Wicked: Questioning what we know

As a frequent Metropolitan Opera goer, I haven't gotten out to see many Broadway shows in recent years. So I was delighted to catch up with the performance of Wicked during its latest Columbus run. While not the same caliber experience as the opening cast on Broadway, the touring company versions we get here compare well to the later casts of long-running shows in NYC. Wicked was no exception: bright, energetic, entertaining, with an appreciative audience; it made for a very enjoyable evening.

Wicked is currently the longest-running show on Broadway (it opened in Oct. 2003). I wanted to see it mainly to learn the backstory it presented to The Wizard of Oz. For those who haven't seen it, Wicked tells the Oz story from the perspective of the Wicked Witch of the West. We learn how the Cowardly Lion, Tin Man, and Scarecrow came to be as well as many other aspects of the story that, thanks to Judy Garland, is so well known to all of us.

While I was being entertained by the show, songs, and story, I kept thinking how we grow up thinking of history in one way. Of course, The Wizard of Oz is fiction, not real history. But Wicked asks us think whether the story we know so well is what really happened.

So while I was watching and listening, I thought about Josephine Tey's book The Daughter of Time and learning at Cornell several years ago what the study of history is all about. (See my prior blog: Why Study History?) In her book, Tey turns around the story of King Richard III and asks the reader to question whether history's view of the wicked hunchbacked Richard portrayed by Shakespere in his play (and by Lawrence Olivier on the screen), is really accurate. History, after all, is written by the victors, and in Richard III's case, depicting Richard as wicked served the purposes of the succeeding Tudor dynasty. Tey raises her question, though, through a fictional mystery story, much as Dan Brown raised his question, 52 years later, on Jesus Christ's real relationship with Mary Magdalene in his wildly popular The Da Vinci Code.

A more direct history vs. history challenge has been raised by Gavin Menzies in his book 1421: The Year China Discovered the World in which Menzies challenges the story American schoolchildren have learned for generations: that the European explorers starting with Christopher Columbus discovered the sea routes that led to the Americas, Africa, and Asia. The romantic history we were taught is that Columbus and other Europeans were so bold that they questioned the flat earth notions of the time. Menzies reveals documentary and other evidence that Chinese Admiral Zheng He led Ming Dynasty treasure ships around the world in and after the year 1421 and prepared maps that reflected the world - maps that ultimately Columbus and the other European explorers had seen that helped them in their voyages.

American education has long been criticized as being far too Euro-centric. My purpose in this blog entry isn't to carry on that debate (I'll leave that issue to a future blog), but to raise the issue of questioning what we know.

Questioning what we know can be a dangerous pursuit. Neil deGrasse Tyson, director of the Hayden Planetarium at the American Museum of Natural History,  wrote of the slings and arrows he suffered in questioning what we all think we know in his book and PBS show The Pluto Files. When Tyson and other astronomers downgraded Pluto's status from "planet" to "Kuiper Belt Object" he and his colleagues were vilified by the venerable NY Times and scores of third-graders (at least until the Times published another story, 5 years later, acknowledging the reasonable position the scientists had taken). So many of us learned (and had drilled into us) the fact that there are 9 planets in our solar system; that history must be respected and protected. As one who once aspired to be an astronomer myself, my sympathies are with Tyson. But the reasons for my sympathies go further.

One of the fundamental purposes of post-secondary education is to develop critical thinking. But thinking critically about issues - whether they be about stories, histories, or the definition of scientific terms such as "planet" - is not merely an intellectual ability. Critical thinking is also a disposition: a willingness to undertake the hard work of questioning what we are being presented with. Such disposition does not come naturally after 12 or so years of elementary and secondary school education in the U.S., since much of what we learn in school is so often presented as unquestioned fact to be accepted and memorized.

With the continually growing volume of factionalized political argument we are faced with, the future of our democratic system of government and the future of our country depend on our ability to instill more Americans with the ability and disposition to think critically about the "facts" we are presented with and the choices we are being asked to make. I am delighted that a Broadway show might get some in the audience to question what they know and so help underscore the importance of critical thinking.

Collective Nouns ("Terms of Venery")

My friend Kaity Tong's blog (Are YOU Smarter Than a Sixth Grader?) got me to look deeper into collective nouns. We all know that we refer to a group of fish as a "school" and a group of elephants as a "herd." Well, what do you call a group of crows? Kaity's 6th grader knew: it's "a murder of crows."

Where did such terms come from - and why are they needed?

Intrigued, I immediately Googled "collective nouns" and found numerous listings. I eventually found a reference to James Lipton's book An Exaltation of Larks and quickly borrowed a copy from my local library (as a user, I can attest that the Columbus Metropolitan Library has earned its rating as #1 public library system in the U.S.). In this wonderful book, Lipton describes his research into these terms and provides almost 1200 of them - the most definitive list I've come across - with some of their origins.

Lipton advocates calling such descriptors of groups of things "terms of venery," noting that "collective nouns" would be a misnomer, confusing them with words such as "majority" (and committee, team, family, etc.). He justifies "venery" from its etymology signifying "the hunt" and this is where such descriptors originated in the English language: from books of the 1400s, The Egerton Manuscript (1450) and The Book of St. Albans (1486), that provided the earliest surviving lists of these terms and these related primarily to game animals, though also to people and 15th century life. He also described the 15th century as a period in which the English language exploded with new words, providing a new descriptive richness to the language.

Some terms have become so idiomatic, they don't sound like collective nouns. A litter of pups. A month of Sundays. A mountain of debt. A hill of beans. A head of steam. A can of worms. A baptism of fire. An embarrassment of riches.

So that's where these terms came from. Why were they needed? Why isn't "group" enough of a modifier to describe any collection of objects? Since most of these terms of venery are unique to their objects, aren't they superfluous?

Alas, here Lipton provides less information (and my Google search provided nothing more). He cites Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (1906) suggesting "for every collection of beasts ... there is their own private name so that none may be confused with another." Closer to the period of their origin, in the 1400s, inventing terms of venery had become a somewhat of a game and of social commentary. (A rascal of boys. A gaggle of women. A pontificality of prelates. A blast of hunters. A drift of fishermen.) Not knowing the correct term was an indication of ones lack of education and breeding. (What would you think of someone who referred to "a school of elephants?")

Lipton himself advocates use of such terms to retain the beauty and richness of the English language - the essence of poetry. Terms of venery illuminate the object to which they refer - they "add something to the equation." Lipton points out that Shakespere's The Comedy of Errors is a group term, as is "a sea of troubles" (Hamlet, Act III, Sc. 1). He notes "the poet came up with a more imaginative term" and cites a couple of dozen other terms in publications from the Bible to New York Magazine in which authors have continued to play the Game of Venery. (George Plimpton: An om of Buddhists. Neil Simon: A mews of cathouses. Kurt Vonnegut: A phalanx of flashers. And the unattributed: An obstinacy of buffaloes. A tower of giraffes. A pomp of Pekingese. A wobble of bicycles. A dawdling of waiters. A mass of Bostonians. A spread of Texans. An upyours of New Yorkers.)

It is these newer, unfamiliar venerial terms that trouble me. While they are clever, I have difficulty envisioning them becoming so popular that they will eventually become a natural part of speech. And this brings me back to my "why" question. While Lipton decries - as do I - the dumbing down of Americans and the loss of English literacy, given the losing battles of over grammar, usage, and spelling, will the public suffer the need to memorize further peculariarities of the English language for the sake of advancing the poetry of the language?

To go further, into territory only obliquely mentioned in Lipton's book: How extensively do other languages employ terms of venery?

In the very little Chinese I learned as a child, I recall that there are such terms in the Chinese language. These "modifiers" typically accompany the noun and often refer to quantity or measure. There's a generic modifier ("ge"), but use of a modifier specific to the noun is far preferred. My mother cautioned me that to use "ge" instead of the specific modifier is a sign of lack of education. As an American-born Chinese, learning Chinese was tough enough without having to learn a gaggle of modifying terms! Perhaps that's why I gave up studying Chinese (much to my later regret).

So there's an answer parallel with the English "why" question: to indicate degree of education. But the Chinese language has a much more fundamental reason for having such modifiers. Because Chinese is a largely monosylabic language, so many Chinese words sound like other Chinese words with completely different meanings (homonyms). Using modifiers helps distinguish among the many objects that would otherwise sound like other objects. As in the rest of the Chinese language, the context in which a word appears with other words helps the listener interpret what is being said. Hence, there's a very good reason why the Chinese language needs terms of venery.

But in English, words for objects don't often sound like other such words, so avoiding confusion isn't a good justification for adding complexity to the language. At this point, I can only speculate as to other reasons. English, as a relatively young language, may have borrowed the use of modifiers such as terms of venery from other languages. Lipton acknowledges such borrowing in his book, citing examples of words borrowed from the French. Going deeper then, how widely do Latin and Greek (the basis of most English words) and other world languages (from which the English may have borrowed) use terms of venery? I have no idea, but I now have a new topic of discussion for future cocktail parties in which I might find myself in the company of a babel of foreign language scholars. Hoorah!

Why Study History?

In this time of concern for getting a good job after graduation, can there be any less useful college major than history? (Alas, "this time" has been around for generations.) My exposure to history majors at Cornell profoundly disavowed me of this opinion decades ago.

One of my good friends in my Cornell MBA program, Bill, had been a history major at Cornell College ("the other Cornell," as he was proud to say.) We had very good times together in our two years in Ithaca and I wasn't surprised that Bill did well after graduation, ending up working for a Chicago bank. He moved into managing bonds, and has been responsible for investing bond funds worth billions of dollars. "What did history have to do with the bond market?" I wondered. At reunions, I discussed this question with Bill and learned that in studying history, Bill had developed the ability and skill of reading voraciously, analyzing masses of data, and projecting likely outcomes, given past experiences. Bill's success in business demonstrates the wisdom of the George Santayana aphorism "Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it."

Indeed, in this troubling time of dealing with the excesses of the sub-prime mortgage debacle, some of us ask how this is any different from the past debacles of derivatives, savings and loan deregulation, and junk bonds. Perhaps those who studied history concluded they could repeat the financial killings some had made in those markets by just changing the details of the type of investment, hoping that government regulators hadn't studied enough history to see parallels and the inevitable consequences.

Another revelation on what the study of history really is about came during the inauguration activities for Cornell University's then-new president, Hunter Rawlings, who is a classicist. One of the inaugural sessions I attended was entitled "What is a Classicist?" In that session classicists were described as scholars specializing in ancient Greek and Roman history. But contrary to my impression that historians merely memorized dates and facts about past eras, I learned that the study of history is about discovering what actually happened in the past. The session painted a picture for me of historians being Sherlock Holmes-type characters, piecing together disparate hints and clues to form hypotheses to fill in the blanks. As a Sherlock Holmes fan - and today, loving the TV series House, MD for his ability to do the same in the medical field - had I been taught history beyond the boring rote memorization of dates and facts, I may have become fascinated by history and pursued its study. [On making this observation at the Rawlings inaugural, someone recommended a little novel to me: Josephine Tey's The Daughter of Time. It's a wonderful history mystery!]

Of course, history courses in our school curriculum are there to develop memorization abilities in students. But just as the purpose of math courses go beyond enabling students merely to "do math" (see my blog "Why Study Algebra"), history courses go further to teach students about relationships and consequences - what happened because a combination of events, decisions, or circumstances occurred. Ultimately, history teaches its students about beliefs of people in their age and environment.

Having been such a poor student of history, I can now relate to the importance that we all develop the skills related to the higher order study of history. There are other ways to develop these skills. But it's important that we recognize that because of our own lack of success in studying certain subjects in our typical education curricula, we may keep setting ourselves up for the recurrence of major problems in our own history.