April has been a busy month of driving, speaking and drawing. It’s the high season for my Author’s Purpose talks and SOL review speeches. The students I’ve seen have been bright and engaged — last night I met one who even knew what the War of Jenkins’ Ear was!!! He was in a group of fifth-graders from California visiting Williamsburg, and I couldn’t stump them in my Hysterical History talk no matter how I tried.

But students in an earlier group stumped ME. One asked what the root of the slang term “Yankee” was — and I fumbled around the answer (I was in the neighborhood, but not knocking on the front door). Here’s the real answer: “Yankee” goes all the way back to 1683, when the Dutch were in control of what we now call New York City. It’s a not-so-nice term they used for the English colonists in neighboring Connecticut. It may be from Dutch word Janke, meaning “Little John.” In one college class I studied how groups that get insulted chose to use that insult as a brand of pride, and this may be a great example of that kind of recycled use. “Yankee” may also be a form of the Dutch nickname Jan Kees, after “John Cheese,” the generic nickname the Flemings slapped on Dutchmen. So the Dutch took an insult at them and then turned it onto the English — who then took it as a proud description for themselves! It’s a general term for “native of New England” by 1765. Of course, during the American Revolution the British in London used it as a slur for all Americans, but look at how that one turned out.

In that same group of students, I was asked why the Pentagon headquarters of the U.S. Department of Defense has five sides. NO CLUE!!! Turns out we got a striking building just because of a striking need — it’s a great story of American can-do-in-a-hurry. The Pentagon was built quickly because of the need for office space to run the American military effort in World War II. It has 3,705,793 square feet, making it one of the largest office buildings in the world. The first site planned for it was beside Memorial Drive, and an early plan called for a square structure with one corner cut off to fit it by an existing road. This produced a skewed Pentagon shape — five sides but not balanced or pleasing to the eye. With further planning, the building got moved to a larger plot of land nearby, and that allowed the project’s chief architects, George Edwin Bergstrom and David J. Witmer, to refine the five sides into the form of a true pentagon — which actually allows for easy movement around the huge building and for the most sunlight possible to enter the building. Preliminary design and drafting took just 34 days — and resulted in the happy accident of a world-famous shape.

I love it when History and geometry come together!

Tags: Bentley Boyd, Chester the Crab, comix, history, Pentagon, Yankee

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