Tammy Benwell, age 9, of Schenectady, New York, for her question:

What does excelsior mean?

Once upon a time there were noble knights who strove to seek the truth and fought bravely against crime and cruelty. One of their favorite words was Excelsior. To them it meant Better Than the Best. Often they wore this word on their shields and banners because they knew that even the best knight should try to be better. That was long ago and since then the word excelsior has been changed to mean a couple of other things.

In our modern everyday world, excelsior is the stringy stuff they use to pack around fragile objects. It may be made of thin curly wood shavings, tangled strips of paper or bits of spongy plastic. The moving men use excelsior to stuff into boxes packed with fragile dishes and such. If somebody drops a box, the excelsior padding makes the contents less likely to smash. The word excelsior also means a certain kind of print that is almost too small to read.