Walt Disney’s Jiminy Cricket sang if you have c-u-r-i-o-s-i-t-y you need to consult the E-N-C-Y-C-L-O-P-E-D-I-A. How many of us learned to spell that word from his song? How many of you have that catchy tune in you minds right now? How many of you remember living in a time when the only source of information was reference books: atlases, Farmer’s Almanacs, dictionaries, Dr. Spock’s Baby and Child Care (1946), etc.
As a child when I did have curiosity, I would ask a parent for the answer. This could range from how to spell something or what a word meant or what is puberty. Their stock response would be “look it up.” So, I would go to our worn out dictionary or to our outdated set of encyclopedias that we got each week from the local supermarket for buying a certain amount of groceries. Just as a reminder, encyclopedias were in a set with basically one book being for each letter of the alphabet. Invariably, the letter of the encyclopedia that I needed to look something up in was missing. Perhaps the week that “T” was being given out we did not go to the supermarket.
It is really no wonder that I was called the President of the Flat Earth Society. The dead curious cat was fair warning to me not to follow in its footsteps. But really, what was there to be curious about? Curiosity was immediately stifled by the task of having to “look it up.” Early on, if I wanted to know about a particular sports team, how would I find out? Early on, if I wanted to know about a particular dinosaur, how would I find out? Early on, if I wanted more information about a particular historical event, how would I find out? As a result, I firmly believe that my curiosity was stopped dead in its tracks.
What a world we live in today! At our fingertips we have all the information, all the answers to any and every curious thought that crosses our minds. Just in the writing of this blog I immediately found out about the Jiminy Cricket song that I just vaguely remembered; that Christopher Columbus forever debunked the notion of the earth being flat; that the Dark Ages were a time of intellectual stagnation after the Roman Empire collapsed; and that Tim Berners-Lee created the world wide web (what www stands for in internet addresses.
Speaking of the Dark Ages, the time before the explosion of the internet in 1990 certainly may be referenced as that type of time period by future historians. But today can certainly be called the Age of Enlightenment. What a world we live in. Kids can still learn to spell encyclopedia by googling youtube and watching Jiminy Cricket teach them the song. Certainly Jiminy had it partially right. Being curious is a great thing to lead us to knowledge and creativity, but using the encyclopedia as a vehicle to that end was over rated back then and now has disappeared. I can only wonder what happened to those Encyclopedia Britannica salesmen who walked door to door selling those sets. Of course, they made good money as most households in America had a set which needed to be updated often.
Just curious, why would anyone even need to know how to spell encyclopedia today? All we need to know how to spell is G-O-O-G-L-E. Who needs a catchy tune to know how to spell that?
