Resting on his laurels....

My apologies for that very long post last time. So long was it that finding "the" figure would have been practically impossible.

But for the sake of the record, the figure I meant to practice was anastrophe, reversal of the ordinary sequence of parts. For example, the sentence "Slowly moved my fingers over the keys" puts the verb before the subject, and the closing line about man the "dweller universal" puts the noun before its adjective.

For some reason this figure is just not natural to me. I need to practice it more. My wife read over the previous post once and spotted the new figure instantly because she has read my prose for more than ten years now and has never seen it before!

Fortunately, a mnemonic image is easy: picture an Olympic champion standing on top of a giant trophy, and think, "On his trophy." Not only does it sound like "anastrophe", but the reversal of order between the champion and the trophy reminds one of the meaning of the name. And, as the title of this post suggests, the picture is a familiar one.

The content of the post raised more questions than it answered, but in the end it was directed against Le Corbusier, of whom I know little more than that he was either an employee or indeed a pseudonym of Ray Moose. Under this name, or through this man, the Moose pursued modern art (note that "Le Corbusier" is just a rearrangement of the letters of "Sir Cube Lore") as a basis for bizarre furniture (note that "Le Corbusier" is just a rearrangement of the letters of "Rebel Curios"), and in general deceived mankind (note that "Le Corbusier" is just a rearrangement of the letters of "Lie Obscurer") into swallowing an architecture not created for mankind but for the glory of Le Corbusier (note that "Le Corbusier" is just a rearrangement of the letters of "Be our relics").

I was reminded of all this recently when I ran across a website proclaiming "Easy Room Makeovers". I spotted right away that "Easy Room" is just a rearrangement of the letters of "Ray Moose"--and who wants a "Ray Moose Makeover"?

Living in our houses

Last weekend I visited a friend who owns a Steinway baby grand. He told me about the history of the Steinway brand, the unlikely success of its orphaned and impoverished founder, and how the Steinway is manufactured--literally, made by hand--today, but I could hardly pay attention. Slowly moved my fingers over the keys, and aching in my arms and back stirred old, old muscle memories: how I would lean into the instrument and in it sing, my voices weaving in and out of each other, finding in an old familiar rag the intensity. Some said I had a gift for it.

Then we moved away to graduate school and there was no piano around, and everyone studied late and woke early, and years went by and I did not play and did not play. I remember when I came home for vacation, sat at my parents' upright piano to play the old favorites, and discovered that they were gone. The muscles tensed but nothing moved, like the stump where arm used to be. The piano was for me a limb lost.

As my friend finished his story about Steinway, my ears perked up at his closing remark: "It's quite an amazing machine." A Steinway baby grand piano, a machine?

Leaving aside necessary distinctions between tool and machine, I was arrested at the thought that I had brought a mechanism into myself and made it of my own body an extension; I did not manipulate the keys so that the piano sang, but I sang in the piano. How queer that I could live, so to speak, in an assembly of wood and metal.

All the way home from that visit, I was keenly aware of how I drive my car. As I guided it in between the proper lines and around cars and corners, I realized that the car becomes an extension of my personal space. When someone crowds too close to the car, I feel it as crowding too close to me; similarly, I feel how close I am to the center line much as I would feel how close I am to the wall as I walk in a hallway. I not only control the car as it moves, but in the car I move.

Then I became aware that, as I drive, I look several hundred feet ahead and project myself, so to speak, into that space, imagining what I will do there, driving each segment in my imagination before I drive it on the road. I looked around at the fields on either side of the highway, at the road ahead and behind, and thought to myself:

I live in the space around me.

Let me try to say that more clearly. When I see the road ahead, I do not change or touch the road; the road has nothing real in it by which it is related to me. But because I see the road, I am changed and touched by the road; there is something real in me by which I am related to the road, and by knowledge I am present to the road. This happens because I sense and know the road. A rock does not dwell in the space around it as I do: if I were a machine, and if my eyes were video cameras, then I would be no different from the rock; but because I am an animal, and my eyes organs of sensation, I am a true inhabitant of all the area around me. As Saint Augustine says, Anima ubi videt, ibi sentit; et ubi sentit, ibi vivit; et ubi vivit, ibi est: "Where the soul sees, there it senses; where it senses, there it lives; and where it lives, there it is."

The Vitruvian Duck recently commented, in typically penetrating fashion, that a house relates to its owners as the body relates to the soul. On that drive home from my friend's house, it finally came home to me what that means: we really do live in our houses, and not just within the volume of our bodies. St. Thomas Aquinas points out that "Something is said to be by 'presence' in all the things that fall under its gaze, as all the things in a house are said to be 'present' to someone, who nonetheless does not exist by his substance in every part of the house" (ST 1.8.3 corp).

The vast size of the cosmos is often trotted out as evidence that man is insignificant. "See how small a territory is ours, one of the smaller planets circling one of the smaller stars in one of the smaller galaxies! So much for man as the center of the universe."

But this misses the point exactly: Because we are men and not machines, animals and not rocks, we truly live in the cosmos. St. Thomas Aquinas goes so far as to say that, in a manner of speaking, when the soul sees the heavens, it lives and exists in the heavens (ST 1.8.4, ad 6). Man is the dweller universal.

Blog slog

Sorry to be so quiet recently, but I have been a bit under the weather. With any luck, the blog will be up and running again over the weekend.

Also, I have been slow to post because I just can't think of a good mnemonic image for the last figure of speech: Anapodoton, pronounced "anna-poh-DOH-ton", the omission of an element gramatically (but not always logically) implied by the sentence.

I only wrote two lines in my last post: "I don't" and "Do you?" Both were attempts at anapodoton, but once again the Vitriuvian Duck has been more attentive than I: he caught that the lines I imported from a news story were themselves shot through with figuration. I see more clearly now than ever that figures of speech cannot be tidily separated out from regular speech as though the figures constitute "poetry" and regular speech "prose". All speech is shaped, and to the extent that it is shaped well it takes on one of the recognized "figures."

So now I want to post about other things, but I may have to pass for the moment on a mnemonic picture. ("On a pod dot on"? What the heck would a "doton" be?)

Infinite Regress

Today's nugget from Moose News:

"The groom and cousin were arrested for allegedly resisting arrest."

Let's run that again:

"The groom and cousin were arrested for allegedly resisting arrest."

Do you?

I don't.

Meet my friend. Meet Anna Fora.

As the Vitruvian Duck caught, last post's figure of speech was the Anaphora: beginning a series of sentences or clauses with the same words. Once again, while I tried to use the figure more than once, it seemed to take over of its own accord and shape one paragraph through and through:

A home is first of all for human life. A home is a practical place of everyday living and an emotional place of comfort. A home is eventually the repository of a human history, a sacrament of memory. A home deserves sweat and late nights for its design.

A home is not about the architect--not unless the architect is designing his own home.

But the Duck pointed out something further in his comment:

That second paragraph: "A home is not about..." is an anaphora to the first paragraph (when viewed as a part of a greater whole). But as viewed as whole unto itself, it's not...It was the fact that 'home' was used at the beginning AND the end of the clause that was bugging me.

This is a good example of how an author writes and does not write. I was certainly trying to shape my prose, and I certainly felt that I had achieved a nice effect, but until the Duck pointed it out I had not even noticed that I began and ended that last line with the same word, or how the second paragraph acts as an anaphora to the first. Those effects are there and are certainly "intended" in some sense, but in what sense? I make my living by interpreting ancient texts, and so the Duck's point fascinates me: I cannot honestly say that beginning and ending that sentence with the same word was actually "on my mind," but I have to accept his observation as an accurate interpretation of how I achieved the effect. The author's "intention"--what the author would say about his own text--may not always be the gold standard.

But I am too tired to unscrew the inscrutable. Tonight anyway.

Anaphora was a fun figure to play with. It was like each sentence was a path that began the same way but might or might not go to the same place; it might actually go in the opposite direction by the end. Mnemonically, I picture in my mind four paths of letters, each beginning with a large letter "A"; each "A" is on a fur rug, and the path stretches back behind it into a dense, mysterious wood. If "four A" does not phonetically cue me, "On a fur A" should recall the needed term.

The Houseownerbot

Yesterday my real estate agent sent me a floor plan of the house I am buying long distance. It is nearly double the size of what I rent now, features a big yard that doubles as a ski slope in the winter, and sports a nifty office room set up to look like a log cabin on the inside. All in all, I am excited about it.

But I did notice in the diagram that the bedrooms, which take up the entire southern side of the building, have no windows facing south. The main living area, comprising the upstairs living room, dining room, and kitchen, is split down the middle by the staircase and its protective walls; besides chopping up what could have been a charming family space, it cuts off most of the light from the living room. Why would anyone do that?

The history of architecture is not really my forte, but two possibilities come to mind. First, the designer may have thought it looked neat to have a staircase in the middle of his blue print, and so in his mind it was actually an artistic flair; he was expressing himself as an artist. Second, the designer may have found that, due to constraints of structure and manufacture--for example, that it is a modular home--it took a minimum of thought and effort to put the stairs in the middle. Either way, it is about the architect, whether it be his self-expression or his ease.

The owner of the house is not exactly forgotten, but he has become an abstraction. He is not Joe or Jane or even Man, but something still more abstract: a functionary, a device created to occupy houses, a mere occasion for the architect's endeavor--a houseownerbot, if you will.

I object. A home is first of all for human life. A home is a practical place of everyday living and an emotional place of comfort. A home is eventually the repository of a human history, a sacrament of memory. A home deserves sweat and late nights for its design.

A home is not about the architect--not unless the architect is designing his own home.

The sanest approach to home--and towns and offices, for that matter--is the Pattern Language. Although parts of the book are available online, I just ordered my own copy at last. I just recently discovered the works of Sarah Susanka, inspired by the same ideas, but I haven't had time to read much yet. The unexamined life is not worth living, Socrates said; and the unexamined living space is not worth living in.

So, I wonder how I can turn that staircase into an asset? The Pattern for stairs assumes that the main living area is at the bottom of the stairs, so I have not seen any ideas for how to handle a staircase leading down from a main area.

Find that Figure

Just to remind you all (an exceedingly hopeful way to describe the readership of this blog): your task, should you choose to accept it, is to locate in each day's post the sentence containing that day's figure of speech. After an appropriate delay, I will post the answer along with a definition of the figure and the picture I use to remember it.

When the figure was Accumulatio, the task proved almost impossible because I use that figure all the time anyway. Who was to guess that it was anything unusual in these pages? So last time I made a special effort to use the figure again and again, to make it more conspicuous.

The figure? "Anadiplosis", pronounced "AHN-ah-dip-PLOH-sis": ending one sentence or clause and beginning the next sentence or clause with the same thing.

I used the figure a number of times, but one paragraph in particular was almost wholly shaped by it:

Some time we need to revisit the whole notion of "news"; "news" means something new, but new in what sense? Every day the sun rises; is this sun rise new or is it the same old thing? Need it only be a new repetition of an old thing, or must it be new in kind? In kind, almost nothing is new.

This was a hard one to find a picture for, but here goes. I spy in my mind's eye two hills with a valley in between them. There is a house on top of each hill, and two houses side by side in the valley. Each of the houses on the hill tops has an enormous blue ribbon on it, but neither house in the valley has a ribbon. Why does on a hill win? Because "On a dip loses."

Oh, that hurt. Wow. But it's a good hurt.

Notice in this picture that the sequence ribbon-dip is followed by dip-ribbon, so that the end of the first is the same as the beginning of the second. Not tidy, but it's the best I can do!

For clarity, let me note that this post does not contain the figure of today. The "figure of today" post will come this evening. I hope.

Improving my figure

My brain is so tired that grammar is a strain, much less rhetoric. To make matters worse, I spent the entire day away from my computer and the Internet, so I do not know what Ray has been up to out there.

But I have set myself an exercise regiment, so I had to find some way to write a blog entry.

I revved up the computer in the evening and turned on the Internet to find some foolishness. Foolishness is most of what I found, in fact. Why Brad Pitt must be in the headlines every day this year escapes me, but the rest of the "news" was so predictable as to defy its name: Obama is trying win over Clinton supporters (you don't say), while Clinton is portraying herself as better than Obama (the gall!); Jay Leno has said something offensive (so turn off the TV already), and the speaker of the house thinks that we should go ahead and have the presidential primaries (yawn).

The one headline that caught my attention: "Home defibrillators do not increase survival." I was shocked at the mere thought of a defibrillator in my home; my home is a monkey farm, and some of the monkeys who can operate machinery would not know if I were fibrillated or not. But on second thought, this bit was already "olds" before it was "news": essentially, it said, what could have been news did not in fact happen. You might have thought you needed a defibrillator--the thought had never occurred to me--but relax, because you don't.

Some time we need to revisit the whole notion of "news"; "news" means something new, but new in what sense? Every day the sun rises; is this sun rise new or is it the same old thing? Need it only be a new repetition of an old thing, or must it be new in kind? In kind, almost nothing is new.

Perhaps the most sensible definition of "news" would be information that might cause me to change my plans for the near or distant future. The rest is titillation.

Accumulatio

Since no one managed (or bothered) to guess yesterday's figure, it was "Accumulatio": saying the same thing in other words, repetition with variation, redundant meaning in novel clothing....

You get the idea.

My picture of Accumulatio is a small pile of dollar bills next to a larger pile of quarters next to an even larger pile of pennies; each pile is the same amount of money, but in different currency. Behind the three piles stands a magician in the traditional cone hat to remind me that another name for Accumulatio is Congeries (like "conjuries").

I forgot to mention that I hope to provide an imaginary picture for each of the figures of speech as we go along. That way I can use the loci mnemonic to remember all the figure and their names.

Persecution

Ever since I began my crusade against the insidious Ray Moose, I have had no peace. His spies call my telephone, pretending to offer me a credit card, and say that they "just need to verify your address."

Sure. As though I'd tell them where I live.

I traveled far away to give a lecture in a town where no one should have known me, and mounted on the wall in the lecture hall was--I am not making this up--a Moose head!

It watched me the whole time. And listened.

Just tonight I had a close call in the sanctuary of my own home. My wife prepared a special dessert to cap off a week of celebrating Easter, a sumptuous something to bring joy to the heart and sugar to the blood. I anticipated the moment all day, until she told me what it was:

Chocolate Moose.

I was stunned; I was speechless; my mouth sagged open; I was breathless, I said not a word. In my own home!

Fortunately my wife hastened to show me her recipe book, and I saw my mistake. I am a typical American and ignorant of foreign words. The name of the dish is clearly chocolate mouse, however the French pronounce it.

"Figures" of Speech

As you may (or may not) have noticed, the Ignoramus Blog is back, for a time at least. As random as the forthcoming posts may seem, I am on a mission.

One of my favorite stimuli to writing is Arthur Quinn's Figures of Speech: 60 Ways to Turn a Phrase. The thought has long possessed me of working through all 60 figures of speech Quinn lists as a kind of exercise, a rhetorical workout.

This idea gained strength recently when I realized how deeply Ray Moose hates words. That's right: he hates them. As much as he can turn them to his advantage, as much as words can make lies as well as truth, the word itself is abominable to the Moose man. He would much rather we look at pictures.

Animals live in a world of sound, smell, and picture, steeped in the sensory. That's all to the good, but that's all there is to it. Humans, without leaving behind the sounds, the smells, and the pictures, go on to interpret their sensations by putting them into words. While a picture may be "worth a thousand words" in terms of conveying details, a picture with no word to give context isn't worth a damn. A wordless animal does not get anything from pictures.

We often hear this put as a limitation or even a defect: There is no such thing as a neutral description; no author is strictly speaking objective; every text has its bias. But suchlike laments read language backward: it is the glory of man that he rises above the sensory to interpret the sheer physical datum by his words.

In a sentence, then: words are from thought, while pictures are from the eyeball.

Ray would rather we did not think. He would like us all at the level of animals, sheep to be specific, steeped in sensation and oblivious to ideas. Ideas are the most powerful force in the cosmos, and Ray would just as soon have all the power in his own hands. So he bombards us with sensations--mega sounds, artificial flavors, manufactured smells, special effects--and most especially with pictures, since for us sight is the strongest and most arresting of the senses.

Ray's greatest victory has been our transition from a print-based culture to a TV-based culture. Whereas Americans once found all their knowledge in books and newspapers and pamphlets, now everything, absolutely everything, is conveyed by way of the TV. And the TV trains the brain to let go thought and submit to the endlessly stimulating pictures. At the end of the day you just can't eradicate words from human culture, since even TVs require words to govern their making, but you have to give Ray credit for having succeeded beyond what anyone would ever have thought possible. If you want to ignore Ray Moose, start by turning off the TV.

So my self imposed rhetorical bootcamp is inherently anti-Moose. I intend to work through the glossary at the back of Quinn's book, using each figure of speech according to its definition.

I begin with the first entry, "Abusio," also known as "Catachresis." This is the substitution of one word for another seemingly in order to use a word contrary to its meaning. For example, in my last post I referred to "slothful speed." Sloth is associated with slowness, so my point about the speed--that it was made possible by a lazy inattention to detail--was made more strikingly by a seemingly inappropriate word choice. Similarly, I believe Shakespeare refers somewhere to "blind mouths."

In my imagination, Abusio is a doleful four-year-old child, covered with bruises and welts to show how harshly the poor word has been treated; his clothes are oversized, indicating that he has been put in place of some other word that perhaps was more natural for this situation; he holds in his hands a copy of the Catechism, to remind me that his other name is "Catachresis."

Such an extreme figure for our first exercise! But Abusio highlights the true nature of the rhetorical figure: it is appropriately inappropriate. Once you have submitted to a language and its conventions, once you have learned where the boundaries are, then you can master it, and transgress for effect.

Your challenge: Can you spot the rhetorical figure of the day in each day's post? Let me know in the combox if you spot it.

Polluting the News

Most of the time I'm OK with the fact that Ray Moose runs the mass media. Then, once in a while, silliness exceeds all bounds of excess and I compulsively...blog.

It started innocently enough. Monsignor Gianfranco Girotti, a Vatican official, gave an interview with L'Osservatore Romano in which he was asked what "new" sins we have to deal with today. He commented on the effects of globalization, and remarked that the capital sins have found new ways to manifest themselves; for example, gluttony comes out as pollution.

But with slothful speed, "capital" sins became "deadly" sins, which then morphed into "mortal" sins, and the headline read: "Pollution and drugs are on a list of new mortal sins produced by the Vatican." Now is that a list produced by the Vatican of new mortal sins, or is it a list of "new mortal sins produced by the Vatican"?

As the situation deteriorated, reporters tried their hand at theology by introducing a distinction between "mortal" and "deadly", as in the the following "news" article:

There are now seven “mortal” sins added by the Vatican to be placed alongside the traditional seven deadly sins: envy, pride, gluttony, lust, hate, greed, sloth, and envy. These new sins are deemed to be more apparent in today’s world.

By the time it trickled through to treehugger.com, a bold-printed headline blared "The Vatican Declares Pollution One of the Most Deadly Modern Sins," and the article sanguinely remarked that

“Thou shall not pollute the Earth. Thou shall beware genetic manipulation. Thou shalt not carry out morally dubious scientific experiments" might soon be incorporated in the Ten Commandments.

Depressing, I know. But perhaps there is a homiletic chance in all the hullabaloo. The idea that greed and gluttony now show themselves in corporate waste dumping is certainly right; pollution is a sin. But in a talk given in 1989, John Paul II turned the whole idea on its head. Sin, he argued, is a pollution:

I am sure that, like almost all young people of today, you are worried about air and sea pollution, and that the problem of ecology upsets you. You are shocked by the misuse made of the earth's products and the progressive destruction of the environment. And you are right. One must take a coordinated and responsible action before our planet suffers irreversible damage.

But, dear young people, there exists also a pollution of ideas and morals which can lead to the destruction of man. The pollution is sin, from which lies are born.

Imagine the slogan potential: "Go Soul Green." "Stop Global Sinning." "An Inconvenient Truth." "Save the Earth."

Some of these slogans have already been taken, it occurs to me, but surely they apply more to the cause than to the effect. After all, that was Monsignor Girotti's point.

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.