New York Times mistake - 19 October 1979

All hell was let loose at the New York Times the other day, and I can only imagine the glut of telephone calls that the frantic switchboard operators took, as the indignation came roaring in like the Mississippi flood.

The Times committed a bona boo-boo or clanger of the first clang. They identified a neutron as a neutrino, can you imagine?

Now this required a humiliating retraction, or correction, the next day and it appeared in the weirdest form. Opening my paper on Wednesday morning I saw what at first looked like a technical explanation of what was happening in the World Series, the annual baseball championship, with which we have been obsessed during the past ten days, to the exclusion of such trivia as SALT II, the general alarm over rising interest rates, and how low Jimmy Carter is sinking in the polls.

The apologetic diagram showed what looked like eight baseballs, four in the top picture, four in the bottom. They were arranged at the four corners of an invisible rectangle, with arrows swooping out from the centre to each of them. In the middle was a faint star surrounded by short sharp spokes, exactly the way they indicate the daze in the head of Andy Capp, when Mrs Capp fetches him a clout on the chops. This by the way, was called in the diagram "an energetic collision".

Before I put my glasses on, I'd swear to you, that this was an illustration of the art of John Candelaria – the pitcher of the Pittsburgh Pirates, who on Tuesday night saved his team for the decisive final game. And I bet that many an eager boy saw the diagram and was proud to think that the Times had had the wit to illustrate in this fashion two of Candelaria's deadly weapons, the arrows swooping out from centre to produce either a curve ball, or a sinker.

Well, people to whom baseball is as much a mystery as atomic physics will be relieved to hear, that what the Times was apologising for was a gross mistake it had made the previous day, in explaining just why Weinberg and Glashow of Harvard and Abdus Salam of London and Trieste had won the Nobel Prize in physics.

I don’t think we need detain ourselves very long over the details of their great achievement, if the Times says, which it did, that these great men have evolved a theory which, and I am quoting, "is so profound as to effect man's perception of existence", that surely should be enough for the rest of us. Enough for me, anyway, to end the unbearable suspense you must be suffering, by saying that in the two diagrams – four baseballs to each – the ball at the south-west corner of the first diagram, labelled charge current, was identified as neutrino zero or negative charge. Which required the reprinting, next day, of the whole picture to show that same harmless ball correctly identified as neutron zero, or negative charge. I hope now that everything is quite clear.

What this did to me was to convince me that knowledge has become so specialised that there is no point any more in the presence even of a semi-expert, of pretending to know anything about anything. I used to think, in the old days, that Americans were much more knowledgeable than Englishmen for instance, about medicine, because they used with enviable flipness exact medical terms like rhinitis or congested sinuses, where Englishmen tended to go around grumbling about their catarrh or sniffles.

I remember becoming so ashamed of my lumpish ignorance about such things that I stopped talking about my lumbago, or rheumatics and learned to toss off words like sacroiliac muscle spasm and slipped disc. Years later, a back expert told me that a slipped disc is a meaningless phrase. It took some years to discover the ordinary American, the layman, was no more knowledgeable than his English counterpart, he simply yielded to the national love of Latin and Greek. Especially if he knew no Latin or Greek.

Thus, I was enormously impressed when I heard somebody say, casually, at a cocktail party that he’d suffered a lesion on his clavicle. I tiptoed off to the dictionary to learn about this horrendous and exotic affliction, what do you think? He’d hurt his collarbone. Lately anybody who has an itchy eyelid announces he has blepharitis.It used to be, and I imagine it’s still so in England or Australia, South Africa, Ireland, that when you had a pain and went to the doctor and a friend would say, "What did he do for you?", and you’d say, "He gave me a pill".

No longer, not in this country – you are undergoing chemotherapy. Quite simply, literally, this means treatment by a chemical. Well everything you put in your mouth, from a hamburger to an aspirin is a chemical, and I have no shame in declaring that my favourite American form of chemotherapy is a chocolate milkshake.

And if you think I am being facetious, let me remind you what may for the moment have slipped your mind – that in 1502, Columbus took back cocoa beans to Spain, where people added sugar and water, and guzzled the stuff to their great and secret delight. For I notice a baffling item in this story, it says here that for nearly a hundred years the Spaniards kept their secret. Why? Why?

It took the English, soon after 1700, to add milk to the powdered bean and popularise what became known as chocolate houses. By the way the idea, of chocolate baked into blocks and gobbled in theatres – preferably during the tensest scenes of the play – was a long way off and even then has remained a habit peculiar to the English. Chocolate houses spread around Europe and in 1713 there appeared what, for many years, has been one of my favourite books and one I incessantly recommend to Americans who believe that good medicine started no later than the discovery of penicillin.

It is a work, and still a classic work, by one Bernardino Ramazzini, an Italian, and it's called De Mortis Artificum – of the diseases of workers. In other words, this was the first text book on occupational disease. He goes into what he has noticed about the diseases peculiar to blacksmiths and bakers and miners and midwives, and on and on through glassworkers, farmers, fishermen, painters, stone cutters, many others, all the way to athletes and not least, scholars.

He scolds scholars for sitting up late at night straining their eyes, weakening their knee joints by sitting all the time, and complaining usually of constipation. He quotes to them an older authority still, Plautus, "sitting hurts your loins and bowels; staring your eyes".

Well, "scholars and night owls tend," he says, "to sleeplessness", so Ramizzini in 1713 brought them all the good news, the latest, the absolutely sovereign remedy, "There has come in," he announces, "a new drink or draught, it is called chocolate, you mix it with milk and heat it, you take it just before you go to bed, it will sooth the digestion, calm the intellect and induce sound sleep."

If Alfred Nobel, a night owl and an insomniac had been alive at the time, I am sure he would have given Ramazzini the Nobel Prize for medicine. So let’s have no more sidelong sneers at a mere journalist who has been following Ramizzini’s prescription for many years, and who sleeps like a top. Whatever that means.

Another word that is enormously popular in America – has been for, oh, I should guess a couple of decades, is the magic word, virus. All suffering people toss it off to explain everything from pneumonia to a head cold and fallen arches. I used to use it myself till, to my shame, a doctor present said, "No I don’t think it's a virus, I doubt it has protein coat". That's a stopper if I ever I heard one.

Well, I find these days, it’s better to ask simple questions than to venture a statement of fact in any company that might include an expert. I think the best ploy out not to appear to be sulking, but to leave with experts a fleeting impression of intelligence, is Stephen Potter's great recommendation. You will remember he was caught in a learned conversation between two experts on Italy, an economist and a priest who were going on with the most alarming expertise about the social, political and economic turmoil of present-day Italy. He waited like an alert cat for a chance to spring – he'd said nothing so far, and then the priest got off some large generalisation about the whole of Italy, Potter piped up, for the first time modestly, "But not, I think, in the south". The priest darted in "absolutely right," he said, Potter never opened his mouth from then on but the priest thought him an uncommonly perceptive man, and invited him to lunch.

Another way to cut a figure among strangers, when you don't know what they know about and what they don’t, is to fetch along an amiable, except in some way abstruse, topic, and gradually bring the conversation round to that. A few years ago, I was sitting with a party of Americans mostly not showbiz people but composers of popular music, theatrical agents, and the like.

They were having a very private bore recalling who wrote what, and when, and the rest of the company was very much left mum on the outside. Especially one small modest Englishman present, who, I knew, had an encyclopaedic knowledge of the speciality they thought was all their own. So in one momentary pause I turned, not to the pros but to my friend, and I said to him "By the way, who wrote the lyric of Collegiate?" that was a stunned silence from the experts, "Surely he said it was Nat Bonks?" And of course he was right. From then on, the company treated him with elaborate respect, asking his opinion, fetching him drinks, muttering "these English are the damndest people".

Well I imagine that is a trivia name even less well-known than that of the immortal Nat Bonks – he is Clarence Muse, so far as I am concerned he wrote the immortal song which Louis Armstrong made his theme, Way Down Yonder in New Orleans. But he was the first black man to star in a movie. He made in all 219 films and in practically all of them, he played the kindly humorous differential negro who became known – and in our day execrated – as Uncle Tom. He died this week in California, an unrepentant, kindly and modest man, one day before his 90th birthday.

I am myself suspicious of people who believe, as a religion, in progress, but some things do not stand still – a black man has just won the Nobel Prize in medicine and Uncle Tom, at last, is dead.

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