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Just when I thought it was safe to return to my rustic and culturally illiterate ways, a review copy of The Dictionary of Cultural Literacy arrived. It's a best-selling sequel to Cultural Literacy, wherein E.D. Hirsch, Jr., explained why all Americans need to know certain things. He even provided a 64-page list of what we should know.
This time around, the list has expanded to 586 pages, because it includes short definitions. It also includes things that just aren't so.
Here you can learn that James Butler Wild Bill
Hickok was a rider for the Pony Express in his
youth.
Hickok never rode for the Pony Express. His
total involvement was that he tended horses for a few
months at the Pony Express station in Rock Creek, Neb.
Or you might discover that the Santa Fe Trail was an
important route used by settlers moving west,
and that
it ran from Independence, Missouri, southwest to Santa
Fe, New Mexico.
In fact, few settlers ever took the Santa Fe Trail, which was a route of commerce. Settlers took the Oregon Trail. Despite what you read in the Dictionary, the Santa Fe Trail didn't end in Santa Fe -- the bulk of its trade continued south to Chihuahua, Mexico. Anyone here who trusted this Dictionary would be teeming with erroneous notions about his own culture.
You could also examine the curious logic employed by our
cultural betters. On page 252, we learn that Gen. William
Tecumseh Sherman was known for saying
On page 284, we are informed that War is Hell.
Sherman
supposedly said this [
War is Hell
] several years after
the war.
Did Sherman say it, or didn't he? Why can't we get a definitive answer from this Dictionary? Isn't that what dictionaries are for?
Not this one. It tells us that the phrase Iron
Curtain,
in reference to the Soviet bloc in Eastern
Europe, was coined by Winston Churchill.
Winston
Churchill coined many memorable phrases during his
distinguished career, but that one isn't his.
Churchill said Iron Curtain
on March 5, 1946, in
a speech at Fulton, Mo. Its first use was apparently on
Feb. 23, 1945, by, of all people, Joseph Goebbels, the Nazi
propaganda minister: If the German people lay down their
arms the whole of Eastern and Southern Europe, together
with the Reich, will come under Russian occupation. Behind
an iron curtain, mass butcheries of people would
begin.
One apparent virtues of Cultural Literacy is that you don't need to do any research. You are allowed to know about the Beatles, but you will find no entry for Chuck Berry, who merely invented the most popular form of music in the world.
The Dictionary doesn't improve when you leave
history and popular music and enter real literary culture.
Christopher Marlowe may been second only to William
Shakespeare among English playwrights, but you can be quite
Culturally Literate without knowing about Marlowe or
Marlowe's mighty line
that Shakespeare adopted --
Marlowe doesn't rate an entry.
Historians of such matters declare that the world has produced only three great mathematicians since the dawn of reckoning: Archimedes, Isaac Newton and Carl Friedrich Gauss. But Gauss is nowhere to be found. Am I the only one who finds it amazing that a man can be one of the three greatest mathematicians ever, can have a unit of measurement named after him, can exert a major and continuing influence on the ways we measure and manipulate the physical world -- and he isn't worth mentioning?
Cultural Literacy apparently means accepting dime novels
as history, crediting people for quotations that they never
said, giving the wrong people credit for memorable phrases,
and ignoring people who did make significant contributions.
That is a fair description of how American culture really
works, but I had been expecting better from any book that
presumes to tell us What every American needs to
know.
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