the know-it-all

aj jacobs is funny.  and smart.  seriously smart.  he sets out to try to become the smartest person in the world by reading the entire set of encyclopedia britannica from A-Z.  and he succeeds.  his book "the know-it-all" captures many of those words, so i guess you could say he makes the reader smarter without us having to do all the work of turning thousands and thousands of tiny print on tissue-like pages.  here, in an exchange between jacobs and his brilliant 11 year old nephew, is one small dosage of what i learned by reading his entries, this one in the "L's" for language, "well," said douglas, "everyone's heard of antonyms and synonyms.  but there's also capitonyms.  that's when the meaning of the word changes according to whether it starts with a capital letter...like Herb and herb...or Polish and polish...or consider miranyms, the word in between two opposites, like when you have 'convex' and 'concave', the miranym is 'flat'." his nephew proceeds to show off with the longest word he knows, "pneumonoultramicroscopicsilicovolcanoconiosis" (the disease you get from the silica dust when volcanoes erupt).  aren't you glad you know that?