Radio Free Plexus
August 29th, 2007
Collegiate’s Cerebral Curiosity Shop
By Bysshe Collegiate
Did you ever stop to consider that while supernovae are making roman candles in the void of space billions of parsecs away, some guy in New Jersey is bouncing on his bed in his wife’s underwear, lighting his pubic hairs with a fireplace match? That while Io’s 400 volcanoes are expelling hundred-mile-high plumes of sulfur into Jupiter’s orbital air, there’s a crazy cat lady in Juneau smoking catnip just to see what the hell she’s been missing all these years? That while the Milky Way and Andromeda Galaxies careen toward each other in a cosmic, three-billion-year game of chicken, there’s a redneck trucker on I-244 in Tulsa giving the bird to a slow-rolling Pakistani family in a minivan?
People regularly, and idiotically, dichotomize human culture from the universe at large. Turn on Animal Planet and one is bound to hear a television field guide offer up the throwaway phrase “in nature” a dozen times. For example: “In nature, an insufficient number of females in the population of the Andean purple-tart frog induces a select portion of males to transform gender.” While scientists have determined that pesticides are causing mass hermaphroditic shifts in world amphibian populations, I’ve spent enough Saturday nights at PT’s Cabaret to know this behavior is not unique to toads and their ilk. (Folks should really stop using Ortho Insecticide as a mixer.)
The word “nature” has more than a dozen definitions, the most common of which (in a discussion of the “universe at-large”) is “the world as unaffected by human beings.” This strikes me as somewhat ironic as it is relatively impossible for humans to observe any part of the world without affecting it. People can speculate, for instance, that most ecological environments were happily dancing the circle of life gig until humans came along and crashed the party with backhoes and nuclear waste. But it’s ridiculous to think that human culture is any less a part of nature than, say, a cataclysmic meteor.
Homo erectus is simply what happens when nature develops an opposable thumb and a properly-angled larynx. Just the same: Beavers are what happens when nature develops a taste for tree bark and the desire to build water lodges. A family of beavers waddles along and finds a virginal riverbed loaded with birch trees. Expectantly, the beavers do what they do best. (Marry a rich guy, divorce him, and vacuum his life savings. Oops! Different type of beaver.) The beavers chew down the trees, build a log cabin on the river—and voila!—a lake forms, thus dramatically impacting an ecological zone. And I guarantee there aren’t a bunch of fishing swimming around going, “In nature, that dam wouldn’t be there blocking our spawning highway!”
There is one crucial difference, of course: Human beings can reflect upon and alter their behavior. Beaver sentience, sadly, precludes this species from forming political action committees. They just keep on being beavers until the world is dammed.
New subject: How many turns of the etymological wheel did it take for the Greek word for ‘soap’ (smaegma) to evolve into the term used to describe the Oil of Olay-like creamy junk that accumulates in the foreskin of males and the vulva of females? Language is fascinating, even if it makes one’s stomach reel.
Here’s another etymological ditty: The Latin word for ‘wedge’ is ‘cuneus,’ as in the beveled stylus used to imprint letters on a clay tablet in Mesopotamian times. Thus, the word ‘cuneiform.’ ‘Lingus’ is another Latin word, meaning ‘tongue,’ which is also the root of the word ‘language.’ Put ‘cuneus’ and ‘lingus’ together, and one gets something that would force my editor to wash my mouth with smaegma.
The word ‘penis’ comes (no pun intended) from the Latin ‘tail.’ The Greek word for the male generative organ is no phonemic stranger: ‘phallos’ (‘phallus’ to us moderns). The Indo-European (pun intended) root for phallus is ‘bhel,’ meaning ‘to bloat or swell.’ From this root also descends the Greek for ‘whale’: ‘phallae.’ So now perhaps you have a more intimate understanding of Herman Melville’s titular for that diabolical sperm whale, Moby Dick.
It is said that the symbol of the question mark [ ? ] derives from a cat tail and its anus. Just don’t ask that creature of mystery how people came up with the symbol [ : ].
(Etymology is often the falsest art. First paragraph: true. Second paragraph: true. Third paragraph: False. Fourth paragraph: Likely false, but I wish it were true. By the way, did you know that technically a paragraph is a line that shows a break in content?)
Why is it that newspapers never recommend books except within one week of their debut? Most books released today are total schlock. Here are a few well worth your time but printed prior to last week:
High-Brow Literature: Snow by Orhan Pamuk
Low-Brow Literature: Women by Charles Bukowski
Eye-Brow Literature: Maus by Art Spiegelman
Good Toilet Reading: Oxford Companion to Music
As Good as Tolkien: A Song of Fire & Ice by George R.R. Martin
As Good as Books Get: The Fixer by Bernard Malamud
Out of Print but Worth Finding: Swastika Night by Constantine by Murray Constantine (Katharine Burdekin)
Read with a Dictionary by Your Side: The Discovery of Heaven by Harry Mulisch
Read with Two Dictionaries by Your Side: Foucault’s Pendulum by Umberto Eco
Read on Your Next Trip to Europe: Berlin Noir by Philip Kerr
Read on Your Next Trip to Africa: Abyssinian Chronicles by Moses Isegawa
Read on Your Next Trip to the Laundromat: Down and Out in Paris and London by George Orwell
Read During a DUI Stint in the County Clink: Truth and Method by Hans-Georg Gadamer
Read in a Bomb Shelter: The Road by Cormac McCarthy
Read While Getting Laid: The Pop-Up Kama Sutra
Read While Hoping to Get Laid: The Ginger Man by J.P. Dunleavy
Read While Watching Someone Get Laid: Sabbath’s Theater by Philip Roth
Books Worth Burning: Anything by Dan Brown
Books Not Even Worth the Price of a Match: Anything by Ethan Hawke
The Greatest Novel Ever Penned: Don Quixote
Final Thought: Never answer a question with a cat anus.
Mr. Collegiate is filling in for columnist Harry S. Iarch, who is shopping for ladies panties.
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