1492

dinkum commented on the word 1492

TERM: 1492

DEFINITION:

(1) "In fourteen hundred ninety-two, Columbus sailed the ocean blue

And found this land, land of the Free, beloved by you, beloved by me."

-- First verse of 1919 poem by self-styled wunderkind Winifred Sackville Stoner, Jr., who plagiarized it from an earlier poem by Joel Barlow, who wrote the original in 1807.

(2) According to Kurt Vonnegut, 1492 should not signify any great date of national remembrance, since it was merely "the year in which sea pirates began to cheat and rob and kill" the indigenous inhabitants of North, Central, and South America. (NOTE: "Sea pirates" is the name Vonnegut applies to the rapacious, marauding white Europeans who displaced or enslaved or exterminated the native inhabitants of the "New World").

EXAMPLE:

' A lot of the nonsense was the innocent result of playfulness on the part of the founding fathers of the nation of Dwayne Hoover and Kilgore Trout.

' But some of the nonsense was evil, since it concealed great crimes. For example, teachers of children in the United States of America wrote this date on blackboards again and again, and asked the children to memorize it with pride and joy:

' = 1492 =

' The teachers told the children that this was when their continent was discovered by human beings. Actually, millions of human beings were already living full and imaginative lives on the continent in 1492. That was simply the year in which sea pirates began to cheat and rob and kill them. '

-- From Kurt Vonnegut's 1973 novel Breakfast of Champions -- Chapter 1 (page 10).

CITATION:

1973 KURT VONNEGUT, JR. Breakfast of Champions, or, Goodbye Blue Monday (c) 1973 by Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. Delacorte Press / Seymour Lawrence. Second Printing.

Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data:

Vonnegut, Kurt. Breakfast of champions. I. Title.

PZ4.V948BR PS3572.05 813'.5'4 72-13086

August 27, 2013