Severna Park Resident Pens Presidential Language Trivia Book

In 2016, Severna Park resident Greg Nedved published “Presidential Foreign Language Trivia,” a book filled with tidbits and anecdotes for people to learn and test their knowledge about U.S. presidents and languages.

Late last year, he added a new edition with an updated format, new presidents and new facts.

The project is a merging of two of Nedved’s longtime interests.

“I’ve always been interested in history,” he said. “It was my favorite subject when I was growing up and it’s my degree when I majored in college.”

In college, Nedved also studied Mandarin Chinese, which turned into a career at the U.S. Department of Defense as a linguist, translator, interpreter, and instructor and at the National Museum of Language as its president emeritus.

Nedved realized that despite the wealth of knowledge and numerous trivia books covering presidential history, one topic was missing.

“There's been trivia books about presidents and all kinds of other areas, never one focusing on their language skills, so I thought, ‘Who better than me to write this?’” Nedved said.

He started writing the first edition in 2014 and began research beforehand. He jots down facts that he comes across or prints them out and organizes them in folders.

“Sometimes I stumble across it by accident, but usually I’m looking for something,” Nedved said. “I like to have a couple of anecdotes for every president. Some are easy. Some aren’t so easy. If it’s a president that I’m having a problem finding specific anecdotes about their language skills, then I will look for it, which means I will go to the library and start researching it.”

A challenge when writing any nonfiction book is sourcing.

“If there’s any doubt in my mind, I won’t use it,” Nedved said.

One thing he found out from his research: There does not seem to be a correlation between language skills and presidential performance.

“We have had presidents that have been very good in languages, like John Quincy Adams, for example, who’s not considered a good president at all,” Nedved said. “The flipside of that is we have people like George Washington and Abraham Lincoln who really didn't study languages at all, and they're among our best.”

From the beginning, Nedved knew that he wanted to update the book.

“I knew at the time I wrote it that I would probably need to do an update, because you get new presidents, and since that time, we have had three presidents,” Nedved explained.

He also enjoys staying sharp on the material and being the authority on a topic.

“I like the idea that I’m the person that knows about this topic,” he said. “If you want to know, you contact me.”

For the second edition, Nedved updated the format from a multiple-choice format with a source list to a true/false and question/answer format.

“I thought I needed to simplify it a little bit, make it more user-friendly,” Nedved shared. “Instead of having a big book with footnotes at the end and all that other kind of stuff, I thought it would be a little easier, perhaps more attractive for people, if it was simpler.”

He also added sections, including sections about presidents before, during and after their terms and a “presidents general” miscellaneous section.

“It’s just general topics, not necessarily connected to while the president was in office, but connected to him somehow,” Nedved said. Say, for example, Latin being on the dollar bill or Latin being on the Washington Monument. That’s related to a certain president, but that didn't happen when Washington was president. It didn’t happen before he was president. It didn’t happen after he was president. This is just something that’s identified with him.”

It also features a section on English about the various ways presidents have used and affected the English language, from Theodore Roosevelt popularizing the term “lunatic fringe” to Abraham Lincoln coining the term “Michigander” to mean a person from Michigan.

One president gets a section all to himself.

“There’s so much material on Thomas Jefferson, I just thought I'd make him a separate category,” Nedved said.

He also reviewed facts from the first edition and replaced weaker entries, or ones that had weaker sources, with better ones.

To further language research and education, Nedved decided to donate the money from the book to the National Museum of Language. He has been involved with the museum since 2008 and is the president emeritus of the museum and runs programs.

“I just thought it would be a way to bring some money into the museum,” he said. “It's not going to be a lot of money, but it’s still something that I’m willing to do.”

Outside of trivia, Nedved is writing a biography on Alva Lasswell, a Marine Corps cryptologist who deciphered Japanese radio traffic during World War II and helped facilitate the victory at Midway in 1942 and the ambush of Japanese Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto in 1943. He also expects to continue researching and updating the “Presidential Foreign Language Trivia” book.

The book is out and available at major retailers and on Nedved’s website at www.gregnedved.com/shop in hardcover, paperback and Kindle formats.