.”
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Only when pigs fly across the face of a blue moon while hell freezes over and I find a hen’s tooth do I get a fan letter from a celebrity, but here’s one that I recently received from Randy Sparks, whose name will be familiar to many chronologically endowed readers of this column:
Dear Dr. Lederer: Thanks for being an advocate for words. I’m five years your senior, and I still write songs on a daily basis. It doesn’t matter that there is no longer a demand for my new product. Without the mental fulfillment, I’d surely be but a name on a tombstone.
I founded my group, The New Christy Minstrels, as a writer of songs, and we’re still in concert, still reaching out to our fans around the world. I count my mother’s gift, a lesson about the rhyming of words when I was four years old, as one of the best I ever received.
I spent three of my four college years in San Diego (SDJC and SDSU), then was drafted into the Navy in San Francisco and then sent right back to San Diego.
Thanks for all that you do, and keep up the good word. Old Guys Rule.
— Randy Sparks
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Why are so many women so upset with men? Maybe it’s because so many unpleasant words begin with man and men — manacle, mangle, mangy, maniac, manic, manure and Manson and menace, mendacity, mendicant, menial, meningitis, mens rea (“guilty mind”), menstruation and mental illness.
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A May 1 CBS segment of Steve Hartman’s “On the Road” featured an engineer named Brian Henderson who has taken it upon himself to delete all 160,000 Wikipedia instances of “comprised of” and replace them with “composed of.” Here is what Henderson had in mind on that CBS report:
Comprise means “to include, contain or embrace.” The whole comprises the parts, and the parts compose the whole. “Is comprised of” is clunky because “is included of” and “is contained of” make no sense.
The Union comprises the 50 states, or the Union is composed of 50 states, but the Union cannot be comprised of the 50 states, nor do the 50 states comprise the Union.