What’s a completely useless fact you love sharing?
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Spell the word Malayalam backwards. You get Malayalam.
That is my answer to today’s prompt. Malayalam is the language of Kerala, where I spent most of my working life, and its name reads the same from either end. This has never solved a problem, won an argument or saved anyone a rupee.
It gets better. The trick fails in the language’s own script. Written മലയാളം, the word is no palindrome; its two l sounds, for one thing, are different letters. So the fact is not really about Malayalam, only about how the word happens to look in someone else’s alphabet. The language itself knows nothing about it.
I can hardly imagine anything more useless, and I intend to defend it on those terms.
1. The usual defence gives the game away.
Lovers of trivia have a comfortable reply to their critics: what we call useless knowledge is simply knowledge whose usefulness we have not yet discovered. In 1939 the American educator Abraham Flexner showed how radio grew out of the work of Maxwell and Hertz, men “without thought of use”.1
He was right about science. But notice the bargain. A useless fact may live only on the promise that it will one day pay. Flexner himself pleaded for “the abolition of the word ‘use’”. Nothing will ever be built on the backward spelling of Malayalam. If I defend it by its future employment, I have won it an adjournment, not an acquittal.
2. People have always spent real genius on such things.
In the seventh century the Tamil poet-saint Thirugnana Sambandar composed verses that read the same from the last letter to the first.2 Unlike Malayalam, they do it in their own script. The Greek line “Wash the sins, not only the face” does the same in Greek letters, and is said to have been carved on a font outside Hagia Sophia.3
A hymn does not praise better for being reversible. Holy water does not wash cleaner. Yet when people wanted to give their best, they gave skill that did no work.
3. A useless fact is the one thing we say that wants nothing.
Nearly everything that reaches us wants something. Advertisements want our money. News wants our attention. Advice, even good advice, wants us to change. This blog wants you to think, I admit.
A useless fact asks for nothing. That is why it crosses so easily between strangers in a waiting room. I hand you something worthless, we both know it, and for a moment neither of us is after anything. Try it today: offer someone a small fact with no moral attached, and stop there.
It may bring a smile, but a smile is a fruit, not a purpose. The moment I tell it to impress you, it has found a job and is no longer worth hearing. That is what is wrong with the guest who corrects every dinner table. His fault is not useless knowledge. He has found a use for it.
4. Some curiosity is only a way of hiding.
Here the critics have a point. In a Buddhist discourse, a man struck by a poisoned arrow refuses the surgeon until he knows the archer’s name and what the bowstring was made of. He would die, says the Buddha, with those things still unknown.4
I can know the history of every word and not know how my neighbour’s operation went. A useless fact is a fine dessert and a poor meal. Once it takes the place of something I owe someone, it has lost its innocence.
5. The harder question waits after retirement.
Retirement, changing responsibilities or the passing of years should never bring our learning to an end. Yet all our working lives we are asked what we are for. Then the asking stops, and we must ask what a thing is worth when it is no longer of use.
I had a glimpse of the answer on the old streets of Alexandria, Virginia, where I was known by no one. For the first time in years, nobody needed me to be anything, and I found I could simply be.
If everything must earn its keep, what shall we say of the aged parent in the next room, the infant who can do nothing yet, the friend whose illness has ended his work, and, in time, ourselves? The instinct that spares a useless fact is, on a smaller scale, the one that keeps a chair at the table for someone who can no longer pay for it.
You will say I have just made this fact work for nearly eight hundred words. I plead guilty. Tomorrow it goes back to doing nothing.
A fact need not earn its keep. Neither, in the end, need we.
What about you? Do you have a curious, unusual or seemingly useless fact that you love sharing? And do you believe any knowledge is truly useless?
Notes
1. Abraham Flexner, “The Usefulness of Useless Knowledge”, Harper’s Magazine, October 1939. Flexner was the founding director of the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton.
2. Sambandar, who is said to have died at sixteen, composed hymns to Shiva that form the first three volumes of the Tirumurai, the Tamil Shaiva canon. His reversible hymn, in the third volume, is in the form called maalai maatru, likened to a garland that runs the same from either end. Its first verse reads: யாமாமாநீ யாமாமா யாழீகாமா காணாகா / காணாகாமா காழீயா மாமாயாநீ மாமாயா
3. Nipson anomemata me monan opsin, attributed to Gregory of Nazianzus, a fourth-century bishop. It is a palindrome only in Greek letters, ΝΙΨΟΝ ΑΝΟΜΗΜΑΤΑ ΜΗ ΜΟΝΑΝ ΟΨΙΝ, in which ps is the single letter psi.
4. The Cula-Malunkyovada Sutta (Majjhima Nikaya 63), from the Pali Canon. The Buddha’s target there is speculation about the cosmos, not trivia. I borrow the picture for a smaller purpose.
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John Britto Kurusumuthu
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In response to the WordPress Daily Writing Prompt, 05 November 2026: What’s a completely useless fact you love sharing?
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