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Executive Times |
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2008 Book Reviews |
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The Book
of General Ignorance by John Mitchinson and John Lloyd |
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Rating: |
*** |
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(Recommended) |
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Click
on title or picture to buy from amazon.com |
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Humility I
didn’t get more than a few pages into John Mitchinson and John Lloyd’s The Book
of General Ignorance before I felt humble about what I don’t know. I’ve
concluded that I’m both generally and specifically ignorant. After being
burned a few times, I tried to become more alert to the technicalities and
the careful word choices in posing questions. I still failed more often than I
succeeded. Here’s an excerpt, pp. 88-90: What
color is water? The
usual answer is that it isn't any color; it's clear or transparent and the
sea only appears blue because of the reflection of the sky. Wrong.
Water really is blue. It's an incredibly faint shade, but it is blue. You can
see this in nature when you look into a deep hole in the snow, or through the
thick ice of a 'frozen waterfall. If you took a very large, very deep white
pool, filled it with water, and looked straight down through it, the water
would be blue. This
faint blue tinge doesn't explain why water sometimes takes on a strikingly
blue appearance when we look at
it rather than through
it. Reflected color from the sky obviously plays an important
part. The sea doesn't look particularly blue on an overcast day. But
not all the light we see is reflected from the surface of the water; some of
it is coming from under the surface. The more impure the water, the more
color it will reflect. In
large bodies of water like seas and lakes the water will usually contain a
high concentration of microscopic plants and algae, j Rivers and ponds will
have a high concentration of soil and other; solids in suspension. All these particles reflect and scatter the
light as it return What color was the sky in ancient
Greece? Bronze. There is no word for
"blue" in ancient Greek. The nearest words—
glaukos and 4yanos—
are more like
expressions of the relative intensity of light and darkness than attempts to
describe the color. The ancient Greek poet Homer
mentions only four actual colors in the whole of the Iliad
and the Odyssty,
roughly
translated as black, white, greenish yellow (applied to honey, sap and
blood), and purply red. When Homer calls the sky
"bronze," he means that it is dazzlingly bright, like the sheen of
a shield, rather than bronze-colored. In a similar spirit, he regarded wine,
the sea, and sheep as all being the same color—purply red. Aristotle identified seven
shades of color, all of which he thought derived from black and white, but
these were really grades of brightness, not color. It's interesting that an
ancient Greek from almost twenty-five hundred years ago and NASA's Mars
rovers of 2006 both approach color in the same way. In the wake of Darwin, the
theory was advanced that the early Greeks' retinas had not evolved the
ability to perceive colors, but it is now thought they grouped objects in
terms of qualities other than color, so that a word which seems to indicate
yellow or light green really meant fluid, fresh, and living, and so was
appropriately used to describe blood, the human sap. This
is not as rare as you might expect. There are more languages in Papua New
Guinea than anywhere else in the world but, apart from distinguishing between
light and dark, many of .-them have no other words for color at all. Classical Welsh has no words
for brown, gray, blue or green. The color spectrum is divided in a completely
different way. One word (glas) covered part of green; another the rest of green,
the whole of blue and part of gray; a third dealt with the rest of gray and
most, or part, of brown. Modern Welsh uses the word glas
to mean blue,
but Russian has no single word for blue. It has two —goluboi
and sinii—usually
translated as
"light blue" and "dark blue," but, to Russians, they are
distinct, different colors, not different shades of the same color. All
languages develop their color terms in the same way. After black and white,
the third color to be named is always red, the fourth and fifth are green and
yellow (in either order), the sixth is blue, and the seventh brown. Welsh still
doesn't have a word for brown. What I’ll
do with all the trivia I encountered on the pages of The Book
of General Ignorance, I don’t know. I do know that I’ll be a little more
humble about things that I think I know. Steve
Hopkins, February 21, 2008 |
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Go to Executive Times Archives |
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The recommendation rating for
this book appeared in the March 2008 issue of Executive Times URL for this review: http://www.hopkinsandcompany.com/Books/The Book of General
Ignorance.htm For Reprint Permission, Contact: Hopkins & Company, LLC • E-mail: books@hopkinsandcompany.com |
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