Read Online Now I Know More by Dan Lewis - Free Book Online Page A

to navigate their surroundings will certainly get lost. Sure, you can be creative when it comes to choice of colors, fonts, or line thickness, but the locations of things have to be right or the map won’t be very useful.
    As a consequence of this, it’s very easy for a third party to start making maps—the mapmaker simply has to copy the data from any other reliable map and reproduce it. To some degree, copyright law should prevent this, but outright copying isn’t so easy to prove. As a solution, some mapmakers add fake streets (called “trap streets”) or even fake towns (often called “paper towns”) into their maps. Any third party copying their work will also copy the fictional creation unique to the original mapmaker’s product.
    According to novelist and YouTube celeb John Green in a TEDx talk, the General Drafting Company in 1937 did just this with the town of Agloe, creating it out of thin air at the intersection of two dirt roads just a few miles from Roscoe. (Green later used Agloe as one of the locations for his novel, Paper Towns , and as the inspiration for its title.) A few decades later, Agloe appeared again, but this time in a map made by a different, unrelated company—Rand McNally. General Drafting thought they had caught Rand McNally red-handed, but Rand McNally had a good and surprising defense:
    The county clerk’s office had given them the information.
    It turns out that, in the early part of the 1950s, someone armed with the General Drafting map went to visit Agloe. Seeing nothing there, he figured that opportunity had knocked. This lost-to-history fellow probably guessed that others would also come to Agloe—it was on the map, after all!—and would expect to find something there. So he opened a small shop and called it the Agloe General Store. Over the next forty years, the fictional town of Agloe grew. As Green notes, at its largest, Agloe had a gas station, the general store, and two houses. Most importantly, Agloe had the attention of the county administrators. They considered Agloe a real place, and therefore, so did Rand McNally’s team of cartographers.
    Today, sadly, Agloe is gone. The buildings are abandoned if not destroyed, and the mapmakers of the world no longer recognize its existence.
    BONUS FACT
    Orbiting the Earth right now is a satellite called LAGEOS 1, which contains a plaque designed by the late astronomer Carl Sagan. The plaque is effectively a map, showing what the arrangement of the continents looked like when the satellite was placed into orbit. Why include this? LAGEOS 1 is expected to return to Earth in about 8 million years (due to orbital decay), and when it does, the map will tell whomever or whatever discovers it the epoch from which it came.

A PERFECTLY CROMULENT WORD
THE VERY BRIEF HISTORY OF TWO WORDS THAT AREN’T
    â€œA noble spirit embiggens the smallest man,” said Jebediah Springfield, the namesake and founder of the hometown of Homer and Marge Simpson’s family. The word “embiggen,” of course, isn’t a word at all, despite the assertion of schoolteacher Miss Hoover that it is a “perfectly cromulent word.” (It shouldn’t surprise anyone that “cromulent” is, also, a made-up nonword.) One can say that Mr. Springfield’s esquivalience in formulating a motto for his town via a well-known speech was disappointing. After all, one would think that Jebediah’s investment in the region and in his own legacy would have compelled him to invest the time needed to craft a message involving, you know, actual words. But it wasn’t to be. The dord of fake words attributed to him is, therefore, incredibly high.
    And yes, “esquivalience” is made up, too. Same with “dord.” You can find both in a dictionary, though, if you look hard enough—but for two very different reasons.
    First came “dord,” courtesy of the G. and C. Merriam