Preface
A third edition! My colleagues and I have never wavered in our conviction that the theory behind The Dictionary of Cultural Literacy is sound, as it is based on well-established findings of linguistics and cognitive psychology. But it is gratifying to learn that its scholarly soundness has found a practical resonance with the public.
A new edition is called for to keep up with the changes in American culture. This book contains about five hundred (out of nearly seven thousand) new entries, of which about two hundred are in the science and technology chapters. It is frightening to realize that when we wrote the second edition, almost no one knew what a Web page was. Of the remainder of the new entries, about half are in the fields of history, politics, and geography. A thousand entries have been revised for clarity and updated to reflect current usage. We hope that this book continues to be useful to Americans of all ages and backgrounds.
I say “to Americans” because the concept of cultural literacy implies a national culture. Of course the entries reflect content from many nations of the world, and the principle of cultural literacy is implicitly international. There are by now German, Dutch, and Swedish versions of this book. But each is different, having been adapted to the relevant national language and culture. People within each of these national communities are bound together not just by political institutions and laws, but also by shared values and allusions and a shared language. The public understands that in the United States, our shared language contains not just “the” and “was” but “Birmingham Jail,” “Sitting Bull,” and “pay through the nose.” (Explanations of idioms like “pay through the nose” have been especially welcomed by immigrant parents and children.) The public also understands that these shared meanings are essential for communication inside our nation — or, to put the matter simply, they are essential for reading. We all know that reading is the most important academic skill, and that there is a big reading gap between haves and have- nots in our schools. We know that reading skill is a key not just to a child’s success in school but also, in the information age, to his or her chances in life. That is why the federal government and now most of the states have started to place an enormous emphasis on reading.
This is good news and bad news. It’s good news because becoming a good reader is so enormously important. It’s bad news because the people who make and carry out school policies have not been very sophisticated so far about what is needed, beyond sounding out words, to become a good reader. On the important matter of reading comprehension, their vision is vague and clouded. Talking about reading comprehension reminds me of Mark Twain’s comment on the weather: everybody talks about it, but nobody does anything about it. Reading comprehension scores have not gone up significantly.
In the United States, reading with understanding is based on the kind of background knowledge identified in this book, and it is to be hoped that our schools will begin to do a better job of imparting this kind of knowledge to all children in a coherent and cumulative way. When they do, reading comprehension scores will go up. (Data to support this can be found at the Web site of the Core Knowledge Foundation, www.coreknowledge.org). From the start, the premise of this dictionary was that true literacy — reading with comprehension — requires a lot more than sounding out the words on the page. Those who possess the needed, taken-for-granted knowledge can understand what they read, and those who lack that knowledge cannot. The haves learn ever more from what they read and hear; the have-nots fall further behind and lose the chance to become participating members of the wider community.
That word “community” brings me to the second motivation behind this book, the connection between communication and community, especially in a democracy. A lot of American flags are flying these days. Some people think this is a worrisome show of nationalism, but I believe it is a show mainly of solidarity and community. Community is built up of shared knowledge and values — the same shared knowledge that is taken for granted when we read a book or newspaper, and that is also taken for granted as part of the fabric that connects us to one another.
Horace Mann put it eloquently in his nineteenth-century way in making a case for public schooling and a common curriculum. Shared knowledge, he said, would enlarge “the cultivated class or caste and . . . open a wider area over which the social feelings will expand; and if this education should be univeersal and complete, it would do more than all things else to obliterate [artificial] distinctions in society.” Mann thought that if everyyyyyone shared the enabling words and knowledge of our culture, everyone would gain a sense of solidarity with others. Social feelings would expand. Artificial distinctions of class and caste would be erased, and patriotic feelings would grow.
The love of country — patriotism — is a very different sentiment from nationalism. A fine book by Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities, beautifully distinguishes between nationalist and patriotic sentiments. Nationalism is an aggrandizing, tribalistic sentiment that defines one’s own group as opposed to alien groups, which are seen as potential rivals or enemies to be overcome or excluded. Patriotism, by contrast, implies love of country without necessarily implying hostility to anybody else. American patriotism is built of shared knowledge, attitudes, loyalties, and values, including the values of nonexclusion, toleration, and respect for other religions and cultures. Americans have proved that it is possible to feel patriotic about a cosmopolitan, diverse country, which is loved more for its vital diversity than for its racial or ethnic purity. That was Walt Whitman’s patriotism, and Herman Melville’s. For most of our history, the United States has imagined itself as a patriotic rather than as a nationalist state. George Washington thought of himself and was celebrated as Cincinnatus, the Roman hero who wishes only to return to his hearth and his farm once the necessary sacrifice and service to the patria is accomplished.
To that, Herman Melville added our modern idea of a nation that embraces all races and ethnic groups. He said,
There is something in the contemplation of the mode in which America has been settled that, in a noble breast, should forever extinguish the prejudices of national dislikes. Settled by the people of all nations, all nations may claim her for their own. You can not spill a drop of American blood without spilling the blood of the whole world. . . . We are not a narrow tribe of men — No: our blood is as the flood of the Amazon, made up of a thousand noble currents all pouring into one. . . . For who were our father and mother? Or can we point to any Romulus and Remus for our founders? Our ancestry is lost in the universal paternity, and Caesar and Alfred, St. Paul and Luther, Homer and Shakespeare are as much ours as Washington, who is as much the world’s as our own.
You might want to read the rest of this wonderful passage (Chapter 33) from Redburn, written in 1849. I won’t quote any more of it here. Suffice it to say that this American idea of a new kind of patriotism and community is a tradition that stretches from George Washington to Horace Mann and Herman Melville to ourselves, and it has not lost its pungency and capacity to insp...