Anonyponymous (3 page)

die·sel
n. 1. A type of fuel. 2. An engine designed to run
on said fuel. 3. A rusting, homely, hard-to-start car from
the 1970s.

For those of you who blame 9/11 on George Bush and believe the Kennedy assassination was orchestrated by the military-industrial complex, I present to you Rudolf Diesel.

In 1897, Diesel unveiled a 25-horsepower engine revolutionary in its simplicity and superior efficiency. Diesel engines soon were everywhere, and Rudolf became wealthy off the royalties. Although he had investigated fuel sources such as ammonia steam, coal dust, and vegetable oil, Diesel settled on liquid petroleum to power his creation. However, at the 1900 World’s Fair in Paris a diesel engine was run using peanut oil, a demonstration commissioned by the French, who were lacking in oil fields but had peanuts in abundance. Nothing came of the experiment, but in 1912 Diesel reflected back on the event, drawing conclusions that sound shockingly modern.

The fact that fat oils from vegetable sources can be used may
seem insignificant today, but such oils . . . make it certain that
motor-power can still be produced from the heat of the sun,
which is always available for agricultural purposes, even when
all our natural stores of solid and liquid fuels are exhausted.

A year later, Diesel was dead. Was it an accident, suicide, or assassination? Here are the facts:

On September 29, 1913, Diesel boarded an overnight boat from Antwerp to London and was last seen going on deck around ten P.M. When attendants came to his cabin at six fifteen the next morning to wake him, the engineer was gone, his bed not slept in. Ten days later, Diesel’s bloated body was found floating in the English Channel. The official cause of death was accidental drowning, but Diesel had suffered from mental breakdowns and economic setbacks, so suicide seemed a plausible alternative. Conspiracies, however, were shouted immediately across newspaper headlines. The British Secret Service murdered him to steal U-boat secrets, they said, or the Germans did him in to protect those secrets, or—most tantalizingly—the assassination was carried out by the titans of the oil trusts out of fear Diesel would put them out of business.

Here’s to hoping that his engine—or something else— soon does.

BREEDS APART

Jack Russell was called the Sporting Parson because, while he may have been a reverend, his true calling was the hunt. Back in his final year at Oxford, Russell came across a milkman with his doggie in tow, a white terrier with charming tan spots about her eyes and ears. Smitten, Russell bought little Trump on the spot. To his delight, Trump made a splendid hunting companion, gifted especially in rooting foxes out of their dens, and he used her to mother the breed that would take his name. The Jack Russell exemplifies all things terrier—tenacity, feisty aggressiveness, and intelligence— and takes those traits to the extreme.

Louis Dobermann wanted an extreme sort of dog himself—extremely terrifying. Dobermann’s motives were partly professional, the industrious German being a night watchman and tax collector, dangerous jobs both. However, it was in his third capacity, as town dogcatcher, that he had access to the breeds he needed to get the right mix of temperament, appearance, and that all-important size. It is unknown exactly which breeds Dobermann made use of, but somewhere in the genetic stew were the German pinscher, German shepherd, Great Dane, and rottweiler, which should give you some idea of the kind of animal he was aiming for. The result of Dobermann’s efforts was Bismarck, the ultimate Hund from Hell, a black bitch whose offspring were a major hit with the German people.

Draco was an Athenian lawmaker who drew up a seriously nasty penal code sometime around 621 B.C. The crotchety Draco was pro–death penalty to the extreme: Among qualifying offenses under his edicts were murder, treason, sacrilege, petty theft, and “idleness.” When questioned if maybe death wasn’t a bit too harsh for petty crimes, Draco reportedly said the
real
shame was that he couldn’t prescribe anything worse for the bigger ones.

Draco’s laws were posted for all to see on
axones
, wooden pyramids that spun around like magazine racks. For people to know what the laws even were was an innovation back then, let alone to have them written down. This benevolent reform notwithstanding, Draco and his laws were intensely hated.

dunce
n. A dullard; a dolt; a dum-dum. Duh.

John Duns Scotus was a Scottish theologian and one the most influential thinkers of the Middle Ages. An ardent follower of Saint Francis, Duns Scotus spent his career at the universities of Oxford, Paris, and Cologne. He provided the definitive argument on the then culture-war issue of the Immaculate Conception, after which it became Catholic dogma that Mary was conceived without sin. For his delicately shaded approach to this and similar difficult issues he earned the nickname Doctor Subtilis, and his theories held sway from his 1308 death through the end of the Middle Ages.

Duns Scotus’s followers, the Scotists, dominated theology until another gang of scholars, the Thomists (after Thomas Aquinas), encroached on their turf. These new philosophers ridiculed the hairsplitting sophistry of Dr. Subtilis and his Dunsmen, who were impervious to learning anything new and different. The Scotists reacted reactionarily, resisting any change that threatened their preeminence. But their creed lost cred, and in the intellectual rumble of the Renaissance the elegant theories of Duns Scotus were knifed on account of his blockhead followers, and so to be called a dunce became the worst insult a would-be man of letters could receive, the irony of which would have been painfully obvious to Dr. Subtilis, if not the Dunsmen themselves.
*

frick and frack
n. 1. A closely linked or inseparable pair.
2. A couple of morons.

The Ice Follies was the original skating extravaganza, having among its galaxy of stars such luminaries as the British beauty Belita, Richard “Mr. Debonair” Dwyer, and the Swiss skating duo Werner Groebli and Hans-Rudi Mauch, better known as Frick and Frack. Something like Siegfried and Roy with a sense of humor, in their signature move the “Clown Kings of the Ice” would skate at each other full steam and then, just as they were about to collide, short, stocky Frack would slide through the legs of tall, lanky Frick.

It brought down the house every time.

Frick and Frack got their shot at Hollywood stardom in 1943’s
Silver Skates
, a movie about a traveling ice show facing bankruptcy, and the following year’s
Lady, Let’s
Dance
, an ice-skating musical. (Note that a lot of actors—and screenwriters—were off fighting a war at the time.)

Frack was forced to retire in the mid-fifties due to health problems, but Groebli skated on for decades as Mr. Frick, delighting generations with his patented “cantilever spread eagle” trick.

fris·bee
n. A spinning circular disk used as a recreational
device.

In the 1930s, a couple of drunk Yale students munched down a pie and started playing catch with the leftover tin plate. The game took off, and soon the whole campus was eating pies and playing the new sport. Their pastry of choice was made by Mrs. Frisbie’s Pies of Bridgeport, although it’s unknown whether this preference speaks to the quality of her pastry or the aerodynamics of her tins, which came embossed with the company name. To signal the receiver that a flying object was coming at his head (which, being drunk, he might not notice), the thrower would yell “Frisbie!” the way a soldier shouts “Incoming!”

Mrs. Mary Frisbie was likely amused by this tossing around of her plates; certainly, her bakeries were selling a lot of pies—eighty thousand a day in 1956. On the other side of the country there was a guy who would’ve envied her: Fred Morrison had created a disk designed
specifically
for flying, but no one was buying them. Trying to cash in on the UFO craze, Morrison released the Pipco Flyin-Saucer, then the Pluto Platter, which caught the eyes of the Wham-O corporation. Wham-O had recently created the biggest fad America had ever seen, the Hula Hoop, selling twenty-five million units in four months. They purchased Morrison’s designs, realizing why success had eluded him: His names all stunk. They soon learned there was already a better name for a flying disk—Frisbie—in a place where the sport was wildly popular. Wham-O decided to call their plastic version the same thing, but to trademark the name they changed the spelling to Frisb
ee
. (Very tricky.)

The Frisbee wound up being Wham-O’s most popular and enduring product, but the word
frisbee
—however it’s spelled—rightfully belongs to us all, or at the very least to those of us who have ever played it wasted on the quad.

gal·va·nize
v. To shock or arouse into action.

Luigi Galvani was a physician living in Bologna whose two seemingly diverse interests, physiology and electricity, combined into one after a spectacular accident.

One fine day in 1781, an assistant of the doc’s touched a metal scalpel lightly to a nerve in the hip of a frog Galvani had dissected and, to his amazement, the dead amphibian’s leg violently sprang to life. The other assistant swore it happened at the same moment he was cranking up sparks in the doc’s nearby electricity machine. They called their boss over, and, with Galvani wielding the scalpel, managed to repeat the effect. The “wonderful phenomenon” caused a brainstorm in Galvani. (The same assistant later stuck his chocolate bar into the doc’s peanut butter by mistake, but Galvani failed to see the possibilities of that
delizioso
combination.)