The Way I Heard It with Mike Rowe - 133: Call It What You Will

Episode Date: May 1, 2019

It's difficult to describe the chaos of an unpredictable world--but Peter sure tried.

This is the way I heard it. Peter stood dumbstruck in the doorway of the bathroom, searching for just the right word. Gastly, came to mind, followed in no particular order by graphic, grizzly, and gruesome. Seated on the bathroom floor in a puddle of his own blood was Peter's uncle, Sir Samuel Romilly. Moments earlier, the two men had been in the study discussing Peter's treasure house when Sir Romilly rose from the couch, walked into the bathroom. bathroom picked up a straight razor and dragged the blade across his throat. Dear God, what have you done? cried Peter, running to his uncle's side. The answer was self-evident. Samuel Romilly had severed his carotid artery along with his

windpipe. Heartbroken by the death of his beloved wife three days earlier, the poor man had entered a state of bottomless grief, or maybe something more than grief, despair, perhaps, or devastation or despondency. Call it what you will. The mental anguish was more than he could bear, and now Peter could only watch as his uncle tried to scribble his final thoughts onto a piece of bloody stationary.

My dear, he wrote, I wish. But Samuel Romilly couldn't find the right words. He just sat there, staring at the blank page, bleeding all over the bathroom. room floor. Minutes later, he died in his nephew's arms. Peter was no longer dumbstruck. He'd moved on to traumatized, non-plussed, gobsmacked. So he did what he always did when the chaos of an unpredictable world threatened to overwhelm him. He walked back to his study, opened his

treasure house, and started writing. Two years later, sitting alone in the gloom of his parlor, Peter was once again searching for just the right word. Was he depressed? Probably. With a schizophrenic grandmother, a paranoid mother, a bipolar sister, an overly anxious daughter, and of course a suicidal uncle, Peter knew that melancholyer ran in his family. But to what degree was he afflicted? Was he clinically depressed or merely down in the dumps?

Was he disheartened or disenchanted, dismayed, or? or demoralized. Would he eventually succumbed to the same darkness that took his uncle? Call it what you will, as Peter pondered, the precise nature of his malaise, his enwee, his lugubriosity. He couldn't help but notice that the wheels on the carriages, passing by his window, appeared to be breaking the laws of physics, at least when viewed through the slats of his partially opened shutters. interesting. After much observation and careful thought, Peter concluded that his eye was retaining the image of the spokes, a fraction of a second, after the slats in the shutters interrupted the rotation of the wheel, thereby creating the illusion that the spokes themselves were moving backwards.

Hmm, that was more than interesting. That was intriguing, titillating, maybe even metamorphic. Call it what you will. Peter was definitely onto something. So once again he consulted his treasure house, considerably thicker than it was two years ago, and began to write a detailed analysis of what he'd just observed. He called it explanation of an optical deception in the appearance of the spokes of a wheel when seen through vertical apertures. Not exactly the title of a bestseller, but Peter wasn't trying to publish a novel. He was just trying to explain the chaos of an unpredictable world. The result?

Hundreds of scholarly papers on countless natural phenomena. In this case, a detailed explanation of the defect in the human retina that came to be known as persistence of vision, a principle that explains the illusion of motion, a principle that led Peter to fabricate a prototype, a prototype with a shutter similar to the shutter that hung in Peter's parlor, and an aperture similar to the window from which his shutter hung. I suppose I could now say, that's the way I heard it, and direct your attention to Tinseltown, where the name of the man most responsible for creating the motion,

picture camera is honored with a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame. But I can't, because ironically, or perhaps paradoxically, or better yet, unjustly, Peter's name isn't there. Nor is it in the halls of NASA, even though he invented the slide rule, a mathematical breakthrough that allowed us to get a man on the moon. Nor is it on the aquifers of London, even though he invented the slide rule, a mathematical breakthrough that allowed us to get a man on the moon. even though he found a way to purify Britain's drinking water. Nor is his name on the facades of hospitals, even though he is primarily responsible for the development of general anesthesia. Nor is Peter's name on the cover of the Encyclopedia Britannica,

even though his hundreds of scholarly papers on countless natural phenomena can be found therein, no less than 300,000 words. all written by Peter, words that attempted to explain the chaos of an unpredictable world. Point is, we don't remember this prodigy, this polymath, this pansofic for his incredible list of accomplishments, nor for his contribution to the world's most famous encyclopedia. No, we remember him for his incredible list of words. Specifically, the list of words he compulsory. compiled to combat the depression that perpetually plagued him. Words whose early assemblage began as a unique form of therapy, but whose ultimate congregation went on to become an eponymous compilation

of rhetorical replacements, a compilation that went on to sell no less than 40 million copies over the next two centuries. I refer, of course, to that indispensable directory, of dialectical determination destined to dramatically increase the word count of every term paper ever written, while helping millions of aspiring writers prove conclusively that alliteration almost always annoys. I'm talking about an unparalleled linguistic lineup of syntactical substitutes, a most crucial compendium of etymological options, a singular source of all things synonymous, conceived in serendipity, and dedicated to the proposition that no crossword puzzle should ever go, unfinished.

Call it what you will. The reverse dictionary wouldn't be on your bookshelf today or on your computer, but for the grief-stricken uncle who died, searching for the right words, and his melancholy nephew, who never stopped collecting them. a remarkable collection that Peter Roge called his treasure house, or if you prefer the Latin, his thesaurus. Anyway, that's the way I heard it.