Table of contents for September 2017 in Reader's Digest

CHANCES ARE, if you look up geek in the dictionary, you’ll see a picture of me next to the entry. That’s because when I was in high school, I actually traveled everywhere with a dictionary in my backpack. Back in those prehistoric, late 20th-century days, most kids didn’t take SAT prep courses. I was a pretty good math student, but my verbal skills needed ameliorating, especially when I would come across a word such as ameliorate in a lit book and have no idea what it meant. So when I was 15, my Merriam-Webster’s New Collegiate Dictionary became my traveling buddy. Sure, kids would look at me strangely on the school bus or at the beach (my two-pound companion vacationed with me too). But my Merriam came in handy with…

IT WAS 9 P.M. on a dark, chilly night in November 2015. Desmond Powell, then 17, was walking home from a basketball game along an empty seven-lane road in Manchester, New Hampshire; he was looking forward to seeing his mom and grabbing dinner. As he approached the Granite Street Bridge, he noticed something peculiar—a person was sitting on the cement railing, legs dangling over the Merrimack River, about 100 feet below. “At first I thought he was just hanging out. But as I got closer, I heard him muttering. Then I clearly heard ‘I’m just gonna jump,’” says Powell. The stranger was slender, probably in his 20s, Powell thought. He wore dark clothing, and his red hair was topped by a baseball cap. “Hey, buddy, what are you doing?” Powell…

DAVID THORNE is the creator of the humor website 27bslash6.com. HOLLY CANNOT COOK. She is capable of the process of cooking, but my wife cannot cook in the same way that an octopus cannot ride a bike. It has enough arms to reach the pedals and handlebars, but the result will rarely be a successful journey from A to B. I once looked over Holly’s shoulder to discover her crumbling Alka-Seltzer tablets onto a meal she was preparing because “they are salty and we ran out of salt.” Another time, I walked into the kitchen to find Holly making toast. I generally feel safe eating toast that Holly has made because it requires minimal ingredients to forget, replace, or experiment with. But this toast was a bit thin and soggy.…

DR. BO BROCK is a veterinarian in Lamesa, Texas, sometimes referred to as “the middle of nowhere.” EVEN THOUGH my grandfather, whom I called Papaw, was a farmer, my mamaw would iron his work clothes every day. Mamaw mixed up her own starch in a glass Coke bottle topped with a metal cap that had a multitude of holes in it, like a saltshaker. She would sprinkle Papaw’s pants with the starch, hang them over a chair for a few minutes so they could dry a bit, and then apply the heat of the iron to them. Because I watched her do this through my childhood, I figured every old woman in the world did it. But as the years passed, I began to question this practice. Why in the…

HEMP SEEDS 3 TBS. = 10 GRAMS OF PROTEIN These little brown seeds (pictured) add a healthy boost to any baked good. Sprinkle some over that birthday cake—you won’t even taste them. POTATOES 1 LARGE = 7 GRAMS Potatoes get a bad rap as carbohydrate kings, but prepare them without loads of butter and you have a vegetable low in fat but high in protein, vitamin C, and potassium. Try baking instead of doing the usual mash. PEAS 1 CUP = 8 GRAMS Peas contain a lot of lutein, an antioxidant that can help heart health by lowering cholesterol and preventing plaque buildup. Pile them on top of a salad, or serve a side of these green goodies with dinner. BUCKWHEAT 1/2 CUP = 11 GRAMS Buckwheat flour is a…

WORD POWER! THE MAN WHO TRIED TO MAKE ENGLISH ... ENGLISHER In the 1800s, William Barnes, a poet and minister, tested an unusual question: What would the English language look like if it were stripped of all Greek and Latin root words? This new language, Barnes thought, would make more sense to speakers who lacked a classical education. For example, instead of the word photograph (from the Greek words meaning “light” and “writing”), we would say sunprint. Some of the entries in Barnes’s proposed “pure English” dictionary make perfect sense. Others produce chuckles and need some translating: ◗ ayesome = affirmative ◗ folkdom = democracy ◗ inwit = conscience ◗ muchness = quantity ◗ naysome = negative ◗ overthwartings = opposites ◗ suchness = quality ◗ sundersome = divisible ◗ thwartsome = contrary…

Monkeys from Pisa bully deer from London. OK, admittedly it’s an implausible scenario, but it’s a grammatically fine sentence. In English we can use place names as adjectives, so let’s shorten the sentence a little. Pisa monkeys bully London deer. Now we’ll throw in some giraffes from Paris to even the score with those mean monkeys. Pisa monkeys, whom Paris giraffes intimidate, bully London deer. English is peculiar in that you can omit relative pronouns, e.g., “the person whom I love” can be expressed as “the person I love.” Let’s do that to this sentence. Pisa monkeys Paris giraffes intimidate bully London deer. This kind of pronoun removal can be a little more difficult to grasp when written than when spoken. Saying the above sentence with pauses after monkeys and…

RICHARD MARSH awakened to the rhythmic beeping of a machine. Something was lodged in his throat. He couldn’t cough. He couldn’t sit up. He couldn’t move. What’s going on? He tried to move his legs, arms, and fingers. Even his eyeballs, he realized, wouldn’t budge. He felt someone put drops in them to keep them moist, but he couldn’t make out who it was. What’s wrong with me? He could only stare in one direction—straight ahead. With his peripheral vision, Richard could see his wife off to his right. He heard her talking to a man next to her, a man who seemed to be in surgical scrubs. “It doesn’t look good,” the man said. What doesn’t look good? “His chance of survival is very small.” They’re talking about me.…

GOVERNMENT-SPEAK, that enemy of plain English, is a language that has annoyed Americans since the days of King George III. It turns out that among those peeved are our nation’s spies. In these excerpts from a declassified 1982 CIA internal newsletter, an unidentified analyst for the agency mocks Washington’s love affair with worn-out jargon and confounding double-talk. To add even more bite to his or her sarcasm, the author included drawings of imaginary beasts to represent the “strange fauna” of these “specimen samples of clichés and misused or overused word combinations that CIA editors have encountered frequently over the years.” “ Overwhelming Majority” The overwhelming majority is the best known of a species of draft animal used by many analysts to carry the burden of their argument and analysis. Garrulous…

1Three Earth-size planets that could sustain life. Astronomers found not just one but seven planets outside our solar system that circle a tiny star called TRAPPIST-1, about 40 lightyears away. Three are in what NASA calls the habitable zone, which could be right for water to exist and possibly for extraterrestrial life. 2Shrimp so loud, they were named after a rock band. On the Pacific coast of Panama, scientists discovered a new type of pistol shrimp that uses its large pink claw to create a noise so loud it can stun—or even kill—small fish. In fact, the boom created by the animal’s snapping claw can reach 210 decibels. (For comparison, a loud concert is about 110 to 140 decibels.) The team members dubbed it Synalpheus pinkfloydi, inspired by their love…

1. detritus n.—A: subtracted amount. B: debris. C: falsified claim. 2. prerogative n.—A: educated guess. B: first choice. C: special right. 3. segue v.—A: transition. B: completely surround. C: begin a court case. 4. hegemony n.—A: domination. B: smooth blend. C: large family. 5. dais n.—A: group leader. B: garden fountain. C: raised platform. 6. kefir n.—A: verbal skirmish. B: fermented milk. C: painting technique. 7. peremptory adj.—A: allowing no disagreement. B: coming first. C: walking quickly. 8. quay n.—A: wharf. B: small island. C: dram of brandy. 9. machination n.—A: study of robotics. B: talkativeness. C: scheme. 10. slough n.—A: soft breeze. B: heavy club. C: swamp. 11. spurious adj.—A: hasty. B: fake. C: livid. 12. nuptial adj.—A: just starting. B: relating to marriage. C: present during all seasons. 13. coxswain n.—A: innkeeper. B: secret lover. C: sailor in charge. 14. geoduck n.—A:…

Funniest Family Vacations! Reading your story about a missionary who earned the nickname Dances with Bees for his antics to avoid angry hornets after disturbing their nest, I literally gasped. You see, I knew that story already. My father is that missionary. SARA PETERSEN, Vancouver, Washington 13 Things Pet Stores Won’t Tell You This is a must-read for anyone thinking about buying a puppy. Every purchase denies a home to a shelter dog whose life may depend on being adopted. I guess that makes me a lifesaver: The three happy, healthy pups who share my home are all rescues. CRAIG SHAPIRO, Virginia Beach, Virginia Things I Wish My Dad Knew About Me Before He Died Susannah B. Lewis deeply moved me with her list of things she wished her father…

LOUIS CK, comedian, on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert HISTORY ISN’T just part of our civic responsibility. To me, it’s an enlargement of the experience of being alive. DAVID MCCULLOUGH, historian, in an interview with the National Endowment for the Humanities YOU DON’T have to be famous. You just have to make your mother and father proud of you. MERYL STREEP, actress, in a commencement speech LOYALTY DOES NOT necessarily produce happiness and can even be painful, but we all require devotion to something more than ourselves for our lives to be endurable. ATUL GAWANDE, surgeon, in his book Being Mortal MY MOTHER SAYS, “The reward for hard work is hard work,” and that’s the truth. It’s satisfying to finish something and feel like it’s the best you can…

TRANSPLANT RECIPIENT John Bell knows exactly where to find his first heart—the damaged one he lived with for 72 years. It’s floating in a three-gallon jug of formaldehyde at a large storage facility at Baylor University Medical Center in Dallas, Texas, along with hundreds of other human hearts. When he returns to the hospital for a checkup with his cardiologist, Bell contemplates stopping by to pay his old heart a visit. Why? Because at Baylor, the retired sales and marketing professional can do something almost no one else in the world has ever done. He can hold his heart in his hands. “It was fairly emotional, that first encounter,” says Bell, who lives in Fort Worth. “I can’t actually explain why.” Bell is one of more than 70 hearttransplant patients…

LATIN YOU USE EVERY DAY (WITHOUT REALIZING IT) Don’t call Latin a dead language. Chances are you speak it all the time! By some estimates, more than 60 percent of English words have Latin roots. Some words, such as the five below, have been lifted completely. Audio Audire is a Latin verb meaning “to hear.” The first-person conjugation audio means “I hear.” (And video? That's “I see.”) Doctor How can someone be a doctor of philosophy? Because doctor means “teacher” in Latin. Exit In Latin, the verb exire means “to go out.” So exit means “he/she/it goes out.” As with so many words, we can partly thank Shakespeare for bringing exit to English, via the celebrated stage direction in A Winter’s Tale: “Exit, pursued by a bear.” Minus Latin is…

ENERVATED People think it means “energized.” But it really means “weakened.” The word nervus originally referred to sinews and tendons, but around the 1600s it became a byword for strength and vigor. Enervate first meant “to cut the nerves or tendons” and later came to mean “to lessen the vitality or strength of.” FACTOID People think it means “a fun, trivial fact.” But it originally meant “a fun, false fact.” Coined by Norman Mailer in 1973 to describe “facts” invented by reporters, this word can (confusingly) describe both true and false information. But for Mailer’s intended meaning, look to the suffix: -oid. If a humanoid resembles a human (but isn’t one) and a planetoid resembles a planet (but isn’t one), it follows that a factoid resembles a fact—but isn’t one.…

The reason Dr. McCarthy is a great doctor is because he has compassion. He discarded the busyness of the profession to find the humility and care that was already deep within him. DON A. STOWELL, Cincinnati, Ohio I was wondering what the outcome of Benny’s heart transplant was. I hope he is doing well. STEVE KRANICH, Bismarck, North Dakota We reached out to the author for an update, and here’s what he told us: Benny and I have stayed in touch, and we’re both doing well. He’s living comfortably at home in New York with his family. My experience with Benny inspired me to become a specialist in the treatment of transplant recipients. MATT MCCARTHY, MD SHARE YOUR STORIES WE NEED YOUR ADVICE! Some people just love to tell other…

THE FIRST ONE out the window was a man. He was followed by his two children. Next, a baby and then the baby’s mother came flying out of the third-story window, all driven by desperation and the smoke that was billowing from the apartment complex in Columbus, Ohio. Brian Smith and Corey Boykin helped them all. “We caught everything that came out of the window,” Smith said. It happened last November, at around 4 a.m., when a fire started on the second floor. “I got my family out,” said Smith. “Then I started banging on doors on the first floor. I tried getting to the second floor, but the smoke was too black. I couldn’t see; I couldn’t breathe. So I turned around and came outside. That’s when I saw…

ART ISN’T EASY As educators, my husband and I encouraged our son, Kenny, to always try his best. One day, his dad, his godmother, and I took him to view a Matisse exhibit, The Cut-Outs, in Detroit. Kenny was five at the time, and as we stood in front of one of the large, colorful paper cutouts, he looked a bit befuddled. He mused for a bit and then, with his hands clasped behind his back, remarked, “Well, he tried his best!” CATHERINE RUSSELL, Brownstown, Michigan PLAYING CRICKET Years ago, my elderly neighbor mentioned she had been trying to locate a cricket that had found its way into her house. After several attempts to find it, she gave up, and her husband named the cricket Jiminy. The pair began talking…

IF YOU’VE EVER been pummeled by the gut-wrenching pain that comes with a kidney stone, your doctor probably handed you a surprisingly benign prescription to avoid another one: water. Stones often form when urine doesn’t have enough fluid in it to dissolve calcium and other substances the body regularly processes. When the body tries to move them along the conveyor belt of the excretion process, they get stuck—and it hurts. Doctors sometimes prescribe medication to keep stones from forming, but for many people, proper hydration is the first line of defense. As some urologists say to those patients, water is your medicine. If the notion of simply hydrating yourself to health seems like magical thinking, consider the research that produced the claim. Study after study shows that drinking enough water…

1 PAINT Freezing and thawing can ruin paint, even if it’s sealed (especially latex paint, which is water-based). Be particularly careful with spray paint and any other aerosol cans, which can explode in extreme heat. 2 SEASONAL CLOTHING Car fumes and dust easily settle into fabric, organizing expert Emma Gordon told Real Simple. In the garage, insects and vermin can get at clothing too. It’s best to store off-season items loosely in plastic containers indoors. 3 A SPARE REFRIGERATOR Refrigerators work best in rooms kept at 70°F; much higher or lower, and they have to work harder, using more energy. Save on your utility and grocery bills by investing in a large energy-efficient fridge. If you must have a spare, keep it in the basement. 4 CANNED FOOD That aluminum…

They sounded new when we first heard them. But the earliest cited uses of these words all date back to 1917: ■ advertorial ■ chowhound ■ cootie ■ gaga ■ lounge lizard ■ OMG (yes, as an abbreviation) ■ pep pill TEN-HUT! PHRASES COINED BY THE MILITARY Blockbuster During World War II, this modern-day term for a box-office hit had a more sobering definition: a bomb big enough to take out most of a city block. Cup of Joe When Josephus Daniels was appointed secretary of the Navy in 1913, he abolished alcohol from military ships. Legend has it that sailors began to refer to the hardest drink available to them—coffee—as a “cup of joe.” Deadline Now a synonym for due date, deadline was originally used much more literally. During…

Can a Word Be Its Own Opposite? Yes! There are actually dozens of examples. They are called contronyms—words that are their own antonyms, depending on usage. Here are a few for starters: Dust can mean “to add fine particles” or “to remove fine particles.” Left can mean both “remaining” and “departed.” Off can mean both “activated” (as an alarm) and “deactivated.” Oversight means both “watchful care” and “an inadvertent error.” Screen can mean both “to show” and “to hide.” 6 Simple Words with Devious Pronunciations COMPTROLLER She doesn’t troll computers; she controls finances, which is why this management title is technically pronounced “con-tro-ller.” GALA You won’t get kicked out of one for saying “gal-luh,” but do know that “gay-luh” is preferred. GYRO It may have the same root word as…

WORD POEWR! WHEN I WAS in second grade, my friend Resi and I walked to school together every morning. We lived across the road from each other in a village in the mountains of Bavaria, Germany. We were supposed to walk to a certain corner and link up with some of the other village children. It was 1945, and I suppose this was a safety thing because of the war. Most mornings we did as we were instructed, but sometimes Resi and I took a shortcut, a little path across a meadow. One day, on one of those detours, we saw a young man, a stranger, in the side yard of a house. He was chopping wood and whistling. We stopped and stared, then walked away quickly, wondering who he…

THE VAST MAJORITY OF PEOPLE give no thought to the dictionary: It merely is, like the universe. To one group of people, the dictionary was handed to humanity ex coeli, a hallowed tome of truth and wisdom as infallible as God. To another group of people, the dictionary is a thing you picked up in the bargain bin, paperback and on sale for a dollar, because you felt that an adult should own a dictionary. Neither group realizes that the dictionary, whether online or leather-clad, is a human document, constantly being compiled, proofread, and updated by actual, living, awkward people. In what is euphemistically known as a “transitional neighborhood” (drug deals occasionally happen in the parking lot, and there are bullet holes in the safety glass at the back of…

AGATHA CHRISTIE Her novels are direct and unadorned, even when the hero is a fussy Belgian. Her language couldn’t be simpler, but her plots continue to fool readers generation after generation. Murder on the Orient Express: “It was five o’clock on a winter’s morning in Syria.” MICHAEL CONNELLY There’s nothing in the pages of his crime novels but simple, get-going writing. No froufrou, no distractions, just the facts, making him perhaps the best procedural writer in the business. Ever. The Black Echo: “The boy couldn’t see in the dark, but he didn’t need to.” JANET EVANOVICH Her books are short, sharp, and funny. That’s rare in any kind of writing, and she’s prolific in a variety of genres. One for the Money: “There are some men who enter a woman’s…

“IT’S LIKE NAILS on a chalkboard,” Missouri state representative Tracy McCreery said. What is? Grinding gears? Silverware scraping on a plate? No—her colleagues’ propensity to use the word physical every time they mean to say fiscal. McCreery even introduced a resolution urging members to speak correctly. “There are a lot of reasons to be depressed about the Missouri legislature, and this just kind of piles on,” McCreery said. Source: Riverfront Times A PENNSYLVANIA MAN was arrested on burglary charges after he was recognized on the store’s security video as a former employee. “The face looked familiar,” said the store’s owner. But it was seeing the thief’s sweatshirt that clinched it— the crook’s name was stenciled on it. Source: wtae.com THE MORNING SENTINEL in Illinois ran this correction in 2011: “Saturday’s…

ONE is the loneliest number that you’ll ever do, according to the consortium of scholars known as Three Dog Night. But what if there is a number (or many numbers) even less popular than one? For reasons totally unrelated to classic rock, author Alex Bellos set out to find the world’s favorite numbers. His online survey swiftly received more than 30,000 votes from numberphiles around the world. Voters gave many reasons for their favorites, though they usually corresponded to an important date or age or other positive association. Overall, odd numbers outperformed evens. And Bellos suggests that numbers ending in zero were too, well, round for most tastes. “When we say 100, we don’t usually mean exactly 100; we mean around 100,” Bellos told Nautilus magazine. “Why would you have…

Tell the truth, or someone will tell it for you. STEPHANIE KLEIN, wri ter I want to thank my parents for somehow raising me to have confidence that is disproportionate with my looks and abilities. TINA FEY, act res s I ’M LUCKY THAT THE ADVENT OF CAMERA PHONES HAPPENED WHEN I WAS 43 YEARS OLD. GEORGE CLOONEY, actor TWO OPPOSING THINGS CAN BE EQUALLY TRUE ... I LOVE TO TRAVEL AND I LOVE MY HOME. TSH OXENREIDER, author Every failure I have considered my own, but every success has been shared. MICHAEL J. FOX, actor GENIUSES HAVE VERY LIMITED TOOL SETS. THEY HAVE A HAMMER, AND THEIR GENIUS IS IN LOOKING FOR NAILS. ADAM ROBINSON, chess master…