Who was this John Hancock fellow anyway?

I saw a clip from Are You Smarter Than a Fifth Grader? in which a woman was shocked to learn that Europe was a continent, not a country.

John who?

We all have lapses in common sense (some more than others, it seems), but we should at least have some shame when we do.

I was reminded of an incident from my retail days. I was an assistant manager at a store in an outlet mall. For reasons that were never sufficiently explained, whenever I completed a refund transaction, I had to get the signature of one of the other employees -- in addition to my own and to the customer’s, resulting in a most impressive triple-signature document.

One day I asked a 21-year-old co-worker to sign one of those receipts, and she said, “Alright, I’ll give you my John Hancock.” Then she stopped and thought for a moment, wondering aloud, “Why do they call a signature a John Hancock?”

I immediately responded, “John Hancock was the first person to sign the Declaration of Independence, and he signed it really large.”

She laughed, clearly not expecting anyone to actually know such a thing. “OK, nerd.”

(And I didn’t even mention that the guy presided over the Continental Congress, or that he’s a character in the hit Broadway and motion picture musical 1776.)

My response was, “But wait, who doesn’t know who John Hancock is?”

Naturally, this led to a poll among the other employees who happened to be there. To my dismay, only two others were familiar with the late Mr. Hancock.

One was a friend of mine from the College of William & Mary, thereby doing nothing to dispel the “nerd” allegation.

In fact, that was the rebuttal: “Oh, well, you two went to the nerd school.”

So we were apparently disqualified.

The other was a high school junior whose history class had only just covered the Revolutionary era.

The high school boy answered, “Oh! He signed his name big enough that the king could read it without his spectacles!” Maybe that’s a bit of a myth, but close enough.

There were several others working that day, all in the teens through 20s range. None of them had the slightest clue who the man was, and they were all astonished that anyone would know this random piece of trivia.

Thankfully, this was before the Will Smith movie Hancock, or else the survey results might have been a tad more facepalm-worthy.

So, was I being some nerd or intellectual snob by expecting everyone to know automatically that John Hancock was the first signer of the Declaration of Independence?

Or is there a tendency among some youth to perceive social rewards for knowing less?

Of course, the “I have a life; therefore, I don’t know much” argument is a tad fallacious, but kids will figure that out when they’re older. Unless they aspire to appear on Are You Smarter Than a Fifth Grader? Can’t help them then.

But really, how do you not know who John Hancock was? He was in 1776, for gosh sakes!