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| A Few Words With the "Know-It-All" |
What could be more interesting than listening to a book talk from a man who knows it all? Watching him pit his knowledge against a room full of third graders! This happened when Adam Schoenberg’s uncle, AJ Jacobs, came to present a book talk. Jacobs, author of The Know-It-All, wrote the book to chronicle his quest to read the entire Encyclopedia Britannica. He got the idea to do this from his father, who had made the attempt many years before only to give up at “Borneo.” Wanting to better his father, he spent about six hours a day for a year and a half reading. And that’s a lot of reading when you consider that the Britannica has “33,000 pages, 44 million words, and 10 billion years of history.”
Jacobs tried to take his newfound knowledge on the road, by becoming a contestant on “Who Wants to Be a Millionaire.” After making it to the $32,000 question, he used a lifeline and still incorrectly defined the word “erythrocyte,” which are blood cells used to carry oxygen from the lungs to the body. Though this was a disappointment for Jacobs as the “know-it-all” not to “know-it-all,” his efforts still impressed and inspired the class. Posted December 3, 2004
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The students were well prepared, knowing that the first word is “a-ak” and the last “Zywiec,” but they were stumped when it came to knowing the longest word, “Pneumonultramicroscopicsilicovolcanoc-oniosis,” which is 43 letters long! On the other hand, they were extremely impressed that their science teacher, Warren Young, not only knew how to pronounce the word, but also knew what it meant—a term to describe a respiratory illness caused by quartz dust.
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A Few Words With the "Know-It-All"