It was the nine-year old nephew of a famous mathematician who, in 1920, came up with the term googol— It meant a massively large quantity of things you could't even see with the naked eye. For example, can you imagine what ten duotrigintillion subatomic particles looks like, or whether one could pack them into all the crevices of this earth? When a company was casting about for a good name for a search engine that could deliver almost infinite amounts of information, the story is they misspelled the little prodigy's term. Are we the only creatures in the universe perennially obsessed with numbers and measurement? Someone always wants to know: if relief comes soon, how soon? Many are gleeful that the president's approval rating is the lowest of all elected to that office. And yet another day brings what's described as another new low— How low could anyone go? Meanwhile, we listen as news reports count and re-count the number of hospital beds; numbers of our dead, numbers of the recovered. Here, when you twitch with pain and your face turns pale, I'm desperate to know how bad it is, on a scale of one to ten; after the mallet strikes the lever and sends the puck on its feverish course toward the bell, to know how soon the wooden tower at last stops its fearful juddering.
Purveyors of fine poetry since 2003.