Introduction
When I started to write this book, I realized that I did remember lots of different things, but I didn’t always remember those facts completely, or necessarily accurately. I knew, for example, that “The Assyrian came down like a wolf on the fold” was a perfect example of—what—a dactyl or an anapest? I had to look it up. I remembered a bit about sines and cosines but had no idea why they were important. I used to know most of the principal bones in the body. How did that song go? “The head bone’s connected to the neck bone, the neck bone’s connected to the…” Hmmm. And after years of study, I could not seem to name the dates of important wars or, for that matter, why they were fought (I’m still having some trouble with that).
Geography was especially challenging—just when I thought I knew the capital of Burma, they change everything. Myanmar is tragically all over the news, and I’m left scratching my head in bewilderment as to where it is exactly. There’s also a wealth of general information that I thought I knew, like Roman numerals and the Roman equivalent to the Greek gods.
Sometimes I hear a symphony and all I can remember is that it was composed by a man whose last name starts with V…or was it B?
In the course of talking to other people about what I should include in this book, I discovered two things: one, that everybody I spoke to had been to school, and two, that that was pretty much all they had in common. They had all forgotten completely different things. So with every conversation the book seemed to grow longer. One chat with an editor friend sent me rushing to add the active and passive voices to the English chapter. Another friend could recite British poetry verbatim but could not remember if the poem she so eloquently performed was by Keats or Shelley. Yet another friend confessed that she had completely forgotten what a square root was (though I have no idea why she suddenly wanted to know). In the end I had to stop discussing it, or this book would have surpassed the size of War and Peace. I also found in the course of researching the things I used to know that I learned more than a few things that I didn’t.
All of which is a roundabout way of saying that I hope you, too, will learn something new or find things here that strike a chord, however faintly. Things that make you say, “Oh, yes, I used to know that.” Because by the time you read this, I will almost certainly have forgotten most of them again.
