Your Weekly Van Loon

We interrupt our regularly scheduled Stupid to bring you the following message from the great Hendrik van Loon, author, journalist, confidant of presidents, teacher of America's young people, and renowned eccentric prose stylist. This week's lesson comes to us from The Story Of The Bible, which Van Loon published in 1923. In it, Van Loon ponders the difficulties that will be faced by historians in the far distant future.

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Suppose that a writer three thousand years hence discovers a number of books dealing with the history of our country, which have been hidden in the deserted cellar in the ruins of Boston. (Ed. Note: Hey, I resemble that remark!) He reads them with the help of an ancient English grammar which he had found in a museum and he finds continual references to the "United States," and to "the States." How is he going to know what the historians of the year 1923 actually meant when they used those terms so indiscrimnately? "America" is the name of a continent which stretches from the North Pole to the South Pole. But common usage had also given the same name to a small part of that continent, situated between Canada and Mexico. How does the future author know that in this case "America" actually meant the "United States of America" and not the entire continent? Again, when he reads "The United States," how will he be able to decide positively whether this referred to "The United States of Brazil" or "The United States of Venezuela" in the southern hemisphere, or to "The United States of America" in the northern?

'Ees a puzzlement, surely. And what will they do when they translate the word "Gohmert"? Probably look around the cellar for the remains of the liquor cabinet, is my guess.

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