ADAM. Adam was the first man on Earth, according to the Old Testament legend. The entry in Diderot’s Encyclopédie would lead some to believe Adam was a giant and that he lived for only 900 years. He was a man of fine stature, but except for the period when a land bridge connected Asia and the Americas it was not true that he could straddle both continents like the Colossus straddled the harbor in Rhodes. He never did die, either. Where would he and Eve go? How could God let them back into Paradise? Could God be so cruel as to condemn them to a life in Hades? Well, He left them on Earth to live out their days, and it is not clear whether they can die or not. Adam does have very large feet even for his height, as evidenced in his footprints found in Asia and in Israel. Recent footprints of his are identified as Yeti or “Bigfoot” prints. See Yeti.

ARP. Jean (Hans) Arp. Hans and Franz say “Put some egg on your face.” Absurd artwork is not to be understood, but to be enjoyed as beautiful fun. Our world is absurd. We have such little comprehension of our Universe, we might as well enjoy it and be silly every now and again. It’s okay to laugh even though we don’t understand God’s jokes.

ART. Anything that doesn’t make money.

ATOM. Thought by the Greeks to be the smallest particle into which the Universe can be divided. Turns out, the atom is so big its smallest parts could believe an atom is the Universe. God made the atom in his image, and all creation is made up of the atom.

BIG BANG. The sound from the big bang is still traveling toward Earth (but will someday destroy it). This explains why Genesis only describes the light part of the explosive creation of the Universe.

BLAIN. Absurdist device resembling the earpiece of eyeglasses held in a shirt pocket. It was made famous by V. J. Jain, who would reveal it to confound others while in conversation. “What is that?” they would gasp. Jain would respond in his characteristic dry tone, “My blain.”

BRACHYURA. Sect of dictionary makers in Akkad. Thelphusian, the founder of the order, is believed to have been the architect of the tower of Babel.

CANCER. Constellation in the shape of the blueprint for Thelphusian’s tower. When the Greeks reinterpreted the constellation as a crab, the word took on new meaning and distorted all further readings of Brachyuran cuneiform style.

COLOSSUS-OF-RHODES MAN. Found in AD 4020, in the Sludge Area. So named because the head of an American white man containing a wooden cube with a carved image labeled “Colossus of Rhodes” was found in a vault filled with hundreds of similar cubes with other images carved on their surfaces. C-R Man was believed to be amassing these wooden cubes to use as some kind of currency after the monetary collapse brought about by the Democrats, who were called Republicans during the twenty-first century.

DODO BIRD (Raphus cucullatus). Said to have been strong and greedy. After all the reptiles were killed by the strong beaks of the Dodo, there were no predators of the Dodo Bird in its little island world. Their society grew to be arrogant and wasteful. The Dodo Bird would lie around on its fat belly eating all day. Life was so easy for the Dodo Bird, their sexual preferences revolved around large beak size and the animal eventually lost use of its wings. (Similarly the arms of Tyrannosaurus Rex atrophied through preference of large mouths and teeth.) Though believed to have gone extinct by 1681, a Union boat blown far off course during the storm that sank the Monitor had a record in the log that “Day 47, December 13, 1863. Private A. Adam found a beaked bird with no wings that was large enough to give meat to our entire crew.”

EVE. When Adam was split, Eve was his other half. As Adam was given the job of naming everything, Eve, the first mathematician, was given the task of numbering God’s Creation. (From a big zero, the universe divided into a binary system of male and female.)

GOLF. Pastime of Apollo and one of the last gifts to mortals from the Roman Gods still hiding out in Scotland when Christians killed the last of the “Pagans.”

JESUS. The “chosen son” whom God gave to the world; gets all the glory, makes Adam jealous and mad.

LEVIATHAN. Story of existence sung constantly by whales. The first song a whale memorizes is the whale equivalent of Genesis. Without the ability to write, the complex oral tradition of whales went beyond word millennia ago. In the same way human brains process electrical pulses and charges as thought, whales translate sound patterns as thought. Thus, whales sing reference-laden thoughts to each other. Like the genome, the whale songs are constantly adding new verses, making each individual only part of the whole collective of the great Leviathan. By disrupting their communication, sonar may be obliterating whole chapters of whale knowledge.

LITERARY CRITICISM. When we engage in criticism of a book, what exactly are we doing? When discussing a great work of literature, some like to look at sources from which the author may have drawn inspiration, others to the culture of the time the book was written, while others may compare this work to other books by the same author. These are all techniques aimed at coming to some greater understanding of a book. But what are we learning? Truths about the way a book of fiction works? Or do we believe a work of fiction can give us insight into the world in which we live?

LOBSTER. The thirteenth creature, the lobster, is believed lucky by some. Deep in the ocean there is an enormous lobster 13 days younger than Adam. It is believed that when that lobster is caught, the world will cease to be, or that Adam will finally gain insight.

LOOSY-GOOSIE. A word that should never be used in a book intended for serious use.

MEMBWAMES. An exclamation of excitement and delight. First use credited to Peter Hepler, noted plant-cell biologist.

MENTAL EXERCISE. Try looking into your head to see how the thoughts are flowing. It is a difficult task. Try to quiet your consciousness and notice what thoughts you are having and how one thought moves to another. It is okay to imagine your head being “dark” at the start, but this is your imagination at work. Your thoughts are blinding and fast—you’d better exercise more to keep up.

THE MONITOR. First iron-clad fighting vessel. It was in an epic battle with the Merrimac, the South’s attempt at an iron-clad. The battle was the Civil War equivalent of Tyrannosaurus Rex fights Triceratops.

MULLET. Haircut of genius.

OKLAHOMA! An American play which in musical form created a mantra to make peace between the Earth’s oldest rivals: the Farmer and the Cowman. In Urbana, Illinois, and Stony Brook, New York, it was further realized that Mathematicians and Writers might find the answer to World Peace through “being friends.” This book is an effort to meld image and word, science and art.

PEACE THROUGH UNDERSTANDING. The phrase to embody the 1964 World’s Fair, also the name of an organization formed during the 1950s near New Harmony, Indiana. Notable among their members were a man named Nation, “Mariehen” Al-an, and Caroline Schnautz. Their beliefs included interfaith worship, divining truth through the use of mediums, and creating music and art that would inspire a groundswell of enthusiasm to bring about Peace on Earth. In the 1990s, Caroline journeyed back to Evansville following a vision to write a prayer to fulfill their original vision. Pray for her success!

PENNY. As in: “A penny for your thoughts.” Hopefully you would pay more if it was something that mattered. It is hard to see how another person’s mind works. One way to find commonalities (a good activity to try with your betrothed) is to choose a page from Pictorial Webster’s and compare the thoughts that first came to your individual minds. Each person might fill the book with thoughts scribbled around the images and then switch books. By studying the other person’s book, you can discover the way your two minds process the same material.

PIPING HOT POP TARTS. On page 275 there is an image of the Tour Eiffel (Paris, almost labeled Pipe Envy) with a hat on top of it. A month after printing this page spread I bought a box of Pop Tarts and on one of the flaps was a similar image of a hat atop the Eiffel Tower?!

PONDERSOME. Awkward to the point of creating hardship for the user. Woodhead carries a pondersome axe.

PRIME NUMBERS. In Eve’s numbering system, Adam was one, the first Prime. Eve was two, the first and only even Prime Number. Cain was three, the most beautiful Prime. Unfortunately Abel was number four. The first non-prime number and the most boring square ever to walk the earth. All Primes are geniuses. It explains why there were so many brilliant things created when the Earth was young and Platos and Euclids and Homers were a dime a dozen. But Shakespeares, Beethovens, and John Adamses will continue to be born as there are an infinite number of prime numbers. Our luck is only that as our Earth ages they become farther apart. Remember that when you meet an eccentric they call “genius,” some very large odd numbers are just very large odd numbers.

SNOWFLAKES. If snowflakes could think they might feel marginalized by the Webster’s engravings of snowflakes. Do you remember noticing snowflakes? One doesn’t have time to regard them as an adult. There are different types, and thankfully the editors of G. & C. Merriam Co. included a few varieties. My father, Nicholas Carrera, studied snowflakes when he worked in cloud physics. He went from snowflakes to studying atomic detonations. Talk about a snowflake in the fire!

TOXIC WASTE. After the great sea rising and ensuing climate collapse in the mid-twenty-first century, the area once occupied by New York, N.Y., to the south and New Haven, Conn., to the north was coated with a 5-foot layer of a product Americans invented in the twentieth century called “Toxic Waste.” The layering coincided with the event which destroyed that area of the country. It is now believed companies were hoarding the substance in warehouses south of New York. The sludge blocked out oxygen, and beautifully preserved biological remains. Study of this find has begun, but precaution is suggested. Though it preserves dead matter, some scientists say Toxic Waste is dangerous to living organisms.

UNBWOGABLE. A word that helped win what may have been the first truly democratic election in Kenya. Made up by a Kenyan hip-hop duo, it combines Luo and English to describe a state of invincibility and undupeability. “I am unbwogable; I am unbeatable. . . . Who can bwogo me? I am unbwogable.”

VOCABULARY. An assignment given to children in the last years of elementary school. Soon forgotten, along with grammar, as it is not fashionable at the mall or at sporting events or around your family to use those hard words, some of which were called Snarks. Remember how to use a word in a sentence that informs the reader of the meaning of the word? An assignment from this book might be to use each image of a page in a short story combined with the vocabulary assignment of the week.

WOODHEAD. Illegitimate son of Adam, born from a hollow log Adam used for an indescribable act. Do not confuse this log with that from which many Pueblo Tribes emerged.

WRITTEN WORD. Before words were written down they had power in and of themselves: To know a name was to have power to conjure a thing. But once the names were written for all to see, magic evaporated from the culture. This is why witches and dragons started to disappear from England around the time of Chaucer and were only a memory when Shakespeare came on the scene.

YETI. (var. sp. Yetti). When the first man becomes tired of trying to live in civilization, he runs to the hills to commune with nature and to continue naming new species of slime molds and moths. Every so often he allows himself to be captured on film, or leaves a footprint.

ZAPPA, FRANK. Almost mentioned on page 432. Some believe he was 211213-1, the same number Dr. Bateman et alia discovered and had printed on the University of Illinois’ postage meter.