Listen to this episode and get links about some of the topics therein at theallusionist.org/lemon-demon
This is the Allusionist, in which I, Helen Zaltzman, try to remember what people used language for before they used it to talk about air fryers all the time.
This is another instalment in our Word Play miniseries; coming up next episode are some fresh adventures in crosswords, but today we have someone who creates word puzzles, solves word puzzles, is a historian of word puzzles, and sometimes even turns his life into a puzzle.
Content note: there are mentions of guns, historical punishments and violence, vomiting, and drunkenness. There are also a couple of category A swears, and some category C swears.
On with the show.
AJ JACOBS: I can't cover all of my views, various identities and sides, but I will boil it down to: I'm A. J. Jacobs. I'm a non-fiction writer and podcaster. I like to take on life experiments and do weird things for a month, a year, and then write about them and what I’ve learned, so the reader can hopefully have an entertaining time and learn a little something and they don't have to grow a huge beard like I did for the Bible.
HZ: Growing the huge beard seems maybe milder than some of the other things that you've put yourself through.
AJ JACOBS: That is true. That was more of a problem for my wife, who really hated it. She did not kiss me for seven months. But sure, yeah, even in that project, which was about following the rules of the Bible as literally as possible: even that one had things like stoning adulterers - which I did try to do, but I used very small stones, I used pebbles. But still, even with pebbles, it is an awkward interaction, stoning an adulterer.
HZ: Yeah, I don’t think I would like to be on either end of that interaction. Have there been any ideas for life experiments that even you thought, “Absolutely not”?
AJ JACOBS: Oh, absolutely. One thing I love is I get suggestions from readers; one of the common ones was people said, I should try to be the greatest lover in the world and do all the positions of the Kama Sutra. And I did bring it up with my wife and she said, “Absolutely not. That is a terrible idea.” And I have to be, I'm on her side. I'm past the age where that would be fun and it might be dangerous for my back.
HZ: And also it's a team effort, really. It's not a solo endeavour to be the greatest lover.
AJ JACOBS: That is a great point. Exactly. It would have to be co-written with my wife, and she had no interest. So, I leave that to a younger couple of whatever, or throuple.
HZ: Whatever configuration.
AJ JACOBS: Exactly, whatever works.
HZ: AJ also hosts the Puzzler podcast, a daily dose of games in audio form.
AJ JACOBS: I still don't consider myself a brilliant puzzle maker. I don't think I'm masochistic - I am masochistic. I'm not sadistic enough to be a great maker, because those people just are really fine with letting people suffer.
HZ: Yeah, you gotta be hungry for that. It's got to feed your soul.
AJ JACOBS: Oh my god - I gained so much respect, because I did a book about puzzles, so I spent two years talking to the greatest puzzle makers of all kinds, crosswords, jigsaws, mazes, whatever. And I just gained so much respect. I really do think it's an art.
HZ: Absolutely. I know this because I don't have it. I'm not good at creating a little suspense. I want everything to be very clear straight away, which is a boring puzzle.
AJ JACOBS: Yes. It is interesting because sometimes I feel when I am watching a romantic comedy, I have a lot of trouble with the suspense. I just want to know whether they get together in the third act. So I usually check Wikipedia, make sure they get together.
HZ: [whispers] So do I!
AJ JACOBS: You do?
HZ: Yes! Love a spoiler. It takes the stress out of it.
AJ JACOBS: That's interesting. All right. I think we're in the minority, though, because my friends and family think that that is just outrageous.
HZ: That’s their opinion.
AJ JACOBS: But I'm so glad you're on my side.
HZ: AJ’s book about puzzles is called The Puzzler: One Man’s Quest to Solve the Most Baffling Puzzles Ever, From Crosswords to Jigsaws to the Meaning of Life - no biggie then. For the book, AJ researched the history of many kinds of puzzles, such as mazes and jigsaws and sudoku, and word puzzles including crosswords and anagrams.
AJ JACOBS: Anagrams are some of the oldest types of puzzles, and anagrams, of course, are when you rearrange the letters in a word to make another word or another phrase, and they have been around since ancient times, but they weren't for fun. Before they were seen as something fun to do, an amusement, they were seen as divine omens, that there was deep hidden meaning in the fact that he rearranged the words. And in fact, an anagram caused at least one war that I know of. And that was: Alexander the Great had a dream -
HZ: Uh oh!
AJ JACOBS: Yeah. He didn't need much excuse to start a war, but this was his excuse this time. He had a dream where, which was about the mythical character of the satyr, the half man half goat figure, and he said to his soothsayers that he had on staff, he said, “What does this mean? Why did I dream about a satyr?” And they wisely pointed out - in Greek, it doesn't quite work in English - in Greek, if you rearrange the letters of satyr, it spells the name of a city in the Middle East. Tyre is T Y R E is what it's called now, in Lebanon. So he's like, “Oh!” and they said, “That means you should probably invade Tyre.”
And he's like, “Okay, well, there it is, that’s science.” So they were seen as these messages from gods; and I still do believe humans love to find hidden meanings where there are none, seeing signal in noise. So that was just one example. So I'm going to stick with the spelling bee where I don't see a deeper meaning in it, but it can still be a pure joy to rearrange letters.
HZ: Less of a pure joy if anagrams land you in legal trouble.
AJ JACOBS: Anagrams played a part in a trial, sort of a witch trial in the 1600s in the UK. And it was a woman who was put on trial for claiming that she was a prophet. Part of her proof was that if you rearrange the letters in her name - her name was Eleanor Davies - if you rearrange it, then it says, ‘Reveal, O Daniel’, as in the prophet Daniel. I don't believe that that was proof she was a prophet.
HZ: But supposedly Eleanor Davies did correctly foretell the deaths of the Archbishop of Canterbury, the Duke of Buckingham and King Charles I, and her own husband. These predictions made a lot of powerful people quite peeved with her, although so did her critiques of the church and the monarchy, in some seventy pamphlets she published during the last 27 years of her life, often illegally printed according to the law in England at the time; and these plus other acts of protest got her sent repeatedly to prison and Bedlam mental hospital. She used anagrams, so the powers that be used anagrams against her.
AJ JACOBS: They came down on her hard in the trial, so they said, “If you rearrange” - her married name was Dame Eleanor Davies - “and you rearrange those letters, it spells ‘Never So Mad A Lady;.” So like, “she's so crazy.” So that was how she was convicted. And by the way, that was when anagrams were easier, because there were so many spellings.
HZ: That’s convenient.
AJ JACOBS: In this ‘Never So Mad A Lady’, they spelled 'So' S O E. So anagrams, I feel, it was easier before spelling was regulated.
HZ: I'm surprised they didn't go for ‘devil’, because that's in Eleanor Davies without too much contortion.
AJ JACOBS: Oh, that's true. Well, you could have been a good prosecutor in the 1600s.
HZ: I don’t know if I could have lived with myself. But I suppose you have like a hundred percent success rate if you're a prosecutor in the 1600s of witch trials.
AJ JACOBS: That is an easy job. I think you're absolutely right, unfortunately.
HZ: I don't feel like that is persuasive evidence in a court of law for either side.
AJ JACOBS: Yes. I would not go with that. Again, I'm a huge fan of anagrams, but in not in a legal or theological context.
HZ: Another interesting use of anagrams for official business four centuries ago was when scientists and astronomers made discoveries, and wanted to demonstrate they had been first to do it but they weren’t yet able to publish their results, they’d send each other anagrams of their discovery. Often these would be wordsmashes, dozens of letters long, and when the time was right they could unscramble it and say, “Look, I told you in the anagram that I’d discovered Saturn has rings.” Galileo Galilei was one for using this anagram tactic, although I find even his deanagrammed messages to be cryptically puzzling; and his frequent recipient Johannes Kepler unscrambled anagrams into the wrong solution for what Galileo intended, but what turned out to be a more scientifically correct one.
HZ: And whenabout did they start becoming less serious and more fun?
AJ JACOBS: Well, they certainly were in the Victorian era; the Victorians loved them more for sort of the sport of it. And the French - actually King Louis, I think it's King Louis XIII, had a royal professional anagrammer in the court.
HZ: Who was named Thomas Billon.
AJ JACOBS: That was a job. That was his full time job.
HZ: I wonder what the pay was like.
AJ JACOBS: Oh, it's 1200 livres a year. I don't know how much that is now.
HZ: About $15,000 modern American dollars; not great for a full time job. But it was part time? Or maybe all his living expenses were covered, and he got free wigs?
AJ JACOBS: But his job was to fashion out of the members of the court. And of course they were going to be sycophantic. They were not going to be like snarky anagrams.
HZ: Another thing that is used in word puzzles today that derived from more serious or practical uses was the rebus, using a symbol or picture to express a syllable, or the visual rendering of the letters adds to the interpretation of the word. Like if you were texting “Hey cutie” to someone in the form of a jpeg of John Constable’s hay wain followed by the letter Q and an emoji of a cup of tea. Rebuses were present in forms of writing from 5000 years ago; later, in medieval coats of arms, if your name was, for instance, Appleton, on your family crest there would be apples, and you’d paint that on your armour so you were identifiable in battle. A similar kind of visual pun has been in use in Japan for hundreds of years and is still quite common today, particularly on products. And now we have rebus puzzles for fun; AJ Jacobs concocts audio rebuses, which he calls:
AJ JACOBS: Ear buses. So the way it works is I'm going to say a word in a certain tone of voice, or a tenor, or accent, and it's going to be a clue to a two-word phrase. So, for instance, if I said, “Tiiiiide [with rising inflection]”, that is a clue to “Rising tide”, because - thank you for laughing. That's a good sign.
Okay, you ready? I'm just going to give you couple.
AJ JACOBS: Bana. Na.
HZ: …Banana split.
AJ JACOBS: There it is.
HZ: Yes!
AJ JACOBS: Nailed it.
HZ: Very proud of myself.
AJ JACOBS: My accent may not be flawless on this one, so if you don't get it, then that's a good excuse. All right, you ready? [In a French accent.] “Dressing.” “Dressing.”
HZ: French dressing.
AJ JACOBS: That's it! Exactly. How about “Chamber, chamber, chamber, chamber…”
HZ: Echo chamber.
AJ JACOBS: Lovely. Exactly.
HZ: What a delight.
AJ JACOBS: Can I give you another type of puzzle real quick?
HZ: I’d be thrilled, yeah. I'm having a great time.
AJ JACOBS: Alright, well, this is eye rhymes. These are words that look like they should rhyme, but they don't. Spelling-wise, they look like they should rhyme. The word that has spawned the most eye rhymes is O U G H, that letter string O U G H.
HZ: We just throw it in to ruin the lives of people who are learning English.
AJ JACOBS: Oh, I know, I feel terrible for people learning English. There are at least 10 pronunciations of O U G H: tough, cough, bough, though, thought, through, hiccough - the original spelling of hiccup was hiccough; lough, if you're going with the Scottish. So if I gave you the clue, “Hard to chew, uncooked bread”, that would be “tough dough”, tough dough. But they're not all gonna be O U G H. I'm gonna move on from O U G H. They're all two word phrases. So for instance, what would be “sixty-minute sightseeing trip”? A sixty-minute sightseeing trip.
HZ: Oh! “Hour tour.”
AJ JACOBS: Exactly. How about an evil spirit in a yellow citrus fruit? An evil spirit hiding in a - it could happen.
HZ: Oh, “lemon demon”.
AJ JACOBS: Exactly.
HZ: That sounds cute.
AJ JACOBS: How about a a phantom that cannot find its way home? A poor phantom.
HZ: “Lost ghost”?
AJ JACOBS: Exactly. You got it.
HZ: It’s very evocative.
AJ JACOBS: It's true; it could be a poetry in its own right.
HZ: Made me think of that thing that Bernard Shaw wrote, you can spell out fish but it's spelled like G H O T I.
AJ JACOBS: Exactly, exactly. I love that. For the GH from tough and the O from women and the TI from nation and you get fish. Yeah, I love that one. English, I will say, the good part of how crazy our spelling is, is that it's great for word games. The bad part is pretty much everything else.
HZ: But look at you, turning a negative into at least a fun pastime.
AJ JACOBS: I do. Yes, there is a slight silver lining.
HZ: Yeah, you're really making word lemonade.
AJ JACOBS: Exactly. Although I have heard people point out that you can't turn your lemons into lemonade without - you need water and sugar. So it's not so easy.
HZ: No, I suppose you make like puzzle lemon juice, just neat. Which is also a useful substance to keep around.
AJ JACOBS: Right. Maybe it's more reframing that lemon juice can be delicious, instead of complaining about the lemon and trying to make lemonade. Just enjoy the bitter lemon.
HZ: Why do you think we are so drawn to patterns?
AJ JACOBS: Well, I think there is an evolutionary cause, there's the idea that if you hear a rustle in the grass, then you have to assume that it's a snake or a tiger, or else you would have been eaten. And so we are pattern-seeking machines, and in some cases that's great. Science is all about patterns and finding patterns. But then it has a huge downside, because we are overzealous in our obsession with patterns. So we find patterns like “the deep state is filled with paedophiles” when it's not. ‘Apophenia’ is the official psychological term for finding hidden meanings that do not exist. It’s double-edged sword. So you always have to be aware: look for patterns, but always be ready to reject them. Always be ready to reject your hypothesis. People talk about deep-seated beliefs; I love shallow-seated beliefs, so I'm open to evidence. I'm open to changing my mind. I love to change my mind.
HZ: The harder it was to find a pattern, the more tenuous what that pattern is telling you is.
AJ JACOBS: Right, yes, you get a certain thrill out of finding a pattern that no one else has found, but beware: the reason it might not have been found is because it doesn't exist.
HZ: But what if you're the one person that realises and then no one believes you?
AJ JACOBS: Well there you go: the double-edged sword. Then you just have to go and try to disprove it, disprove it; and if it gets stronger and stronger, then you come out and say, “looky here.”
HZ: A lot of internet pattern-seekers now, it's like they are all the judges at medieval witch trials, in that they can't be disproven.
AJ JACOBS: Oh, right. It is fascinating. I mean, the confirmation bias is so powerful, and I feel I've learned that more and more. And there was a quote, some poet -
HZ: William Blake.
AJ JACOBS: - he said, "We both read the Bible day and night. You see black and I see white." And I think that's a lovely poetic way of saying we are all so prone to confirmation bias.
I wrote that book about the Bible, and the point of that book, a lot of it was about to explore the different ways to interpret the Bible. So, there are those who are literalist and sort of frozen in time, what's the original meaning? And then there are those who say, "We have to make the meaning progress and evolve with the time." I had always thought, in America, we treat the Constitution in a very similar way, and there are those same two camps: people who say we should be frozen in time and focused on the original meaning, and those who say we should look to evolve the meaning with society. So I always thought I could do a book, The Year of Living Constitutionally. But it was on the back burner. Then a couple of years ago, we had the originalist majority on the Supreme Court, so this is the conservative majority that is very focused on the original meaning and history and tradition, and you had a couple of decisions, such as Dobbs on abortion rights and Bruin on guns, that were very reliant on this originalism.
And I said, okay, well, I think it's time for me to do the year of living constitutionally. So I am going to try to understand, I'm going to be the ultimate originalist, the original originalist, and I'm going to try to follow the constitution using the tools and mindset of when it was written in 1789. So I'm going to bear a musket on the Upper West Side of New York; I am going to give up social media, and write with a quill pen and distribute pamphlets as my First Amendment. I'm going to provide quarters for soldiers in my apartment, much to my wife's skepticism. And so I did, and it was fascinating, and I loved it and I learned a lot, and the point was: how should we interpret the Constitution and how can we save democracy? How can we be more optimistic that we can get through this existential crisis of democracy? And I did become a little more optimistic.
So it was a wonderful experience in the end. The 18th century was in many ways horrible. It was sexist, racist, homophobic, smelly, deadly... But that said, there are some aspects that I think are worth reviving. One of them is the idea of writing by hand. I wrote a lot of the book with a quill pen and ink; I will say, I loved it. I don't think you should have to write with a quill, but writing by hand, away from the dings and pings of the internet and the distraction, I really do think it helped me think more deeply, and I was more happy, more at peace with my thoughts, because I was able to dive in. So yes, I am a big fan of - I still am writing with quill. I'm actually signing all of the books with a quill pen.
HZ: I would hope.
AJ JACOBS: It seems right. It seems right. Commit to the bit, as my son says.
HZ: Do you have any tips for people who might want to write with quills? Because it's not the easiest writing implement.
AJ JACOBS: No, but I do recommend it. I am a vegetarian, so I feel a little bad.
HZ: You can get artificial quills, I think?
AJ JACOBS: Yeah, but also, maybe these are free range quills, is what I'm assuming.
HZ: I live in an area with a lot of geese, so there are a lot of goose discards around.
AJ JACOBS: Right. It's a goose discard. But you can also buy them and go on YouTube and learn how to carve them yourself, which I did. And then they're quite cheap, and you can buy these powdered inks that they'll send to you and you can make them.
HZ: Oooh, nice.
AJ JACOBS: And if you can afford it, there's some nicer paper, because regular paper, the ink sort of gets a little runny when you put it, so there's - they're not parchment. Parchment is actually animal skin, that is what The Constitution is written on. That is very expensive, so I don't imagine people will do that, but you can buy sort of higher end cotton rag paper. And it is just a lovely - I even love the sound of it, scratch, scratch, scratch, it's very ASMR. In fact, there are YouTube videos where it's just someone writing with a quill pen and it's for ASMR reasons. So I am a huge advocate, I would say; yeah, please, give it a shot.
HZ: Do you have to keep like blotting paper nearby for ink situations?
AJ JACOBS: Oh yes. Yes. Or dough. I know they used to use dough as an eraser, or bread.
HZ: Do you notice any difference emerging with your style of prose through the mechanisms you were using to write? Because, like, your brain has to kind of work a bit differently when you're handwriting, because you can't go back and edit so easily.
AJ JACOBS: Right. I feel my sentences got a little longer. I actually went back and, and made some of them shorter, because I do feel that long sentences are, as a reader, I find it hard. So there was some of that; and, yeah, I do feel it changed. Do you write by hand? What's your method?
HZ: Well, through university, I didn't have a computer until after I'd graduated, so all of my essays and things were by hand. And I usually only had time for a first draft, so it would be very much like, “Oh, I have written myself into a cul de sac of a sentence and I need to find a way to back out, and that is going to involve many subclauses.”
AJ JACOBS: Well, it is fascinating to think: what if Goethe had written with a word processor?
HZ: Yeah, Henry James?
AJ JACOBS: Yes!
HZ: The Bostonians would have been like 10 pages long.
AJ JACOBS: Just bullet points, maybe.
HZ: Did you try to emulate the language of the time? Or is that not constitutionally enshrined, so you didn't have to do that?
AJ JACOBS: It doesn't say in the Constitution that you have to speak like that. But, part of my goal was to get inside the mindset of people from the 18th century, which was fascinating because it's very different mind, you know, it is a foreign country, as they say about the past. But, that meant I adjusted my lifestyle. I used candles, I wrote with the quill, as I mentioned, and I cooked with a lot of cloves. They loved their cloves!
But back to the question of language: yes, I did try to speak with as much 18th century verbiage and phraseology as I could. I loved it; there were a couple of interesting parts that I felt I took away. One thing I love, and you actually covered it a bit on a previous episode where you talked about canary's tusks: do you remember that at all?
HZ: Is that like the bee's knees and things like that?
AJ JACOBS: Yes. But I think it had a specific connotation of something that's impossible and never can exist, the canary's tusks. So they had like “Go milk a pigeon,” “He's trying to milk a pigeon,” he's trying to do something impossible, or "That'll happen in the reign of Queen Dick," so yeah, that will never happen. So they had a lot of colourful language. again, you do get a sense of how horrible life was, from the misogyny and, and also the crimes. It was hilarious: there were literally probably a hundred words for different ways to steal from people. So,stealing brass weights off the counter. Countling, was stealing handkerchiefs, was a big thing. Stealing swords. Sneaking Budge is one who slips into a house in the dark to steal cloaks, they specialize in cloaks. Bullycock is one who foments quarrels in order to rob the person's quarreling, which is clever.
HZ: Ah, yeah. That feels quite modern, still, as an approach.
AJ JACOBS: Also I do love the insults. I forget many of them, but ‘grumbletonian’, I love that.
HZ: Ha! What does that mean?
AJ JACOBS: Someone who's ill-tempered, grumbling, whiner complainer - a grumbletonian. Shabaroon is someone who poorly dressed or mean spirited person, a shabaroon. So yeah, they had lovely lovely words.
HZ: Some of the insults that AJ found were a little more roundabout.
AJ JACOBS: I love reading the letters, because they're so wordy and indirect in a wonderful way. So you would read sentences like, "It behooves me to inform you that your actions have caused me a not insignificant amount of inconvenience." And the translation is like, "Fuck you, you are an asshole." But they say it in such a way. And I found when I spoke in this roundabout, indirect way, it was actually good for controlling my emotion, for my anger. Like, you can't be as angry if you are speaking in such sort of florid, indirect way. And so I think that can be a positive. It can be a negative, but it can be a positive.
HZ: Were there words that, where you were like, "Oh, I'm surprised that was so strong"?
AJ JACOBS: That is a great question. I do know that the word ‘damn’ was, in the Revolutionary War, if you were a soldier and if you said the word damn, you got thirty strokes of the whip. And if you assaulted an officer, if you punched an officer, you got twenty strokes of the whip. So saying damn, damning an officer was worse than than actual physical - so they took Blasphemy quite seriously. In terms of the actual curse words, I loved reading the Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue. I'm not sure I recommend it, because it's quite disturbing. Parts of it are very - I mean, it is sexist and it is violent and unpleasant in parts. And it was from 1796, printed in London, but it's also a fascinating look into what society was like. One of the things I found is the huge number of insults and curses about men's legs. Men's calves were like the sexy part of the body. You would present your calf when you met a woman.
HZ: Historically they did used to pad them as well.
AJ JACOBS: Oh, really? Interesting. So, like a Wonder Calf.
HZ: A Wonder Sock.
AJ JACOBS: Yeah, Wonder Sock!
HZ: Or like those T-shirts with abs painted on them.
AJ JACOBS: Exactly. So if you wanted to insult a man, you would talk about his ‘chicken legs’ or his ‘trap sticks’, which were these sticks that apparently like a primitive form of baseball was played with these trap sticks. There are also very elaborate ones that seemed like a stretch. There was one that that's "his calves are gone to grass," meaning that his calves - like the calf, so it's a play on word on calf - the calf is out in the field, it's not on his legs.
HZ: It's a little long, I think, for real impact.
AJ JACOBS: I agree. A little too clever by half.
HZ: Try to sharpen it up a bit.
AJ JACOBS: Well, if you think that, what about this one? This one's even more of a stretch.
HZ: I'll take a comfy seat.
AJ JACOBS: “The veal will be cheap this season, because the calves are falling.” Calves are falling, so that they're dying, so that you can buy more more veal.
HZ: It's like the longest “your mum” joke in the world in terms of payoff value.
AJ JACOBS: There is also a ton of slang about drinking, of course. Ben Franklin wrote a list. He was sort of an amateur linguist, so he gathered a list of 200 synonyms of the day for being drunk, such as “Your head is full of bees,” “He's loaded his card,” “He ate a toad and a half for breakfast” - I like that one, ate a toad and a half for breakfast - “He's jambled,” “He's cherry merry.” But then you get even more specific in this dictionary. I think these are the craziest two phrases I learned: one is “Admiral of the Narrow Sea” and the second is “Vice Admiral of the Narrow Sea”. And this is - and do sit down for this one - an Admiral of the Narrow Sea is a man who gets so drunk, he vomits in the lap of his drinking buddy.
HZ: Nooooooo.
AJ JACOBS: Yeah, that's the Narrow Sea. And then the Vice Admiral is a man who gets so drunk, he pees under the table into the boots of the man in front of him. So that's a very specific insult, but apparently it happened enough that they had these phrases for the situation.
HZ: When I was in my teens, I was never very interested in alcohol, but people would come to my house to drink, and they would quite often puke into my mother's wellington boots. So we should have had a phrase for it.
AJ JACOBS: Is that true? And what, were you able to clean them?
HZ: Yeah - you can give them a good wash. But it was sub-ideal, I would say.
AJ JACOBS: Well, that's a good euphemism. And they were good with the euphemisms as well. So, for instance, “a gold finder” is what they would call someone who emptied the necessary houses, emptied the outhouses as a job was a gold finder. “A House of Civil Reception” was where sex workers worked. They liked the euphemisms.
HZ: You did have to be careful then about what you said.
AJ JACOBS: And there were prosecutions. In fact, a man in Massachusetts was thrown in jail for making an ass joke, or an arse joke, and it was literally an arse joke. He said the word ‘arse’ at the expense of John Adams. He was watching some ceremony for John Adams where they fired ceremonial cannons, and he said something like, "I wish one of those cannonballs would would go up John Adams's arse," and someone overheard him, reported him, and he was arrested.
HZ: Do you think a reason why Americans say ‘ass’ instead of ‘arse’ is to avoid prosecution?
AJ JACOBS: That is an excellent theory. I'm going to say yes, just because it sounds like a good theory.
HZ: Official enough for me.
AJ JACOBS: I also tried not to curse because there were laws in the 18th century state laws against cursing and blasphemy. It was actually New York state in 1800, it was 37 and a half cents fine from the government whenever you said an oath, a curse, or said “Jesus” or “damn”. So I tried to institute that with my family.
HZ: Where do you get a half cent piece these days if you have to pay that fine?
AJ JACOBS: Well, there you go. That was that was how they got out of it, because I would say, "Alright, put 37 and a half cents." And my son would say, "Oh, I don't have a half cent. I'll just wait until I get to 75 cents." Then he would get to 75 and he would curse intentionally again to get back to the half cent. So I never was able to collect. But I did find it interesting that when you don't curse, when you say something like “fudge” instead of “fuck”, you feel so dorky and, and cheesy that you are less angry. You sort of laugh at yourself. And I found that there was something nice about that. So I would say I'm not going to eliminate cursing, but it was an interesting experiment.
HZ: It's good to find yourself less angry when you are carrying a musket.
AJ JACOBS: Exactly. Well, the good thing about the musket is, it is also similar to the language, it is very roundabout because it takes at least fifteen steps to load and fire a musket. You've got to bite a cartridge, pour the gunpowder in, put the lead ball in, take out the ramrod, put the ramrod down, put back the - so it is quite a process. You probably could not have had something like a mass shooting when it took so long for a musket to load. And that gets back to the language part of this book, which was essential, because the question is: how much do we evolve the language? How much has the meaning changed? The second amendment says that your rights to bear arms shall not be infringed.
Gun control advocates will make the argument that arms in the 18th century meant muskets - there were other arms, but most common was musket - and muskets are so different from a modern semi automatic weapon that is it fair to even use the same word? One way to think about it, a metaphor that gun control advocates use is to say: imagine you made a law about wheeled vehicles, when there were just bicycles were the wheeled vehicles.
HZ: Or a cart.
AJ JACOBS: Or a cart, exactly. And now you have eighteen-wheel trucks, so do you need to adjust the law? And that is at the heart of a lot of these constitutional debates. How much should we update the meaning of the words?
HZ: Were there other things where you were like, “People could get hold of this to justify some otherwise indefensible modern position, but they just have overlooked it because they're just so fixated on the guns one?”
AJ JACOBS: A couple of things come to mind. First, the Constitution is fascinating because some parts of it are so inspired and beautiful and wonderful. Like the preamble, which says, "We the people" and it's all about the blessings of liberty and general welfare and it's just inspiring and lovely. But some parts are so archaic, and read like that they're from another century - because they are! And one example is the letters of mark and reprisal. which is in Article 1, Section 8 of the Constitution: congress has the power to grant letters of mark and reprisal to average citizens. And what that means is basically legalized piracy. It's how we won the Revolution. If you had a fishing boat, you could apply to the government and say, “I want to put cannons on my fishing boat and go after British ships and take their booty.” And we had no Navy. So the government was like, “We need these people.” So they were sort of semi pirates, ‘privateers’ is the better word for them. And it's still in the constitution, that right. It has not been granted since 1815, it is still there. So I went to Congress. I got my friend to lend me his water skiing boat, and I met with Ro Khanna, who's a congressman from California, and I said, “Can I get a letter of mark and reprisal?” and he's like, “Let's see how we can make this happen.” Then I explained to him what it was, and he became a little less enthusiastic.
HZ: Oh! Interesting!
AJ JACOBS: He said he brought it up with his colleagues, but I have yet to receive the go ahead.But that is an example of something that is still in the constitution that we could focus on. The other one that comes to mind is the eighth amendment says that cruel and unusual punishments are forbidden, the government cannot use cruel and unusual punishments. But what does that mean? Because things that were considered uncruel and and usual in the 18th century were outrageous by our standards. There was branding, there was flogging, there were pillories. And pillories were no joke: pillories, you put your hands and head in, and people throw things; but not just mud, they threw rocks, they threw dead animals, and it was not a pleasant thing. Now there are a lot of originalists who argue that is not true, that the meaning, even under originalism, “cruel and unusual”, the meaning evolves. So it is a debate. I did end up buying a pillory off of Etsy. It was more for, like, adult entertainment.
HZ: I did wonder.
AJ JACOBS: They actually gave me the option: “Do you want the neck hole to have neoprene padding?”
HZ: Oh, that's thoughtful.
AJ JACOBS: Well, it is thoughtful, but it seems like a little bit like, if you're going to get a pillory, you don't want it to be comfortable.
HZ: I suppose if they're making opt-in pillories, for consenting pillorites.
AJ JACOBS: That is true.
HZ: Do they also supply like a multi pack of pillorying missiles?
AJ JACOBS: No, they don't, but it sounds like there's an opening for you to to offer that.
HZ: I don't know if I have the entrepreneurial spirit.
AJ JACOBS: I couldn't justify putting anyone else in the pillory, but I did put myself in the pillory, making my wife promise to get me out after five minutes. But even that was weird. It was uncomfortable. And she used it to sort of say, “I'll let you out if you promise to fold your sweaters instead of rolling them up,” and that kind of thing. So, I suffered,
HZ: So she didn't throw like a dead grouse at you.
AJ JACOBS: No, she was very kind. It was a very gentle pillorying.
HZ: I worry that some people will be like, “Well, if I'm defending the constitutional gun thing, I'll get behind pillorying. Let’s pillory!”
AJ JACOBS: I hope not. I would hope that that would not go very far.
HZ: So what was too cruel and unusual at the time?
AJ JACOBS: Well, there were torture devices. There was sort of like the Iron Maiden, that type of thing. Now, the interesting thing is the Founding Fathers, many of them considered themselves progressive on punishment. Obviously, it was barbaric by our standards, but by their standards, they were trying to be progressive. That was part of the point of my book, is let's leave a lot in the past, but there are some things worth reviving: the idea of democracy as this amazing, sweet, awe-inspiring right, I feel we've got to get back to that. I love the idea of virtue, which nowadays virtue has the negative, virtue-signaling, is not something you want to be caught doing. And virtue actually has a bad etymology, it comes from ‘vir’, the Latin word for man. So the idea was, you're virtuous if you're a man, you can control your passions, unlike the women, who are just swept away by their emotions.
HZ: Notoriously.
AJ JACOBS: So I'm not a fan of the etymology. But I'd like the basic idea was the idea of putting the common good ahead of yourself, putting thinking of others’ self sacrifice. And I am a fan of that idea. We focus a lot on our rights, our individual rights, which is great - I'm a fan of individual rights; but we kind of forget about the responsibilities. There is a Bill of Rights in the Constitution, but they didn't have a Bill of Responsibilities, because it was sort of implied. You had a responsibility to your country. You did all of these things for your community, your country, your family. So when I wrote a family constitution for my own family, we had a Bill of Rights, but we also had a Bill of Responsibilities. So that's another little way of thinking, that I think is worth revisiting. I try to be fair to both sides and present the pros and cons. In the end, I do come out on the side of - living constitutionalism is one phrase, but it has a lot of baggage. I prefer to call it something like pragmatism or pluralism or elastic constitution. I like the metaphor - I like to think of the constitution as sort of a pair of pants, a sweatpant, you know, you've got an elastic waist on the pants. So you have some sort of structure. It's not a free for all, but it can still stretch as the country grows and changes. You don't want the Constitution to be a pair of skinny jeans that splits when you gain like two pounds. So you want some give. That's kind of where I ended up on the Constitution.
HZ: Constitutional jeggings.
AJ JACOBS: That is my movement. Exactly. Join it.
HZ: AJ Jacobs is a writer and podcaster - get his podcast The Puzzler from all the podplaces, for a little daily dose of puzzle fun. And he has written several books, including The Puzzler, about different kinds of puzzles, and The Year of Living Biblically: One Man's Humble Quest to Follow the Bible as Literally as Possible. His new book is The Year of Living Constitutionally: One Man's Humble Quest to Follow the Constitution's Original Meaning. AJ’s got a lot of stuff going on! Find his work at AJJacobs.com.
Your randomly selected word from the dictionary today is…
timocracy, noun, chiefly philosophy: 1. a form of government in which possession of property is required in order to hold office. 2. a form of government in which rulers are motivated by ambition or love of honour.
Wait, those things seem really different motivations to be described by the same word.
Try using ‘timocracy’ in an email today.
This episode was produced by me, Helen Zaltzman, on the unceded ancestral and traditional territory of the xʷməθkʷəy̓əm (Musqueam), Sḵwx̱wú7mesh (Squamish), and səlilwətaɬ (Tsleil-Waututh) Nations.
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