The other day my brother-in-law told me that one of my blog posts contains a mistake, namely my assertion that it’s impossible to build a pyramid with a three-sided base. “No,” he said, “it’s entirely possible. It’s called a tetrahedron.” Since a picture is worth a thousand words, including Wikipedia’s definition, “a polyhedron composed of four triangular faces, three of which meet at each vertex,” I’ve included the picture above.
I can join no less a personage than Samuel Johnson in citing the reason for my mistake. When a woman asked him why he had defined pastern as “the knee of a horse,” a definition which describes the fetlock, when the pastern is in fact the long portion of the leg immediately below the fetlock, he replied, “ignorance, Madam, pure ignorance.” My ignorance of tetrahedrons was ignorance of the purest kind.
But how can I explain another mistake, one that my daughter pointed out? I had given an incorrect name to the Israeli New Year’s song, "Hashana Habaa." It would have been bad enough had I made the mistake only once. But no, I had repeated it throughout the post. When I learned of my mistake, I corrected the post, too late, though, for many other readers who had already seen it but were too polite to tell me of this egregious error. I don’t understand how I made that mistake since I knew the name of the song perfectly well.
So, readers, I regret to say that I'm not perfect. I hope this does not shock too many of you and that you will continue to read my posts, errors and all.
2010=2012 Anchises-an Old Man’s Journal All Rights Reserved
No comments:
Post a Comment