Longtime Admirer
This letter is in long-overdue praise of Mr. Rob Long. For my money, he is the E. E. Cummings and Jonathan Swift of our times, the consummate reflection of all that is over the top but nonetheless excruciatingly all too real these days. I have been utterly enamored with his biweekly Long View ruminations in NR each issue and find it high time he made an anthology available to his many fans. I am quite sure he can even populate it with columns that didn’t reach your issues but would still be extraordinarily funny and relevant.
I am sure that I am not the first to suggest this, but please let this be known to Rob anyhow. His piece is the first thing I read before I voraciously digest the rest of each issue. It never fails to put me in just the right frame of mind to stew over all the topics of the day as presented so cogently by your publication.
I would thoroughly enjoy a volume that would allow me to laugh incessantly through what seems the purgatory of the rest of the day.
Lewis A. Rogatnick
Clayton, N.C.
Fatherly Fan
As the father of two grown daughters, I wanted to say that Kyle Smith’s essay on the joys of fatherhood (“The Protean Superpower,” October 28) had me looking back and both chuckling and nodding my head knowingly. Mr. Smith should, however, think twice before poking fun at Tim Allen. His Last Man Standing may be the only program currently on network television in which the protagonist is an unabashed conservative.
Chris Traczek
Bolingbrook, Ill.
Prefix Pedantry
You comment that LeBron James is a “centimillionaire” (the Week, November 11), but a “centi-” anything is 1/100th of whatever you are measuring. A “centidollar” is one penny, therefore a “cent.” I believe you meant to say that James is a man worth tens of millions of dollars (a decamillionaire). Almost every adult is at least a centimillionaire (worth $10,000).
Thomas A. Portante
Pittsburgh, Pa.
The Editors respond: Find us a centipede that hops around on a hundredth of a leg and we’ll concede the point, but otherwise consider that the English prefix “centi-” has two senses, hundred and hundredth, both derived from the Latin for “hundred.” You could, if you prefer, bypass the ambiguity with “hectomillionaire,” whose prefix is from the Greek for the same and has only the sense hundred. The asymmetry is unsatisfying, but languages are like that.
