hopefully you will be able to utilize the light from the locomotive and read my message and become empowered

Back in the day I had a friend who was mighty proud of getting his degree in English. The first thing he did was go out and buy an Oxford English Dictionary because, like you, he believed it to be the foremost authority of the English language. It was a big sucker, in some ways more like a small encyclopedia then a dictionary. But then he got nervous, hanging with druggies and commies, and moving around a lot, the way we do in our youth.

Then, twenty years later, he pulled it out and showed me what he had done to protect the foremost authority from theft in those turbulent times. He had printed his name across the face part of the book, the part opposite the spine, which was mighty clever because if he had written his name on the first page, or any other page, the thief could just tear it out, but the way he had written it one would have to tear out all the pages to obliterate his name, and then the book would be useless. He smiled and his wisdom and then he started laughing at the thought that he thought anybody would want to steal an Oxford English Dictionary.

I recently read a book about the creation of Webster’s Third dictionary, The Story of Ain’t by David Skinner, which according to the blurb, was the most controversial dictionary ever written, though we must have missed that, it being published in the early sixties when we were otherwise occupied. The main controversy being it added a whole lot of new words, which I guess was akin to taking off it’s suitcoat and loosening its tie. The work mostly involved guys staring at piles of index cards with words on them and, like everything else, lots and lots of politics.

There are a lot of academic style organizations that periodically issue lists of words that should be banned from the language, because it gives them the only ink in the papers that boring guys like that will ever get. Usually these words are kind of like buzz words which get swept up and everybody has to use them in whatever context to show that they are up to date, but then everybody gets a bit of a hangover when they see how stupid it sounds, you know like when you repeat the same word a hundred times. There was a big todo about hopefully which I never minded at all, but I hate utilize with a mighty passion and don’t even get me started on empower.

The thing about the speed of light is that it’s constant, not instantaneous, it is something like 186,000 miles per second. What is constant about it is that it appears to be traveling that speed to you no matter where you are or how fast you are going. That is, if you are standing on a hill with a puny flashlight and the midnight express roars up at a hundred miles an hour and flips on its light at the same time you turn on your flashlight, its light appears to you to be traveling at 186,000 miles per second, not 186,000 miles per second plus 100 miles per hour. If the locomotive blows its horn at the same time that you click on your flashlight, the speed of that sound will travel a hundred times an hour faster than the speed of your click because the speed of sound is not constant, not constant in the way that the speed of light is.

I kind of understand it and I kind of don’t. I understand it when I read the explanation slowly and carefully, but half an hour later I’m like, could you run that by me one more time? It’s like daylight and standard time (which is just around the corner, so don’t forget) which I understand well enough left on my own, but if somebody tries to explain it to me I get all turned around.

Light from the sun takes 8 1/2 hours to get here, light reflected from the moon will take a little more than a second. The light from the star 20,000 years away started traveling towards us 20,000 years ago, whereas the light traveling from the nearer star left only 10,000 years ago. That’s why, if we had a huge telescope and those stars had planets, we would be seeing what was going on on those planets 20,000 and 10,000 years ago.