January 11, 2007
MarkBernstein.org
 

Trust Your Mother, but Look Stuff Up

You learn a lot of valuable lessons from your Mom and Dad, but one they taught me — and which I am sorry to say I neglected yesterday — is to look stuff up.

I should have known something was wrong when I spelled Krups three different ways in the same paragraph yesterday. But my spelling is always lousy. (So was my Mom’s, and she was a newspaper editor.)

Krups, the manufacturer of small appliances like my coffee maker, has nothing at all to do with Krupp, steel-maker, arms merchant, and employer of slave labor. I distinctly remember being told as a boy about Krupp and our household appliances. My parents were just mixed up.

Which is no excuse. Thanks to Niko Papastefanou for straightening me out.

Nobody offered a defense of Ford.