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Perhaps you know that pickles come from cucumbers. That the 1)Washington Redskins are in Washington, D.C. and not Washington State. And that 2)Roy Orbison was not blind.
But all around you are intelligent, 3)upstanding citizens who do not know these—and other—things. Trust us. Part of being an adult is finding out stuff you should have known for years but somehow didn’t.
It could be something serious, like knowing never to mix 4)ammonia and 5)bleach. Or something trivial, like understanding which side the fork goes on in a 6)place setting. It could be the 7)chronic misuse of a word, such as “comprise”—as in “A baseball team comprises nine players.” (Yes. That’s really how you’re supposed to use it.) It could be misheard song lyrics or a misinterpreted logo.
But it’s pretty much inevitable that at some point each of us as an adult will slap our forehead and think, “Why didn’t I know that? I must have been absent that day.”
Often, it’s something that if we had just stopped to think about it, to hold it up in the light for examination at an earlier time, it would have made more sense.
The problem, of course, is we don’t stop.
Sweet Potato or 8)Yam?
Veteran cook Sarah Commerford, for instance, never knew the difference between a turnip and a 9)rutabaga. In 2010, she created a blog “What’s Cooking in Your World?” One day she tries out a new recipe—from a different country—on her family. The recipe called for a rutabaga, “I’ve always been an adventurous eater, and had eaten turnips many times, but don’t think I’d ever had a rutabaga.”
While she was at the store picking out ingredients “I realized that these two vegetables, although somewhat similar in appearance, were really quite unique,” she confesses. “How had I missed this? Of course, I bought both and tried them, actually preferring the rutabaga as it’s sweeter, less bitter and turns a lovely shade of orange when cooked.”
Ask around and you will hear other such tales, like people who only learned late in life the difference between baking soda and baking powder.
“Up until recently,” Kerry McCray, a food writer at the Sacramento Bee confessed recently to readers, “I didn’t know the difference between sweet potatoes and yams.” She went on to explain that the skin of a sweet potato—which has pointed ends—ranges in color from yellow to orange to red, while a yam has brown or black skin and more rounded ends.
Sometimes we found a few people mispronounced the word “misled,” believing it was the past tense of a nonexistent verb “misle”—meaning to deceive or, mislead. And another guy who thought the word “10)quesadilla” was Spanish for “What’s the deal?”
Weren’t we supposed to have learned all this stuff back in college? Judy Jones and William Wilson asked in their popular 11)compendium of 12)factoids, An Incomplete Education. “Sure you were, but then, as now, you had your good days and your bad days. 13)Ditto your teachers. Maybe you were in the 14)infirmary with the flu the week your Philosophy 101 class was 15)slogging through 16)Zarathustra. Maybe your poli-sci prof was served with divorce papers right about the time the class hit the 17)non aligned nations. Maybe you failed to see the relevance of 18)subatomic particles given your desperate need to get a date for 19)homecoming. Maybe you actually had all the answers—for a few glorious hours before the 20)NoDoz (or whatever it was) wore off. No matter. The 21)upshot is you’ve got some serious educational gaps.”
Nowadays, of course, you can Google or Yahoo whatever you need to know. But it’s quicker, and cooler, if you’ve got the knowledge in your own 22)noggin.
Look It Up
Years ago the legendary writer George Plimpton was featured in an “I Was Absent That Day” magazine essay that was the inspiration for this article. A major corporation asked Plimpton to lay out instructions about how to give a speech. “In my first remarks on the 23)dais,” Plimpton confessed, “I used to thank people for their ‘24)fulsome introduction,’ until I discovered, to my dismay, that ‘fulsome’ means offensive and insincere.”
He said, “Consult a dictionary for proper meanings and pronunciations.”
It’s never too late to learn the difference between enormousness (large) and 25)enormity (26)outrageous or 27)heinous). Or the meaning of 28)nonplussed.
When Gene Weingarten, a Pulitzer Prize winning reporter at the Washington Post, discovered as an adult that he had been misusing a word, he was, well, nonplussed.
“Until incredibly late—maybe 25 years old—I used ‘nonplussed’ as incorrectly as possible,” Weingarten says today. “I thought it meant ‘unflustered,’ basically, instead of what it means, which is, um, flustered.”
He says, “If you look at my clips for the first few years, you’ll probably find it wrong half a dozen times because it was a word I liked to use. Wrongly.”
In confessing knowledge gaps, Weingarten, Commerford, Plimpton and others remind us that we humans have limitations. And that to admit that we don’t know the things that we should know takes a certain amount of humbleness.
Wait. Is humbleness even a word?
也许你知道酸瓜是由黄瓜制作而成的，知道华盛顿红皮队在华盛顿特区，而非华盛顿州，也知道罗伊•奥比森并不是盲人。
但你周围却到处都是这样的人：聪明、正直，却这也不知道那也不知道。相信我们吧。作为一个成年人的标志之一是，发现原本多年前就应该知道的东西，自己却不知怎地并不知道。
那些不知道的事情可能会导致严重的后果，比如说，决不能把氨水和漂白剂混合在一起。或者只是一些琐碎的事情，如摆放餐具时，叉子该放在哪边。也可能是长期用错了某个单词，如“comprise”这个单词，应该说“A baseball team comprises nine players.（一个篮球队由九名运动员组成。）”（是的，comprise确实是这么用的）。还可能是听错了歌词或误解了某个标识。
然而，作为成年人，我们在某些时刻几乎会不可避免地拍着额头想：“我怎么就不知道呢？我那天一定是缺席了。”
通常情况下，如果当年我们在准备考试时，能停下来想想或者提出这些事情，那么它们就更说得通了。
当然，问题是我们没有停下来。
番薯还是芋头？
比方说，资深厨师莎拉•科姆佛德从来都不知道萝卜和大头菜的区别。 2010年，她创建了一个叫“你的世界里正在烹饪什么？”的博客。有一天，她在自己家里尝试做一个外国菜。根据菜谱，她需要大头菜，“我一直是一个敢于尝试的食客，吃过很多次萝卜，但我想我从没吃过大头菜。”
当她在商店里挑选食材时，“我发现，这两种蔬菜，虽然在外观上有点类似，其实各具特色，”她坦言，“我怎么之前就没弄懂呢？不用说，我买了这两种菜来尝试一下，实际上我更喜欢大头菜，因为它更甜，没那么苦，而且煮熟时会变成可爱的橙色。”
四处打听一下，你会听到更多类似的故事，比如有的人到了晚年才知道焙苏打和发酵粉的区别。
加州《萨克拉曼多蜜蜂报》的美食作家克莉•麦克雷最近向读者坦言：“直到最近，我才知道番薯和芋头之间的区别。”她接着解释说，甘番薯两头是尖的，有黄色、橙色和红色三种颜色，而芋头的外皮为棕色和黑色，并且两头要圆一些。
有时候，我们发现有些人念错“misled（欺骗或误导）”这个单词，以为那是动词“misle”的过去式，而事实上“misle”这个词根本不存在。还有人会认为“quesadilla”是西班牙语中“这是怎么回事？”的意思。
难道我们不是应该在读大学时就学过这些了吗？朱迪•琼斯和威廉•威尔逊在其颇受欢迎的“伪事实”编录——《不完整的教育》一书中提出了这个问题。“当然，你那时本应该学的，但那时候正如你现在一样，有状态好的时候也有状态不好的时候。你的老师也是如此。也许哲学课上，大家正在埋头研究《查拉图斯特拉如是说》时你却由于患上流感而呆在医务室。也许你们班在上关于不结盟国家的课程时，你们的政治社会学教授却正为其离婚文件分神。由于你迫切想找到一个约会对象陪你参加校友日活动，你会无视亚原子粒子的重要性。也许你在咖啡因（或不管是什么）的功效消失之前那令人愉快的几个小时里着实是知道所有这些答案的。但结果是，你身上遗留着严重的教育空白。”
当然，现在你可以用谷歌或者雅虎搜索你想要知道的任何事情。但是，如果你自己的脑袋里有这些知识的话，你便可以更加迅速、更酷地说出来。
查一查
许多年前，《我当天缺席》这本杂志刊登了一篇关于传奇作家乔治•普利姆顿的专题故事。这篇文章正是我写本文的灵感来源。一家大公司请普利姆顿对如何演讲进行指导。普利姆顿坦言：“我上讲台最开头的几句话，总是感谢主持人对我‘fulsome’的介绍，直到后来我才沮丧地发现，‘fulsome’是‘冒犯’和‘缺乏诚意’的意思。”
他说：“多查查字典，确认词语的正确含义和发音。”
学习“enormousness（巨大）”和“enormity（暴行）”之间的差异，永远都不会太晚。同样，弄懂何为“nonplussed（使不知所措的）”也为时未晚。
当普利策奖得主、《华盛顿邮报》记者吉恩•温加顿在成年后发现自己误用了一个词时，他变得不知所措了。
温加顿如今说：“直到很晚——也许是25岁时——我还一直错用 ‘nonplussed（使不知所措的）’这个词，要多错有多错。我以前认为它的意思是‘unflustered’（从容不迫的），基本上它不是这个意思，而是‘flustered（慌乱的）’的意思。”
他说：“如果你看一下我头几年的文章剪报，你可能会发现我错用了好多次，因为我喜欢用这个词，现在看来是错用了。”
在坦言知识空白方面，温加顿、科姆佛德、普利姆顿和其他人都提醒了我们：人类有自己的局限性。而人要有一定的谦逊之心去承认自己在某些本应知道的事情上的无知。
等等。究竟有没有“humbleness（谦逊）”这个词？
But all around you are intelligent, 3)upstanding citizens who do not know these—and other—things. Trust us. Part of being an adult is finding out stuff you should have known for years but somehow didn’t.
It could be something serious, like knowing never to mix 4)ammonia and 5)bleach. Or something trivial, like understanding which side the fork goes on in a 6)place setting. It could be the 7)chronic misuse of a word, such as “comprise”—as in “A baseball team comprises nine players.” (Yes. That’s really how you’re supposed to use it.) It could be misheard song lyrics or a misinterpreted logo.
But it’s pretty much inevitable that at some point each of us as an adult will slap our forehead and think, “Why didn’t I know that? I must have been absent that day.”
Often, it’s something that if we had just stopped to think about it, to hold it up in the light for examination at an earlier time, it would have made more sense.
The problem, of course, is we don’t stop.
Sweet Potato or 8)Yam?
Veteran cook Sarah Commerford, for instance, never knew the difference between a turnip and a 9)rutabaga. In 2010, she created a blog “What’s Cooking in Your World?” One day she tries out a new recipe—from a different country—on her family. The recipe called for a rutabaga, “I’ve always been an adventurous eater, and had eaten turnips many times, but don’t think I’d ever had a rutabaga.”
While she was at the store picking out ingredients “I realized that these two vegetables, although somewhat similar in appearance, were really quite unique,” she confesses. “How had I missed this? Of course, I bought both and tried them, actually preferring the rutabaga as it’s sweeter, less bitter and turns a lovely shade of orange when cooked.”
Ask around and you will hear other such tales, like people who only learned late in life the difference between baking soda and baking powder.
“Up until recently,” Kerry McCray, a food writer at the Sacramento Bee confessed recently to readers, “I didn’t know the difference between sweet potatoes and yams.” She went on to explain that the skin of a sweet potato—which has pointed ends—ranges in color from yellow to orange to red, while a yam has brown or black skin and more rounded ends.
Sometimes we found a few people mispronounced the word “misled,” believing it was the past tense of a nonexistent verb “misle”—meaning to deceive or, mislead. And another guy who thought the word “10)quesadilla” was Spanish for “What’s the deal?”
Weren’t we supposed to have learned all this stuff back in college? Judy Jones and William Wilson asked in their popular 11)compendium of 12)factoids, An Incomplete Education. “Sure you were, but then, as now, you had your good days and your bad days. 13)Ditto your teachers. Maybe you were in the 14)infirmary with the flu the week your Philosophy 101 class was 15)slogging through 16)Zarathustra. Maybe your poli-sci prof was served with divorce papers right about the time the class hit the 17)non aligned nations. Maybe you failed to see the relevance of 18)subatomic particles given your desperate need to get a date for 19)homecoming. Maybe you actually had all the answers—for a few glorious hours before the 20)NoDoz (or whatever it was) wore off. No matter. The 21)upshot is you’ve got some serious educational gaps.”
Nowadays, of course, you can Google or Yahoo whatever you need to know. But it’s quicker, and cooler, if you’ve got the knowledge in your own 22)noggin.
Look It Up
Years ago the legendary writer George Plimpton was featured in an “I Was Absent That Day” magazine essay that was the inspiration for this article. A major corporation asked Plimpton to lay out instructions about how to give a speech. “In my first remarks on the 23)dais,” Plimpton confessed, “I used to thank people for their ‘24)fulsome introduction,’ until I discovered, to my dismay, that ‘fulsome’ means offensive and insincere.”
He said, “Consult a dictionary for proper meanings and pronunciations.”
It’s never too late to learn the difference between enormousness (large) and 25)enormity (26)outrageous or 27)heinous). Or the meaning of 28)nonplussed.
When Gene Weingarten, a Pulitzer Prize winning reporter at the Washington Post, discovered as an adult that he had been misusing a word, he was, well, nonplussed.
“Until incredibly late—maybe 25 years old—I used ‘nonplussed’ as incorrectly as possible,” Weingarten says today. “I thought it meant ‘unflustered,’ basically, instead of what it means, which is, um, flustered.”
He says, “If you look at my clips for the first few years, you’ll probably find it wrong half a dozen times because it was a word I liked to use. Wrongly.”
In confessing knowledge gaps, Weingarten, Commerford, Plimpton and others remind us that we humans have limitations. And that to admit that we don’t know the things that we should know takes a certain amount of humbleness.
Wait. Is humbleness even a word?
也许你知道酸瓜是由黄瓜制作而成的，知道华盛顿红皮队在华盛顿特区，而非华盛顿州，也知道罗伊•奥比森并不是盲人。
但你周围却到处都是这样的人：聪明、正直，却这也不知道那也不知道。相信我们吧。作为一个成年人的标志之一是，发现原本多年前就应该知道的东西，自己却不知怎地并不知道。
那些不知道的事情可能会导致严重的后果，比如说，决不能把氨水和漂白剂混合在一起。或者只是一些琐碎的事情，如摆放餐具时，叉子该放在哪边。也可能是长期用错了某个单词，如“comprise”这个单词，应该说“A baseball team comprises nine players.（一个篮球队由九名运动员组成。）”（是的，comprise确实是这么用的）。还可能是听错了歌词或误解了某个标识。
然而，作为成年人，我们在某些时刻几乎会不可避免地拍着额头想：“我怎么就不知道呢？我那天一定是缺席了。”
通常情况下，如果当年我们在准备考试时，能停下来想想或者提出这些事情，那么它们就更说得通了。
当然，问题是我们没有停下来。
番薯还是芋头？
比方说，资深厨师莎拉•科姆佛德从来都不知道萝卜和大头菜的区别。 2010年，她创建了一个叫“你的世界里正在烹饪什么？”的博客。有一天，她在自己家里尝试做一个外国菜。根据菜谱，她需要大头菜，“我一直是一个敢于尝试的食客，吃过很多次萝卜，但我想我从没吃过大头菜。”
当她在商店里挑选食材时，“我发现，这两种蔬菜，虽然在外观上有点类似，其实各具特色，”她坦言，“我怎么之前就没弄懂呢？不用说，我买了这两种菜来尝试一下，实际上我更喜欢大头菜，因为它更甜，没那么苦，而且煮熟时会变成可爱的橙色。”
四处打听一下，你会听到更多类似的故事，比如有的人到了晚年才知道焙苏打和发酵粉的区别。
加州《萨克拉曼多蜜蜂报》的美食作家克莉•麦克雷最近向读者坦言：“直到最近，我才知道番薯和芋头之间的区别。”她接着解释说，甘番薯两头是尖的，有黄色、橙色和红色三种颜色，而芋头的外皮为棕色和黑色，并且两头要圆一些。
有时候，我们发现有些人念错“misled（欺骗或误导）”这个单词，以为那是动词“misle”的过去式，而事实上“misle”这个词根本不存在。还有人会认为“quesadilla”是西班牙语中“这是怎么回事？”的意思。
难道我们不是应该在读大学时就学过这些了吗？朱迪•琼斯和威廉•威尔逊在其颇受欢迎的“伪事实”编录——《不完整的教育》一书中提出了这个问题。“当然，你那时本应该学的，但那时候正如你现在一样，有状态好的时候也有状态不好的时候。你的老师也是如此。也许哲学课上，大家正在埋头研究《查拉图斯特拉如是说》时你却由于患上流感而呆在医务室。也许你们班在上关于不结盟国家的课程时，你们的政治社会学教授却正为其离婚文件分神。由于你迫切想找到一个约会对象陪你参加校友日活动，你会无视亚原子粒子的重要性。也许你在咖啡因（或不管是什么）的功效消失之前那令人愉快的几个小时里着实是知道所有这些答案的。但结果是，你身上遗留着严重的教育空白。”
当然，现在你可以用谷歌或者雅虎搜索你想要知道的任何事情。但是，如果你自己的脑袋里有这些知识的话，你便可以更加迅速、更酷地说出来。
查一查
许多年前，《我当天缺席》这本杂志刊登了一篇关于传奇作家乔治•普利姆顿的专题故事。这篇文章正是我写本文的灵感来源。一家大公司请普利姆顿对如何演讲进行指导。普利姆顿坦言：“我上讲台最开头的几句话，总是感谢主持人对我‘fulsome’的介绍，直到后来我才沮丧地发现，‘fulsome’是‘冒犯’和‘缺乏诚意’的意思。”
他说：“多查查字典，确认词语的正确含义和发音。”
学习“enormousness（巨大）”和“enormity（暴行）”之间的差异，永远都不会太晚。同样，弄懂何为“nonplussed（使不知所措的）”也为时未晚。
当普利策奖得主、《华盛顿邮报》记者吉恩•温加顿在成年后发现自己误用了一个词时，他变得不知所措了。
温加顿如今说：“直到很晚——也许是25岁时——我还一直错用 ‘nonplussed（使不知所措的）’这个词，要多错有多错。我以前认为它的意思是‘unflustered’（从容不迫的），基本上它不是这个意思，而是‘flustered（慌乱的）’的意思。”
他说：“如果你看一下我头几年的文章剪报，你可能会发现我错用了好多次，因为我喜欢用这个词，现在看来是错用了。”
在坦言知识空白方面，温加顿、科姆佛德、普利姆顿和其他人都提醒了我们：人类有自己的局限性。而人要有一定的谦逊之心去承认自己在某些本应知道的事情上的无知。
等等。究竟有没有“humbleness（谦逊）”这个词？