Library fines get serious.

My friend Mark Johnson at Marquette University just topped my record. I've been bad in the past. I've let a dozen books from the children's section go a month over due because they were all mixed in with the landslide that was my living room bookcase, and the bill was big.

But I didn't pay $390,190.72.

What gets me is that the Marquette Law Library tacked on a $15 processing fee for good measure. That's chutzpa.

Today's lost beauty:

Dunt: "A hard blow."

The Silence of the Ignoramus

Sorry to have fallen behind on the blogging, but I am sick. It is hard to think interesting thoughts when I am sick.

Today's Lost Beauty:

Clyte: "This useful word is employed in Scotland to express the confusion of an orator who, for want of a word or an idea, suddenly stops in his speech; and sits down. 'I could na find words to finish my speech,' said a Glasgow Bailie, so I clyted.'"

The Wiley Pirate and the DMV

In case you have not looked at the title of my blog, I am an ignoramus. For example, I have never read that mandatory children’s classic, Treasure Island by Robert Louis Stevenson.

But ignorance is not bliss, so I have begun to educate myself. My standard approach to learning is reading to my children: if I want to know about Wyoming, I check out all the Wyoming books in the kids’ section at the library and we have a family Wyoming readathon; if I want to know more about snakes, the same goes. My method has worked particularly well in this case, since what I want to know more about is itself a children’s book.

Even if you have not read Treasure Island—and if you have not, then why are you reading blogs instead of the classics you are missing?—even if you have not read the book, I say, you have felt its influence. Why does X always mark the spot? Because of Treasure Island. Why do pirates have parrots? Because of Treasure Island. And why, to get to the point, do the most villainous pirates have only one leg or only one hand?

Because of Long John Silver, the iconic good bad man of Stevenson’s tale. And yes, that is where the fast food chain got its name.

With my newfound cultural savvitude, I detected the LJS reference in today’s newspaper immediately: “Armless driver faces prison after police pursuit”. The driver in question is a one-legged man with no arms whose penchant for high-speed driving has landed him in prison twice before; his first arrest came when he kicked a police officer after an accident.

That’s right: the one-legged man kicked an officer.

Wiley, our hero’s highly appropriate last name, is a living parody of Long John Silver. Back in the day, if you wanted to flout the law but had a personal disability such as a severed leg or missing eyeball, you just got yourself a parrot and a boat and off you went to terrorize the Caribbean. Now if you want to go pirating, your best bet is ripping CDs; should you do something that actually feels exciting or dangerous, the DMV will not renew your license.

Today's Lost Beauty:

Scathy: "mischievous; applied to a wild, excited, or frantic person."

A one-line post of my own.

Ok, I am officially irked.

I stumbled across an interesting blog corpse today, The Vocabulary Reclamation Project. It looks like the author was engaged in some serious anti-Moose polemic, even daring to quote that thundering line from C.S. Lewis, "What men have forgotten how to say, they will soon forget to think."

I wonder what happened to the VRP. I wonder if the Moose caught wind of it.

Were the blog active, I would recommend Lost Beauties of the English Language, by Charles Mackay. Admittedly, it is a book of obsolete words, but they are words that should not have been lost and, I think, could many of them be reintroduced.

Today's Lost Beauty:

"Ninny-watch: The expectation of a fool; a vain, over-sanguine hope."

Liturgy for folks like me

Most parishioners associate "rubrics" with a Rube Goldberg machine, and most parishes have dropped Gregorian Chant in favor of The Adore Ray Moose Hymnal, but the disedified masses have found a voice in the Curt Jester's liturgical jab .

And I'm adding this gratuitous sentence so that I will not be guilty of the infamous one-line blog post.

The Ignorfreakinramus is back.

As you can see, the Ignoramus Blog has revived with the approach of summer vacation. Although I have not seen Ray Moose himself on campus in quite some time, his influence is manifest in the papers students turn in, and at this time of year they turn in quite a lot of them.

It can be overwhelming: comma splices, split infinitives, dangling modifiers—the whole range. Ray’s strategy for undermining our country begins with an attack on our literacy.

But so far no student has used the one Ray Moose linguistic innovation that I actually like: freakin’.

Such a fascinating word! Sometimes it is quite banal, serving only to emphasize the speaker’s strong emotion about the word it modifies: “Dude, he was wearing a freakin’ bandana!” Please. At other times it seems to signify that the object described is what it is in an unusually intense way: “He was driving a freakin’ hot rod!”, that is, his vehicle embodied the idea of “hot rod” to an unusual degree.

But the word’s meaning is not what makes “freakin’” interesting. What sets it apart is its grammatical placement: American slang usage prefers that “freakin’” be inserted within the word or phrase it modifies. We’re all familiar with “co” and “pre” and so on, which attach at the beginning off words like “coworker” and “presale”; we know about “ful” and “ment”, which attach at the end of words like “helpful” and “wonderment”; but one can only marvel at “Dude, he’s a megalofreakinmaniac!”, or “That is absofreakinlutely hysterical!” The possibilities are endless: “technofreakinlogical”, “superfreakinstitious”, “Vatican freakin’ II”.

I have to give the Moose credit where credit is due. He has invented a new grammatical form unparalleled in any language I know. And as a bonus, Ray Moose has provided us with the longest non-technical word in the English language:

“Antidisestablishmenfreakintarianism.”

Estrogen, estrogen everywhere, and not a drop to drink.

According to an article in the Scientific American, fish in some American rivers have enough estrogen in them to cause breast cancer cells to grow in laboratory dishes. No one knows exactly what estrogen causing chemicals the fish have imbibed, the article says,

But their effects on the fish themselves were clear: the gender of nine of the fish could not be determined. "Increased estrogenic active substances in the water are changing males so that they are indistinguishable from females," Volz says. "There are eggs in male gonads as well as males are secreting a yolk sac protein. Males aren't supposed to be making egg stuff."

Despite the fact that there is a pharmacy on every streetcorner in my county, I have never seen a fish shop at a pharmacy. And although I have browsed the fish section at Walmart and talked with my friends who own fish, I have never seen an estrogen supplement marketed for goldfish or guppies. Where are these fish getting megadoses of estrogen?

The article explains:

All of the hormone replacement products that women use go down the drain, along with birth control pills, antibacterial soaps, and many of the plastics we use, like Bisphenol A, have such effects.

Translation: women consume hormones to prevent conception or to ease the effects of menopause, these hormones are excreted into the toilet, the toilet is flushed into the sewer, and the sewer treatment system does not get rid of the hormones before the sewer water is dumped into the rivers to cause an identity crisis for young male fish.

The article goes on to express concern about the effect this may be having on populations who depend on rivers for their drinking water. Who knows but that it may cause breast cancer in women or--well, bad effects in men? That is indeed a cause for concern!

But the Scientific American avoids the big question. The estrogen zapping our fish is what manages to get past our sewage treatment system; the estrogen hitting our sewage treatment system is the extra stuff not absorbed by the bodies of American women. If this leftover of a leftover is transmogrifying our fish, what is all that estrogen doing to American women?

Medical ignoramus that I am, I don't know the answer. But I do know why the Scientific American avoids suggesting the possibility of a hint of a guess at the answer.

Today's American culture is built on the foundation of the birth control pill. Our economy presupposes a large population of working women, houses are designed for families with two kids or fewer, cars are designed for small families, movies are about single people or married people with two kids (one boy and one girl), and the American dream is to retire young, that is, when the second child has reached maturity, and move to Florida and play golf. To suggest that birth control has bad effects on women involves more than fighting a large and lucrative industry with lots of lobbying power. To speak against contraception means fighting to redefine the way America lives and dreams.

The task is intimidating, even when you have the research sitting on your desk.