Happy Mother's Day to all mothers, and daughters, and sons of mothers, and in-laws of mothers. To mother we owe everything.

There. That should hold us until the next insipid Hallmark-inspired holiday.

Right about here, in the old days, like a year and a half ago, I would have said once again how much I enjoy looking up things like Mother's Day in my handy one-volume Columbia Encyclopedia (50,000 entries) or the British-flavored Penguin Encyclopedia (28,000 entries).

The Columbia has not a single Mother's Day in it. It runs alphabetically from Mother Carey's chicken (see: Petrel) to Motherwell and Wishaw, which turn out to be two towns in the Strathclyde region of south central Scotland merged into one big Motherwell in 1920. Who knew? Certainly not me.

That's what you can learn from books, at least the ones I have at home.

Here's what I learned from the Internet, where, if there is a god, she probably resides these days:

"In the times of the ancient Greeks, Rhea, the Mother of the Gods, was honored with a special festival... Jumping across the ocean, the first observation of a Mother's Day in the United States took place in 1872 when Julia Ward Howe, social reformer and poet who penned the words to the 'Battle Hymn of the Republic,' suggested a day to honor mothers."

And so on. You can get a heck of a lot of information electronically these days. In truth, I have no idea where the snippet above originates. The web site is named "chennaionline" and it doesn't actually matter much what that is or where it lives.

Just like the introduction to a dictionary, which no one reads, information on the Web trumps the source.

If there is reason to suspect you may be reading spurious information on your monitor, you just Google on over to the next half a hundred explanations of Mother's Day. If most of them agree Mother's Day is what it is, then they probably are correct.

The most popular online encyclopedia, Wikipedia, currently featuring 1,128,527 articles in English, allows users to upload and edit articles. The work of a ten year-old and that of an exalted Oxford Don may appear together in Wikipedia. The ten year-old can edit the Oxford Don with the click of a mouse.

Julia Ward Howe's original proposal called for a "Mother's Day for Peace." Boy, could we use THAT now.

Writing five years after the conclusion of the Civil War, she said, "Let them meet first, as women, to bewail and commemorate the dead. Let them solemnly take counsel with each other as to the means Whereby the great human family can live in peace..."

Mother's Day didn't take hold until the next century. President Woodrow Wilson made it a national holiday in 1914, on the eve of yet another great war.

The eventual mother of Mother's Day, Anna Jarvis "herself became a major opponent of what the holiday had become" because "commercialization of the U.S. holiday became so rampant."

As a result of all this web access to information, publishers have ramped down the production of unabridged dictionaries and multi-volume encyclopedias.

From the Uncle John Bathroom Reader series to Use This Book! The Only Book You'll Ever Need, reference has become entertainment first, information dispersal last.

For yucks there are books such as Pocket Dad with fatherly advice to "travel light" "shine your shoes" and "mow the lawn."

Beyond the ubiquitous annual almanacs, there's Audel's All New 4th Edition of the Mechanical Trades Pocket Manual. Use of a stub shaft? Stair horse layout? Find it here.

These days there's more fun than facts in the reference section. I don't know if this is a bad thing or a good thing. If I figure THAT out, I'll be the first to let you know.

Aired Sunday May 14, 2006 at 10:55 am and Monday May 15, 2006 at 8:40 am

Orders/Information:

The Penguin Encyclopedia edited by David Crystal. Penguin hardcover $35.00 ISBN 0140515437.

The Columbia Encyclopedia, 5th Edition Houghton Mifflin hardcover $59.95. ISBN 039562438X.

Uncle John's Bathroom Reader Extraordinary Book of Facts & Bizarre Information Bathroom Readers' Institute, Portable Press paperback $17.95. ISBN 1592236057.

Use This Book! The Only Book You'll Ever Need by Melissa Heckscher. Quirk Books hidden spiral paperback $14.95. ISBN 1594740976.

Pocket Dad by Dina Fayer & Bob Fayer. Quirk Books paperback $12.95. ISBN 1594740925.

Audel Mechanical Trades Pocket Manual, 4th edition by Thomas Bieber & Carl A. Nelson, Sr. Wiley paperback $15.00. ISBN 0764541706.

Notes:

http://www.chennaionline.com/specials/summer2002/mothersday/origin.asp

Julia Ward Howe wrote the Mother's Day Proclamation in 1870, as a call for peace and disarmament. Excerpt:

From the voice of a devastated Earth a voice goes up with
Our own. It says: "Disarm! Disarm!
The sword of murder is not the balance of justice."
Blood does not wipe our dishonor,
Nor violence indicate possession.
As men have often forsaken the plough and the anvil at the summons of war,
Let women now leave all that may be left of home
For a great and earnest day of counsel.
Let them meet first, as women, to bewail and commemorate the dead.
Let them solemnly take counsel with each other as to the means
Whereby the great human family can live in peace...

The Wikipedia verification policy: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Verifiability