If I sent a question to Cecil, and after months of waiting for an answer decided to send it to General Questions, does that significantly lower the chance that Cecil will answer it in a column?
That’s not a question that has an easy answer.
Cecil gets around 150 to 200 emails a week (that’s not to count the regular mail stuff.) So the chances of any one question being selected by Cecil for a column are pretty slim.
Questions that stand almost no chance of being answered by Cecil (or Staff) would include:
- trivia questions about TV, movies, or sports, and
- questions for which the answer is easily found in a dictionary, encyclopedia, standard high-school history text, etc.
As noted in another thread, Staff tries to send some sort of reply to many questions, just to indicate the likely status. But it does depend on the mood of the Staff person doing the sorting.
Cecil does take questions from the Message Boards – the recent column about the invention of the Slinky was taken from the Message Boards, and not from mail.
Even from the best of questions, Cecil only answers one a week (roughly). He doesn’t exert himself to answer more than that, since he’s not paid for it.
So, if you’ve submitted a question to Cecil directly by email, and you haven’t heard anything back, you could try posting on the Message Boards. It probably will have no impact on whether Cecil himself tackles it. It may reduce the likelihood of Staff handling as a Staff Report, if there’s already an answer from the Teeming M’s that’s been posted.
Hope that helps.
The “system” is enveloped in mystery, even for those of us who work in it, because the bottom line is Cecil’s whim. I’ve been helping sort the mail for several years now, and I don’t pretend that I can even vaguely guess Cecil’s whims.
Sorry, but why doesn’t Cecil get paid for writing the column? It seems a rather strange arrangement to have 
— G. Raven
I think C K Dexter Haven meant that Cecil Adams doesn’t get paid to answer more than one a week.
He gets paid for writing the weekly column, he just doesn’t get paid for writing any more than one a week.
The difference between Cecil and Staff when it comes to questions asked on the message board is that we’re writing for different audiences. Staff Reports are pretty much just on-line, so anyone who’s reading a Staff Report is likely to have already read the message board thread. Cecil, on the other hand, gets published in a bunch of newspapers, as well, and many of the people who read free newspapers aren’t on-line (or at least, aren’t on-line here), so it doesn’t matter if it’s been done before.