"I know what you may be thinking," she writes: "What an obnoxious family! What a bunch of captious, carping, pettifogging The four of them, "compulsive proofreaders," loved to catch people's mistakes in print. Calling themselves Fadiman U., she admits with some chagrin, "in five or six years of competition, we lost only to Brandeis and Colorado College." College Bowl," a quiz show in which two teams of four students, each representing a different college, competedįor scholarship money.
With their parents, both writers, they used to compete with the contestants on the old weekly television program "G.E. She and her older brother would vie to see who could find the longest words she writes that he won "with paradimethylaminobenzaldehyde," the word for "a smelly chemical that we used to sing to the tune of 'The Irish Washerwoman.' "viewed all forms of intellectual competition as a sacrament." Hen Anne Fadiman was growing up, she writes in her endearing collection of essays, "Ex Libris: Confessions of a Common Reader," her family OctoBOOKS OF THE TIMES 'Ex Libris': To the Bookshelf Born By CHRISTOPHER LEHMANN-HAUPT
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