Christopher Sheil, UNSW Australia
Amid the astonishing list of accolades collected by Thomas Piketty’s “Capital in the Twenty-First Century,” the book is often also said to be one of the most unread bestsellers. Is this true, and does it matter?
No, it’s not true, or at least the person who made up the story never claimed it was. Rather, the dubious award came with a disclaimer:
This is not remotely scientific and is for entertainment purposes only!
Somewhere along the line the joke was lost, or became a different kind of joke.
The story was created by Jordan Ellenberg in the Wall Street Journal about two years ago. As a lark, Ellenberg, an American mathematician, invented the “Hawking Index” (HI). The index was so-named after Stephen Hawking’s A Brief History of Time, which has sold more than 10 million copies and is widely referred to as “the most unread book of all time”.
To work out the HI, Ellenberg used the “Popular Highlights” feature in Amazon’s Kindle reader, which lists the five most frequently highlighted passages in a book. He assumed that the highlights of books read to the end would be scattered throughout the text. If people didn’t get past the first chapter, the highlights would be clustered at the beginning. To arrive at the HI, the page numbers of a book’s top five highlights were averaged, and then divided by the number of pages in the book. The higher the number, he assumed, the more that was read.
Ellenberg found that the most read bestseller was Donna Tartts’ The Goldfinch, since all five of the top highlights were from the last 20 pages, giving a completion score of 98.5%. The story about Piketty’s tome was born of the fact that nothing was highlighted beyond page 26, giving a score of 2.6%.
The less than scientific rigour was tipped by the 28.3% score given to F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, just pipping the 25.9 given to E. L. James’ Fifty Shades of Grey. If most people cannot get through either a 170 page classic novel or 500-odd pages of smut, something is awry with the reading public, or the HI is not what it pretended to be.
Sampling issues aside, the main problem is that the index doesn’t tell of the most read books, but where people mark them up, from which Ellenberg has drawn a questionable inference. A safer assumption is that the index will reveal a book’s most striking or useful passages. As Ellenberg noted, Tartt’s high score arose from mark-ups where the narrative falls away to spell out the book’s themes. In The Great Gatsby, readers tend to highlight a Nick Carraway line about a third of the way into the text that forms “the axis around which the novel spins”. In Fifty Shades, readers (apparently) mark-up the names of the Operas mentioned for followup.
In Capital in the Twenty-First Century, the first 26 pages encapsulate the rationale and results of the work. Typical of a scholarly book, it begins with a thesis and the balance contains the supporting argument and evidence. The distillation is bound to be the most marked up, no matter how much is read. Indeed, once you get the gist, you can dip or browse for more profit in any number of reading strategies.
If the HI could be retrospectively applied to E. P. Thompson’s The Making of the English Working Class, it would always fall on the famous preface. The result would be a lower score than Capital in the Twenty-First Century for what is probably the most cited history book of the last century.
The HI was pitched as entertainment, and the most entertained of all is probably Ellenberg. Does it matter? Not to the author, I imagine. With sales now exceeding 2.5 million worldwide, even if the HI was what is purported, a score of 2.4% would give 60,000 completed reads in a trade where publishers can only count on sales of about 300 copies.
The unfortunate consequence would be if people are put off. A 700-page book of economics is never going to be a walk in the park, but Piketty’s style is at the lucid end. As I noted in a full-scale review, one of the book’s charms is the way that the author illustrates the changing social consciousness of inequality with contemporaneous novels and television.
Unlike the US, France and the UK, Piketty’s book hasn’t appeared in Australia’s bestselling lists. As the new report on wealth inequality that Frank Stilwell and I prepared for the Evatt Foundation shows, this is not due to a lack of relevance. If it’s because Australians fall for Ellenberg’s canard, the joke will end up on 99% of us.
Christopher Sheil, Visiting Fellow in History, UNSW Australia
This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.
Joshua Nash, University of New England
Why is it that despite how much and how often we use toponyms (place names) linguists, geographers, cartographers, and historians know so little about how they actually work?
Why is it that place names are less prone to change than other aspects of language like accents and pronunciations? And how is it that regardless of how well furnished a map or smartphone may be with place names and directions, we still bloody well get lost? And why are so many Australian places named after knobs?
Eamon Evans’s 280-page Mount Buggery to Nowhere Else: the stories behind Australia’s weird and wonderful place names lists hundreds of place names — colonial, Aboriginal, German, and other — that adorn our country. It is an entertaining, non-academic read with a playful manner, which charts place names from the serious – the many names for Australia, for example – to the jocular, like Australia’s many rude and dirty topographic monikers.
Many of Evans’s humorous stories go a way to responding to some of the scientific inadequacies and toponymic foibles so common in place naming studies. And after I’ve spent almost a decade inundated with often sterile and uninspirational place name theory and how it may fit within more general research in onomastics, the study of proper names, Evans’s tongue-in-cheek take is more than welcome.
The book begins with a reasonable and justified dis of Lucky Starr and his 1962 claim “I’ve been everywhere.” Evans doubts this claim—fair enough, Lucky lists at least 94 places – and estimates this large country of ours has around four million place names. Visiting all of these sites would take yonks, around half a lifetime tells Evans, and would involve using lots of petrol, shoes, and time travelling beyond the Black Stump and back o’ Bourke. He claims the observations and offbeat remarks in this companion save us from doing all this legwork and allows us to sit back and enjoy the often-bumpy yet comical toponymic ride.
I grew up in Adelaide, surrounded by road and place names honouring rich and powerful, dead white men (plus a minuscule number of women). I mean, how many William Streets, Edward Streets, Victoria Everythings, and Queen Elizabeth Otherthings does Australia need?
Naming is power, which Evans obviously understands. Furthermore, he takes the piss. And he bloody well should. Our eponymous (of a person) place name landscape is largely boring as bat turd and as stodgy and starchy as badly cooked porridge.
In telling us about the histories and etymologies (origins) of places, the colonial makeup of our pre-European toponymically terra-annuled joint is made real. Take Lake Alexandrina in South Australia:
named after Her Royal Highness Princess Alexandrina of Kent, the then heir to the British throne. A nice gesture, but perhaps a wasted one, as the princess much preferred her middle name. We now call her Queen Victoria.
We get quirky introductions to each of the nine chapters – one for Australia and one each for every state and territory – plus more toponymic toilet humour than one could poke a dirty toilet brush at in an outback dunny. The knob gets quite a mention, which we are told is a prominent rounded hill, mountain, or elevation on a ridge, with Chinamans Knob, Governors Knob, Iron Knob, Nimbin’s Blue Knob, Spanker Knob, and Yorkeys Knob. I think you get the picture.
We’re told about Mount Little Dick in Victoria, which Evans hopes is named after a small man named Richard who used to live there and nothing else, Lake Fanny near Mossy Nipple Bend in Tasmania, and a few perky hills also in Tasmania called The Nipples.
This feminal place name reminds me of a topographical name on Kangaroo Island I documented back in 2009. The Tits is a place with undulating landscape similar to a woman’s corporeal scenery on the left side of Hog Bay Road near Pelican Lagoon. Between the Tits is a fishing ground off Kangaroo Head, which uses the space between The Tits in lining up the ground.
Apart from the colonial propensity for double entendres, some of these places are simply the victim of time: Cockburn (pronounced “ko-burn”) was named after the prominent sailor Sir George Cockburn. Intercourse Island, 1,500 kilometres north of Perth, was the site of a productive conversation between Captain Philip Parker King and some local Indigenous people.
The listing of the town Verdun in South Australia gives excellent information about the cleansing-cum-sanitisation of German place names in South Australia during the Great War. Friedrichstadt became Tangari, Neudorf became Mamburdi, and Hahndorf became Ambleside to become Hahndorf again in 1935. “About the only German place name that wasn’t changed,” Evans tells us, “was Adelaide – a city named after a German princess”.
Let’s not forget those place names which are mistakes. For example, Bundle Bundle was bungled to become Bungle Bungle; Mount Kokeby, named after Baron Rokeby, was misspelled as “Kokeby” after a spelling error in one of the town’s first train timetables. Place names are filled with specimens of our laziness and folly.
One can always quibble about what was not given. Regarding the contemporary issue of dual naming, something which could be taken from both a humorous and serious perspective, it was a shame not to have seen a little more beyond the Uluru-Ayers Rock example. For example, Nobbys Head in Newcastle is officially known as Whibayganba. What was formerly known as Grampians National Park in Victoria is now officially called Grampians / Gariwerd. The area contains the dual name Halls Gap / Budja Budja.
Dual place naming is a weighty and contentious affair in modern Australian politics and the social cartography of this once unnamed land is dependent on best representing all levels of place naming: Indigenous, British, German, and others. Perhaps this is something for the second edition of Evans’s book, if he’s not too buggered.
The story of Adaminaby, a mining town in New South Wales Evans says was supposedly named in honour of the line, “Ada’s mine it be,” makes one wonder about the credibility of some bush toponymic lore. But Evans happily acknowledges the hazier areas of his research, and ultimately, who cares?
Place names are fun and their study should be the same. What Evans offers is an amusing take on a potentially very dry topic. It’s not a weighty book and is minus a conclusion to pull it all together, but it would make a grouse Chrissie present.
If wit and quips can be used to good effect to get people thinking about important matters like place naming from a humorous and lively perspective, then Evans’s account is a noble achievement.
Mount Buggery to Nowhere Else, by Eamon Evans, is published by Hachette Australia and will go on sale on October 25.
Joshua Nash, Postdoctoral Research Fellow, School of Behavioural, Cognitive and Social Sciences, University of New England
This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.
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