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I was waiting for my next class in hallway of the law building with a couple of friends when a disheveled looking man approached. He carried a backpack over his shoulder and wore a very wrinkled and ill-fitting hawaiian shirt and shorts -- at a time of year when it was too cold to be wearing shorts. He had messy bleached blonde hair and the face of a man who had lived much longer and much harder than me. I wondered if he was homeless and had wandered into the building.

He stopped in front of us and said hello and looked around a little bit and then asked if we were good with words. His voice was slightly high pitched -- borderline feminine -- and mixed with a mild southern accent. I was still confused. Maybe he was drunk. Maybe he just wanted someone to talk to.

Were we good with words? It was an ambiguous question, so we gave ambiguous answers:

"I don't know,"

"Depends,"

"Not really,"

Then he asked if we knew the definition of a word I had never heard.

We all kind of shrugged our shoulders and told him we didn't know. So he gave us his theory about what the word might have meant -- using linguistic terms I didn't understand -- and then he left the building.

"Who was that?"

"I don't know."

"You think he's a student?"

"I doubt it."

"Never seen him before."

"Unusual looking guy, for sure."


Two years later Spencer told me that his brilliant, quirky, extreme liberal, homosexual professor had taken a playful liking to him and offered to instruct him (and a friend) in a one credit directed reading. The text would be Fowler's Modern English Usage Dictionary and the assignment would be to pick out ten words for each session and do a short write up for discussion. I figured it would be fun, so I signed up.

We scheduled to meet at a local coffee shop. When Spencer and I arrived, he noticed the professor sitting there and said, "Oh, he beat us here."

Guess who it was.


In addition to learning the difference between "effect" and "affect", and that the word "beneath" is often misused, we enjoyed simply hearing the professor's take on things. He had lived an interesting life.

Towards the end of our last session, we got into a discussion that led him suggest The New Yorker as further reading. I had never read it before, but I gave it a shot, and since then it has become my favorite magazine --- even though I don't care much for their poetry, fiction, or humor, and I don't necessarily agree with their political and economic op-eds (even though they're always very well written.)

Ok,, wow, as you can tell from the title of this post, I just signed on to post a link to a story I especially enjoyed in the New Yorker today. And it turned into this. What was the point? I don't know. Don't judge a book by its cover? Read New Yorker non-fiction? I am long winded?

Anyway, here's the story.


Also, if anyone has any non-fiction book recommendations, I'd love to get them.