One day. Professor Lindau came in, in a bad mood. He ranted fitfully about his girlfriend. “That wedge!” he shouted. “What can one do with a wedge like that?” he asked rhetorically.
Oreo was puzzled, so the professor tossed her the desk copy of Partridge. After following a trail of false roots and camouflaged cognates, she came to Partridge’s assertion that cunt (or, as Partridge put it, “c*nt”) derived from the Latin cunnus, which was related to cuneus, or “wedge.” Eric went on to say that the word had been considered obscene since about 1700, adding that “the dramatist Fletcher, who was no prude, went no further than ‘They write sunt with a C, which is abominable’, in The Spanish Curate. Had the late Sir James Murray courageously included the word, and spelt it in full, in the great O.E.D., the situation would be different;… (Yet the O.E.D. gave prick: why this further injustice to women?)… (It is somewhat less international than f**k, q.v.)”
Oreo fell off her chair laughing at this witty entry in Partridge. When she got herself together, she shook her head. Her sprachgefühl told her that Eric was stretching a point (or, rather, a wedge) and that the professor was perpetuating Partridge’s error by persisting in this pie-eyed usage. She had never been misled by her sprachgefühl, and as she thumbed through a later edition of Partridge, she found that that worthy had corrected himself in a supplement: “(p. 198) cannot be from the L. word but is certainly cognate with O.E. cwithe, ‘the womb’ (with a Gothic parallel); cf. mod. English come, ex O.E. cweman. The ~nt, which is difficult to explain, was already present in O.E. kunte. The radical would seem to be cu (in O.E. cwe), which app. = quintessential physical femineity… and partly explains why, in India, the cow is a sacred animal.”
Oreo fell off her chair laughing at the part about the cow. She was, after all, just a child in her mid-units. Then she pointed out the passage in the supplement to the professor.
“I know, I know,” he said, dismissing her quibble. “But I like the idea of wedge. It whips.” When Oreo looked puzzled again, he tossed her volume 12 of the O.E.D.
Oreo became adept at instantaneous translations of the professor’s rhizomorphs. “Mr. Benton is worn out by childbearing. Of course, his paper was an ill-starred bottle. I don’t wonder he threatened to sprinkle himself with sacrificial meal.” “You mean,” said Oreo, “that Benton is effete, his paper was a disaster, a fiasco, and he wanted to immolate himself.” The professor was impressed but not struck dumb. “I am phonofounded,” he said logodaedalyly.
Once in an adjective-adverb drill, Oreo wrote: “He felt badly.” The professor was furious and viciously crossed out the ly. He was ashamed of Oreo.
Oreo looked him dead in the eye and said, “I am writing a story about a repentant but recidivous rapist. In the story, this repentant rapist catches his hand in a wringer. Therefore, when he goes out, recidivously, to rape, he feels both bad and badly.” The professor kissed Oreo on both cheeks.
Oreo was still angry with him for doubting her, and in her story about the rapist she added such abominations as: “The Empire State Building rises penisly to the sky. As architecture, manurially speaking, it stinks.” She felt it appropriate to employ genito-scatological adverbs to express academic vexation.
The professor wept and promised never to cross out her ly’s until he was sure of her intentions.
A few months later, the professor’s gait was bouncier as he came up the front steps. His blood donations seemed to be more and more a source of comfort and anemia to him. Oreo found out that much of the credit for the new Lindau belonged to his latest girlfriend, a wedge of a different fit. Oreo overheard him mumbling happily to himself about the many joyous conflations he and his new friend had had together. That one was easy for Oreo to figure out. “Conflation, from conflare, ‘to blow together,’” she said to herself. “Oh, shit. The professor’s just talking about plain old sixty-nine.”
Oreo’s milkman, Milton, although not officially a tutor, was one of her favorite teachers. Milton had observed much along life’s milk route and was eager to pass on his observations. As he came up the steps to leave his deposit, he would also deposit his thought for the day. Although others had doubtless made similar observations, it was from Milton the milkman that Oreo first heard (here cast in Milton’s favorite syntactical form): You ever notice that all dentists have hairy arms and a large wrist-watch? You ever notice that insurance men walk fast? You ever notice that African men and women all look like men, except Masai warriors, who look like women? You ever notice that you feel guilty when a bank clerk checks up on your balance? You ever notice that you feel guilty sitting in a movie theater waiting for them to turn the lights out and start the picture?
Milton the milkman had an udderful of theories, his Grade A theory a three-stage rumination upon the supposition that short toes, kinky hair, and impacted wisdom teeth were signs that their bearers were further along on the evolutionary scale than long-toed, straight-haired, erupted-wisdom-toothed people. He came up on the porch one day, sat down, and took off his shoes and socks. He believed in visual aids to get his ideas across to modern, media-oriented youth. “Look,” he said, pointing to his feet. “See? Short toes. Now, what does this mean? This means that I am on my way to being your man of the future. You ever notice that some people have toes like fingers? Now, I ask you, do we go around grasping things with our feet any more? The answer is no. Prehensile toes went out in the year one. Therefore, anybody with long toes is like a throwback. Therefore, I, Milton, with my short toes, am practically your man of the future. Pretty soon, toes will disappear altogether and people won’t be able to walk. But that will be okay, because by then everybody will be their own helicopter. They’ll be able to take off from a standing start and propel themselves wherever they want to go with some kind of individualized motor mechanism.
“Now, kinky hair. Kinky hair — like that beautiful fuzzy cloud you have — is not really kinky. It doesn’t zig and zag. Kinky hair is actually coily. That’s right — coily. Each little hair is practically by way of being a perfect circle. Now, these millions of coils on your head are all jumbled up, coiling around each other. That’s why it hurts you to comb your hair. You’re pulling in one direction, the coils may be pulling in sixteen other directions. But — and this is the main thing — while the coils are doing that, they are also forming air pockets. Now, air pockets do several things. One, they keep your head warm in the winter. Two, they keep your head cool in the summer. And, three, they protect you from concussions by absorbing the shock of blows to the head. Therefore, kinky hair is certainly more useful than straight hair. It is obviously advanced hair. I mean, the evolutionary wheel had to take a couple of wrong turns before it came up with kinky hair.
“Now, impacted wisdom teeth. Everyone knows that wisdom teeth are disappearing altogether. We don’t need all those teeth, what with your processed foods, your tenderized meats. Our jaws are trying to tell us something. Our gums are saying, ‘Enough, already. Who needs this?’ So to make the message a little clearer, the wisdom teeth say, ‘I’ll just stay here under the gums. Nobody needs me out there anyway. Why should I sweat it, working away and only catching an edge of something here, a piece of something there?’ So to sum up,” he said, putting his socks and shoes back on, “short toes, kinky hair, and wisdom teeth that won’t come out — these are your three indicators as to your superior person. If you should meet anybody with all three, you’re shaking hands with the future, because such a person is so far beyond us, he or she makes the rest of us look like cavemen.”