When I was a kid, I learned not to ask too many questions. The most polite answer I could usually expect was, Look it up!
Man, how I hated that answer.
Now I wish I had taken it seriously and bothered to learn to use dictionaries, encyclopedias, and other reference books. As it was, I never did become any good with any of those things, and had some of my curiosity stomped down.
But now I look everything up, because there’s so much information available online, if not via Google, then via one of the online references I use professionally. Now I find myself in the position of at least thinking, Why don’t you just look it up? whenever someone asks a certain kind of question. I’m referring to adults. Not everyone has developed the look-it-up reflex. We didn’t grow up with it.
I wonder if my son will have a hard time imagining a time before you could so easily look everything up.
My wife brought home a club sandwich for my lunch. I had never heard of a club sandwich before freshman year in college, when all my friends seemed to order it at the diner we went to regularly. I’ve wondered for the past 20-odd years why cold poultry slices with bacon (or sometimes ham) stacked between 2 or 3 slices of toasted bread should be called a “club.” Today is the first time it occurred to me that I could just look it up:
History of Club Sandwich
