They have an odd number of pairs of legs, but the total number varies from 20 to 300. Millipedes don’t have 1000 legs, but more likely between 36 and 400 legs. Replacing what I previously thought to be true with what is, apparently, actually true, I gather that certain millipedes will have fewer legs than certain centipedes.
This was news to me. I thought centi and mille were mathematical terms, and, as such, they meant something. Something precise. Something unsusceptible to perception or opinion. A verifiable, quantifiable certainty. A centimeter is 1/100th of a meter – it’s not sometimes 1/36th and sometimes 1/400th of a meter. A millisecond is 1/1000th of a second; there’s no fudging. A century is 100 years; a millennium is 1000 years (even if folks disagree on whether these begin with the year that ends in 0 or the year that ends in 1, the span is accepted and known to be 100 or 1000 years. It doesn’t vary, like daylight savings time, which has had several iterations before the current one that just pushed everyone I knew into an inexplicable exhaustion.)
But no. I’ve been wrong. I actually believed centipedes had 100 legs. Not that I’ve ever hung out with a centipede, but sure, I’ve seen a few. Under some rocks, in some dead leaves. There was no need to study them closely, since I and everyone I hung out with knew everything there was to know about them: they’re small, crawly things with 100 legs. They live on leaves. They’re bugs. No need to count those legs – in fact, you’d be a dunce to count them since you know full well they’ve got a full 100 of them, otherwise what’s the point of having bothered to learned their darned name?
I have deep pools of ignorance. I thought they were confined to important spheres, such as exactly how the House of Representatives functions, and how it is we live in a democracy but not every vote counts. I don’t know where all the 50 states are on a map (I recently thought Washington DC and Boston were close, so I’d do a quick weekend trip to both, then ate my humble crow to learn they’re 442 miles apart, a mere 6.8 hours of straight driving at 65 miles per hour). I don’t know the capitals. I don’t know much about the U.S. protectorates. I don’t know all the presidents. I couldn’t tell you the names of Obama’s dog. I recently learned why the Los Angeles’ Dodgers are named the Dodgers, even though I lived in L.A. for 15 years without having any idea (let alone any sense that I should know the origin of a baseball team’s name). In this, I was ignorant of my ignorance. (In case there’s anyone on the planet other than me who didn’t know, here it goes: back when the team was in Brooklyn, there was some skill required to evade the trolley cars on the streets).
But somehow the deconstruction of centipede and millipede feels different. Like stripping away something that, for once, wasn’t my fault not to know. If I managed to learn the creatures’ names, have forever after elementary school known how and when to use the prefixes of centi and mille correctly, then I don’t want to take the hit for this bit of ignorance. I want to pass this one off to the rightful originator of an urban legend (flora/fauna legend?). Call it by its right name; if you don’t, I’m off the hook. Call them variapedes (from the Latin plural for varius). Call them multi-legged anthropods. Call them short slithery things with a varying amount of venomous claws. Rename millipedes to be multi-segmented, slow-moving death-ovores (since they only eat dead and decaying plant matter).
But stop perpetuating the falsehood. How I’m going to explain this to my son is beyond me. Maybe I won’t have to. He likely knows it already. He memorized prefixes two weeks ago, and is studying suffixes for tonight’s homework. My husband knows stacks and stacks of facts, and has an intimidating memory so he can pull them out at any time. Although he already knew the centipede/millipede ruse, and every last bit of American history/government detail I don’t, my humiliation was somewhat assuaged when I found out he didn’t know how the Dodgers got their name, either. Not that it makes our ignorance quotients equal; one missed fact to a bazillion does not level the field.
Perhaps the fault is all mine. I’m about halfway through The Book of General Ignorance (2006), which is filled with accuracies that (a) no one bothered to teach me and/or (b) I mis-learned despite the stellar education to which I was exposed. I’m set to learn so much more about what I don’t know. I can only take a few pages at a time, as I relentlessly get each multiple-choice question wrong. I am the perfect audience for this book. So perfect, in fact, that I have to go back and re-read previous tidbits of facts almost as quickly as I read another. Facts don’t seem to stay in my head.
Perhaps this exonerates my former teachers and the curriculum guidelines for Midwestern students in the late 1960’s and ‘70’s. Other than the centipede/millipede fiasco, I don’t remember much of anything from the downpour of knowledge raining on my head on every other page before this one. It’s likely I could read the entire 288 pages and still not know squat (or is that, “and still know squat”?). If the book had 1000 facts, I could reach 1000 things I don’t know. Or maybe the total of unknown facts is merely 36. I might be the world’s first milletriviaidiota – someone who doesn’t know a whole bunch of small, trivial facts, the actual number of which is unimportant. Maybe not 1000 facts, maybe never approaching 1000 trivial nuggets of knowledge. The expanse of ignorance may matter less than the idea of a 1000-fact-less-person.
Go ask your friends if they know what a milletriviaidiota is – and see if any cast the tiniest tint of blame on their education.