In fact, that’s the title of a new book from the editors of the American Heritage dictionaries–and don’t turn your nose up. If you’re reading this, you know what “stigma,” “stoic” and “Svengali” mean, but the fun is in the passages that illustrate the words. “Mercenary,” for instance, comes with a speech from Wilde’s “The Importance of Being Earnest”; you also get nuggets from Oliver Sacks, D.H. Lawrence, the autobiography of Maureen O’Hara … As a vocabulary-builder: useless. As a “commonplace” book (a compendium): priceless.
This fall’s biggest threat to Dummery and Bluffness is “The Intellectual Devotional,” a secular equivalent of volumes with daily commentary on 365 passages of scripture. It too is aimed at the insecure: the subtitle is “Revive Your Mind [since you’re dead above the neck], Complete Your Education [which you never got], and Roam Confidently with the Cultured Class [to which you don’t belong].” It’s directed particularly at codgers and codgers-to-be: “These readings,” says the introduction, “offer the kind of regular exercise the brain needs to stay fresh, especially as we age.” Philosophers may be as disappointed in the entry on Leibniz as writers and literary scholars will be in the one on Faulkner, but there can’t be many people who know about Beowulf, Elizabeth Cady Stanton and nociception (the perception of pain, dummy). You know what the Sistine Chapel is, but do you know why it’s called that? Well I do. Now.
