As an anthropologist, I was dismayed to find two factual errors about my field within ten minutes of perusing the December issue. Tony Hoagland’s poem “The University of Men” refers to a woman “engaged to an archeologist, / who took her to excavate dinosaur bones in Tibet.” That would be a paleontologist; archeologists study the remains of human societies. Dinosaurs are outside of their wheelhouse by about 60 million years.
In his essay “My Iceland” Sparrow refers to Icelandic, with its 320,000 speakers, as “one of the world’s least-spoken languages.” In fact, more than half the world’s six to seven thousand languages have fewer than ten thousand speakers each.