NOT EVERYONE KNOWS THIS…

By John Chaput

John Chaput was raised in Montreal, has lived in Western Canada for about 45 years, and is seriously thinking about settling down there. A retired journalist and editor, he is the author of three books about Saskatchewan sports history. He is also an amateur actor and has won two awards for his performances at Theatre Saskatchewan festivals.

FEBRUARY 20, 1816

Giacchino Rossini’s opera The Barber of Seville opens at the Teatro Argentina in Rome. Not everyone knows this, but the show is subtitled The Useless Precaution and, in retrospect, Rossini should have taken some precautions even if they did seem useless. Opera in Italy, especially in centuries past, has been something of a spectator sport complete with passionate followers and spirited rivalries between competing teams ... uh, camps ... uh, factions ... oh, however opera lovers group themselves. Rossini took pains to perfect the music, book the theatre, and select the cast, but he didn’t bother to control the audience. The theatre was packed with devotees of rival composer Giovanni Paisiello, who had already put on his own version of the story of the barber Figaro. Paisiello’s fans noisily jeered throughout the show, incited others to join them, and even instigated disturbances on the stage. Subsequent performances were successful and within three years the opera was a hit on both sides of the Atlantic.

FEBRUARY 17, 1913

The Armory Show opens in New York and spectators are shocked, shocked to fi nd abstract representations of the female form in the exhibition of avant-garde art. Outrage focuses primarily on French painter Marcel Duchamp’s Nude Descending a Staircase No. 2, in which layered images of a model convey an incredible sense of motion but not much discernible nudity. Not everyone knows this, but the journal American Art News even offered a $10 prize to anyone who could actually spot the nude in the painting. Former president Theodore Roosevelt wrote an article about the exhibition for Outlook magazine and observed, “Take the picture which for some reason is called ‘A naked man going down stairs,’ ” which probably says more about the quality of those pince-nez glasses Roosevelt wore than it does about the man himself. In any case, Nude Descending a Staircase stands alongside Picasso’s Guernica as a masterpiece of Cubism, even if Duchamp would become even more notorious for making art out of a urinal.

FEBRUARY. 28, 1939

A sharp-eyed editor for the G. and C. Merriam Company spots something amiss in the Second Edition of the New International Dictionary published in 1934. He notices on page 771 that the word “dord” has no etymology. Not everyone knew this, but there was no such word as “dord.” Investigation discovers that back in 1931 while the Second Edition was being compiled, the chemistry editor had submitted a note for the use of the single letter D, in either upper or lower case, as an abbreviation for “density.” Editors typically left spaces between letters in memos for dictionary entries, so “D or d, cont./density” – meant to convey “D or d ... (continued) ... abbreviation for density” – was interpreted by a typesetter as “Dord” being a chemical synonym for density. That it took eight years for the error to be discovered, and another eight before all subsequent printings corrected it, suggests that there was some dord in the G. and C. Merriam Company itself.

FEBRUARY 15, 1965

The Red Ensign is lowered on Parliament Hill and Canada’s new flag is officially raised for the first time. Former Prime Minister John Diefenbaker, who had insisted that any new flag include (as did the Red Ensign) the Union Jack, sheds tears during the ceremony. Not everyone knows this, but it was the third serious attempt to achieve a distinctly Canadian emblem, with governments of Mackenzie King failing to reach consensus in 1925 and 1945. Prime Minister Lester Pearson seemed to be on a similar path to failure in 1964 until he appointed a 15-member multi-party commission that eventually reached unanimous agreement on the 11-point Maple Leaf that has endured as an instantly recognizable symbol of Canadian identity. Of course, if the country had only listened to me, they would have taken Japan’s flag, changed the red dot to black to create a hockey puck, and there would have been an even more appropriate national symbol, but who listens to a kid in Grade Four?

FEBRUARY 13, 1981

The New York Times sets a record for the longest sentence ever printed in that newspaper at 1,286 words when one of its stories includes a single quote from a high school student who speaks (with typical teenage interjections) at considerable length about material he had been studying, thus demonstrating that the generally unappreciated art of editing seemed to be lost not only upon that student but by the reporter who was quoting him as well as the editor who decided to let that ramble appear in print in its entirety, although it could be added – even if not everyone knows this – that 40 years later at least one writer and a certain publisher could have been somewhat more diligent in employing full stops to make their content more easily absorbed by their readership, who are fortunate in that they do not have to endure thousand-word sentences but probably think that even a 160-word sentence is somewhat excessive.

FEBRUARY 11, 1999

Pluto’s orbit takes it further away from the sun than Neptune, thus allowing Pluto to regain its status as the most distant planet in our solar system. Pluto had held that status until 1979, when its eccentric path would bring it nearer the sun than Neptune for the next 20 years. Not everyone knew this, but Neptune was about to reclaim the farthest-away status sooner than expected, because in 2006 the International Astronomical Union reclassified Pluto as a dwarf planet in the Kuiper Belt. This, of course, reduced the number of full-fledged planets in our solar system to eight, not even enough for a baseball team, and left Pluto to bemoan its public relations setback. Considering that a “year” is technically the amount of time it takes a planet to orbit the sun, and Pluto takes almost 248 Earth years to do that, it could be that Pluto is just starting on its own version of 2020. Hang in there, kid.