The next Monday, when the fathers were all back at work, we kids were playing in a field. One kid says to me, “See that bird? What kind of bird is that?” I say, “I haven’t the slightest idea what kind of a bird it is.” He says, “It’s a brown-throated thrush. Your father doesn’t teach you anything!”

But it was the opposite. He had already taught me: “See that bird?” he said. “It’s a Spencer’s warbler.” (I knew he didn’t know the real name.) “Well, in Italian, it’s a chutto lapittida. In Portuguese, it’s a bom da peida. In Chinese, it’s a chung-long-tah, and in Japanese, it’s a katano tekeda. You can know the name in all the languages of the world, but when you’re finished, you’ll know absolutely nothing whatever about the bird [...] So let’s look at the bird and see what it’s doing—that’s what counts.”

                                   —R.P. Feynman

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