Mr. Kipple Goes to Budapest

 

All right. It’s time to get this off my chest. It’s been sitting there over four decades, since I was put a poor confused lad navigating the mean streets of middle school. True, many years have gone by where I haven’t thought one iota about this, but it is also true that, from time to time, it does revisit me and haunt me.

 

In 1980 Mr. Kipple was my social studies teacher in eighth grade. He was a fun, young teacher, small in stature but a student favorite, fairly easygoing and innovative. For example, he assigned us seating in reverse alphabetical order, a fantastic novelty for me, whose last name begins with an a followed by a c, who sat in the front desk on the left or right in 99 percent of my classes. He had a friendly, curious demeanor, kept us laughing, and gave us unique projects over the course of the semester.

 

One of the more basic “fun” projects was for each student had to select any city, anywhere in the world, to research and prepare a report about it. For some bizarre reason – or maybe for no reason at all – I chose the Hungarian city of Budapest. And for a less bizarre reason, I attacked this project with my usual modus operandi – I waited until the last minute. After burning some midnight oil the night before it was due, I had the horrifying realization I didn’t have enough material.

 

Remember, this was a quarter-century before the internet. We did our research in the library. Not having access to a library at 10 pm on a Sunday night, I was at a loss of what to do. So I fudged some facts, small things, little items I think would fall between the cracks and would not be caught by Mr. Kipple. After all, he had 29 other cities to visit via his students’ reports.

 

A week or so later he bounced around class excited to talk about our reports. They were all very, very good, he noted, very interesting and informative. We’d be tested on the information we were about to discuss and review that afternoon.

 

Can you see where this is going?

 

He had a huge checklist he wanted to go over based on the “cool stuff” he gleaned from our research. Thank God he did not make each one of us stand up and read them. Instead, he picked on random people and complimented them for this piece of information, that factoid, this legend, that myth, this stat.

 

Then he called my name, and studying the paper in his hand, asked me if Budapest really did mean “the land at the fork of the rivers in ancient Magyar.” I turned white as a ghost and gulped and nodded. With a faraway look in his eyes, Mr. Kipple uttered but one word: “Neat!”

 

Now, Wikipedia tells me that the etymology of “Budapest” has something to do with the merging of two names, Buda and Pest, both probably Roman Empire names either of ancient rulers or fortifications. Less certain is that idea they derive from the Turkic word for “branch, twig” and the Slavic word for “cave.” That night in 1980 when I was stumped for facts, I noticed that the Danube ran through Budapest, and thought that “the land at the fork of the rivers” would be a great translation.

 

I lied academically for the first of only two times in my life. I felt awful. But the worse was to come. Later in the week we were tested on the class review of all our city reports, and two-thirds down the page was the following question:

 

22. This city derives its name from the Hungarian phrase “the land at the fork of the rivers”: ______________________ .

 

Oh no! Not only have I deceived my teacher, but through me twenty-nine of my fellow students were also fed and learned falsified knowledge, even though they may have promptly forgot the origin of the word “Budapest” over the subsequent years and decades.

 

Unlike the other time when I faked my way through an essay exam on Dickens’ A Tale of Two Cities, which I made amends for by actually reading the novel 20 years later (and a half-dozen other Dickensian works since), I do not see how I can restore balance over this deceit. So, suffice it to say, this is my mea culpa. I can only hope that it was never a secret dream of Mr. Kipple’s to vacation in the Hungarian capital, and if it was, hope that he was never laughed out of a tavern in that noble city for disrespecting the origin of its name.