Sure seems like there’s more confusion afoot than usual, but I suppose confusion’s a constant throughout human history.  Even Daniel Boone confessed, “I have never been lost, but I will admit to being confused for several weeks.”  Fortunately, in our time we still have public libraries across the land as bastions against perplexity.  We have other weapons to turn confusion into understanding, including small ones like erasers.  Even in that small arena confusion lurks.  There’s a jillion types and brands of erasers; some remove ink, some smear it, and some last forever while others rapidly don’t.  The situation’s clarified by “The Best 9 Types of Erasers In 2025,” from Honey Young, “a premier manufacturer and exporter of a diverse range of stationery products, hailing from China.”  Their list ranges from erasers made from gum, rubber, or plastic, to motorized and toy erasers shaped like food.  It includes pros and cons for each type type, and those depend on who using the eraser, and range from   Sand erasers, for example, “are specialized erasers designed to remove stubborn marks or materials from paper surfaces,” that “effectively grinds away pencil or charcoal marks without damaging the paper” and “and are often favored by artists and drafters for their precision and effectiveness.”  Gum erasers leave crumbs (the official term for eraser dust) “everywhere,” and kneaded erasers “can be shaped into various forms … absorbs graphite or charcoal without wearing out or leaving residue … can erase charcoal, pencil, and crayon works, perfect for painters and artists” but “may smudge or stick if the temperature is too high.”

            Meanwhile, the NYTimes Annemarie Conte reported in “Ralph Nader Has a Pencil Eraser Problem,” that the old consumer advocate was irked “what he considers the ‘planned obsolescence’ of pencil erasers,” and that Conte hadn’t researched why many pencil erasers offend so quickly. “Before you use a third of it, over time the eraser goes hard on you. Not only is it useless, it smudges and backfires,” Nader complained.  She noted that historically, bread was used (hence “eraser crumbs”), then rubber, which was abrasive and dried and hardened fast, but in the 1990s synthetic rubber supplanted plain rubber for pencil erasers.  These are attached by metal rings called ferrules.  However, “Though plastic erasers stay flexible longer and are generally better for clean erasing, pencil companies tend not to use them on their tip erasers” to lower cost.  Conte’s final advice to Nader and us pencil fans is “if you really want the eraser on your pencil to last, use one pencil at a time, keep it out of the heat and the sun, and store the rest of your pencils in a box in your desk drawer.”

            According to the website for NATO’s library, that organization is another anticonfusion mainstay thanks to their NATO Phonetic Alphabet that begins “Alfa, Bravo, Charlie, Delta, Echo, Foxtrot, Golf, Hotel, India, Juliett, Kilo, Lima, Mike, November, Oscar, Papa, Quebec, Romeo, Sierra, Tango, Uniform, Victor, Whiskey, Xray, Yankee, and Zulu.”  The words were all carefully selected by an international team to avoid cross-cultural misunderstandings.  For instance, “Alpha” and “Juliet” were changed to “Alfa” (easier for non-English speakers to pronounce) and Juliett (in French a single “t” would be silent).   “From Alpha to Zulu,” an online article by Abby Strong, described the earlier versions of communications alphabets that sprang up when telegraphs, radios, and phones emerged.  It began in 1901 when Richard Geiger, a Navy telegraph operator “came up with the idea of using word instead of letters” to communicate. Western Union created a phonetic alphabet in 1918 that relied on American names placenames and a few personal names (“Adams, Boston, Chicago, Denver, Easy, Frank”).   The International Communication Union created the first internationally recognized one in 1927 that used city names.  WWII proved that was ineffective, so in 1956 after much research, NATO made theirs.

            Alaskans know the confusion of US state abbreviations, particularly that between AK, AL, and AR. The latter state’s confusing in other ways; is it pronounced ArKANsas or ARkansaw?  The source of that’s described in my battered 1945 copy of George Stewart’s “Names on the Land.”   The Territory of Arkansaw” was established by Congress in 1819 right when “a plain and vigorous American citizen … William Wiidruff, a printer by trade and a publisher by instinct, a man of little education, he had strong opinions, and in language was a purist.”  He castigated Noah Webster for including “lengthy” in his new dictionary, wondering if “the next edition will authorize the word ‘strengthy’?”  The first edition of Woodruff’s paper, the Arkansas Gazette, contained the Congressional edict that spelled the state “Arkansaw” eight times, and he replaced each with “Arkansas.”  Congress forgot about their original spelling and thereafter followed Woodruff’s lead, despite most of the population calling it Arkansaw.  Longfellow wrote, “I prefer the sound of Arkansaw as being more musical than Arkansas.”  Woodruff’s preferred pronunciation is unknown, but he was prominent in state politics, sold and rebought and his newspaper numerous times, and at age 68 he fought against the Union army in the Battle of Little Rock.  He proved, as Common Cause founder John W. Gardner said, “Life is the art of drawing without an eraser.”