A classic Calvin & Hobbes, forwarded by Mr B:

I learned a lot during the first 35 years of my life. I’ve spent most of the past 5 years doing a lot of unlearning.

Here’s a historical corrective worth passing along:

On January 26, 1893, Abner Doubleday died in Mendham, New Jersey. In 1905, Albert J. Spalding, a former player turned sporting goods manufacturer, established a commission to investigate the origins of baseball. After two years of questionable study (and primarily on the basis of unsubstantiated testimony from an elderly man of doubtful sanity), the commission concluded that Abner Doubleday formulated the essential rules of baseball in 1839 in Cooperstown, New York (the current home of the Baseball Hall of Fame). Even though scholars have totally discredited the claim (Doubleday’s own obituary says he disliked outdoor sports), the myth lives on. In his 1973 book “The Man Who Invented Baseball,” Harold Peterson expressed it all in a beautiful example of chiasmus:

“Abner Doubleday didn’t invent baseball,
baseball invented Abner Doubleday.”

That’s from the weekly newsletter I get from www.DrMardy.com, a website “for lovers of wit and wordplay,” which was recommended to me by a lover of chiasmus.

I just got my first monthly newsletter from Merriam-Webster, included in which was a list of the most frequently looked-up words of December 2007. The one I didn’t know was …

That image is from the dictionary that comes with OS X. It doesn’t quite capture the feel of the word. Here’s Merriam-Webster:

Main Entry: peck·sniff·ian

Pronunciation: ()pek|snifn
Function: adjective
Usage: often capitalized
Etymology: Seth Pecksniff + English -ian
: marked by unctuous hypocrisy : selfish and corrupt behind a display of seeming benevolence : SANCTIMONIOUS, HOLIER-THAN-THOU <pecksniffian cant> <legislation designed to correct injustice and to translate pecksniffian phrases into living realities — Nation> <a censorship that is … pecksniffian suppression — Springfield (Massachusetts) Union>

Seth Pecksniff, by the way, is one of the characters in Charles Dickens’s Martin Chuzzlewit, someone memorable enough for an eponym, but not, apparently, for his own page at Wikipedia (unlike many other Dickensian characters).

Why was pecksniffian one of the most frequently looked-up words last month? According to the newsletter, it’s because the word “was used by Bill O’Reilly a few times last year, and his use caused the word to spike in the daily list of words that are looked up online.”

You may think I’m highlighting this particular word as a comment on recent rumblings in This Movement of Ours. Maybe I just think it’s a useful word.