Q. I know what a “wild pitch” is in baseball. Is there such a thing as a tame pitch?

A. There is. A tame pitch occurs when a southpaw takes off his glove and throws the ball with his right hand. Vice versa for a northpaw. A pitcher throws with his opposite hand when he either 1) has sprained his pitching wrist, 2) is acting up like a wise-acre, or 3) has been given the wrong hormone shot.

Q. What was so wrong about the Norman king, Henri the Bad?

A. Plenty. I don’t want to talk about it. Let me just say that it started out with his not going to school. He was called all sorts of names, mostly by his mother. When he grew up, he married Anne of Aragon--or was it Aragon of Anne?--the one who pouted a lot and claimed her feet were always cold in the castles they lived in. “Why can’t we go to the Riviera?” she asked. But her inconsiderate and loutish husband would say, “There isn’t any Riviera--well, actually there is, but there aren’t any hotels yet--so you can’t go.” He never built anything himself, he just louted around. Their son, naturally enough, was Philip the Worse, but that’s another story.

Q. Why do lions sometimes eat zebras and, other times, lie around peacefully right next to them?

A. Your average lion, lolling about like that, thinks that zebras are horses and that they are behind bars. He believes that they’re in perambulating protective cages of some sort and forgets all about them. Then he gets his appetite back, his hunger releasing a certain chemical that affects his retina so that he can no longer distinguish the color black--the color of the stripes or bars. Contemplating the zebras, he thinks, all of a sudden, “They’re out!” And he, or she, as the case may be, and usually is, jumps them. And you know the rest, from all the colorful and educational TV programs on Africa.

Q. How come the plural of “gladiolus” is “gladioli”? How can us be singular and I be plural?

A. You see, it comes from Latin, and--never mind. Let me just tell you that people who still speak Latin--in a little-known corner of southeastern Romania--have a lot of trouble with English intrusions into their language: “squid pro crow” and “scrumptious est delicto” on their menus, “Sic Transit Glorious Monday” for urban subway strikes at the beginning of the week, and “Abe has the corpses” in their law courts. It’s pretty much a trade-off. We take “excelsior” (singular) from them and they take “wood shavings” (plural) from us. Don’t worry about it. Just add a little water and put the flowers in.

Q. Are “hollyanders” rabbits or ducks? And what are “fitzbergers” anyway? And “Canadian squidgins”?

A. The answer to your first question is neither; they are a new breed of goat, with forelocks on their chins. Keen interest in being displayed in them, since they may eat plastic. As for Canadian squidgins, they are in between a frog and a hard place: they are a mammalian insect that makes a soft plopping noise when it hits the water, trying to escape from I don’t know what. But you hear the sound quite often in the cottonwoods of upper Manitoba, and occasionally in Saskatchewan…. Coming back to fitzbergers, I never heard of them before, or never met them. I think you may be confusing them with the -geralds or -randolphs or -gibbonses. Say hello to Maud.

Q. I have a lot of trouble with memory aid techniques, especially the associational kind. For instance, in order to remember the name of a client I was recently introduced to, by the name of Henderson, I told myself the following short story: “der is German for the, which is so neutral that I had better not think about it at all, but turn to a gender sound like the syllable that follows: son, imagined as a big, strapping, hungry fellow who audaciously craves a chicken.” But I came out with--Wilcox. Of course, I wound up contacting a rival firm instead of a customer. This is embarrassing.

A. Please, no emotions--even in long questions. I believe that you are just trying too hard. Don’t be so sophisticated or polysyllabic in your associations; never use a word like “audaciously,” for instance. Use very simple words and concepts. For example, here’s how I remembered a man named Phillips: first “screwdriver,” then the logical sequence “hammer--nail--dead,” with the switch pair “head/hat,” turning to “parasol--sunburn--skin oi,” pivoting on the doublet “oil/petroleum” toward “energy--cartels--OPEX,” with a last diptych “OPEC/Gulf,” leading straight to “Houston, Texas--Bartlesville, Oklahoma”--the headquarters of: “Phillips”! Always take the line of least psychic resistance, and you’ll be all right--and normal. As in Norman, Oklahoma(!) again. See what I mean? God help you.

Q. If food and survival are even more basic than sex, how come most songs are love songs?

A. There is a bonafide food song, “Jambalaya,” though naturally enough, it’s half in French. There are a lot of drinking songs, of course, in every language, but they’re not pertinent. In fact, they’re downright impertinent, to say the least. And that’s what I want to say, because I can’t really answer your question. And why, when you come right down to it, there should be a ballad to shrimp and not, say, to roast beef or pheasant under glass, I’ll never know.

Q. What are anklebiters?

A. They are little kids, very little kids, starting out early to be general nuisances--asking for things, getting into the cookies, leaving their toys all over the place, invading swimming pools a full five minutes before the adult lap hour is finished, things like that. They don’t actually bite, they just look and sound like hell-bent irritants only just so high from the ground. But bless their little so-called hearts, they deserve a name of their own, don’t they?

Q. Please, what is a broomschlager?

A. If you must know, it’s a crustacean, particularly abundant off the Tonga Islands. It has long, fan-like spikes that it waves 180 degrees all around itself while it moves along the sea floor, sweeping in plankton that stick to each spike, or spoke, it you’re using the past tense, by the force of electromagnetism. It also wards off predators by the electrical shock it maintains in each projection or finger of its fan. The question for naturalists has always been why it knocks out of even slays giant squid and octopi, since they do not feast or even snack on broomschlagers or pose any threat to them. With the advent of modern undersea photography, we now have an answer. It’s all been a tragic mistake. Broomschlagers are not assaulting any squid or octopi but, down there in the murky depths, are merely tapping them on the shoulders to ask directions. Unfortunately, they don’t know their own power. How could they, come to think of it? They’ve never had any voltmeters or anything. And where would they carry one? They don’t even have a pouch: they’re all mouth and waving bristles. My own zoological advice, when unconscious or deceased squids and octopi are found, is to fetch up all neighboring broomschlagers in nylon nets—never wood nets, or even marginal hemp—and, being careful not to touch them with the human hand (unless a war criminal is in the boat), lift or drag them to a place like the Great Barrier Reef, which is filled with vicious mako sharks. Let them get some rough treatment for a change.sweeping in plankton that stick to each spike, or spoke, it you’re using the past tense, by force of electromagnetism. It also wards off predators by the electrical shock it maintains in each projection or finger of its fan. The question for naturalists has always been why it knocks out or even slays giant squid and octopi, since they do not feast or even snack on broomschlagers or pose any threat to them. With the advent of modern undersea photography, we now have an answer. It’s all been a tragic mistake. Broomschlagers are not assaulting any squid or octopi but, down there in the murky depths, are merely tapping them on the shoulders to ask directions. Unfortunately, they don’t know their own power. How could they, come to think of it? They’ve never had any voltmeters or anything. And where would they carry one? They don’t even have a pouch: they’re all mouth and waving bristles. My own zoological advice, when unconscious or deceased squids and octopi are found, is to fetch up all neighboring broomschlagers in nylon nets—never wood nets, or even marginal hemp—and, being careful not to touch them with the human hand (unless a war criminal is in the boat), lift or drag them to a place like the Great Barrier Reef, which is filled with vicious mako sharks. Let them get some rough treatment for a change.

Q. Are all place-names with h or k sounds automatically funny?

A. Yes, and then again no. Hoboken, New Jersey, is always funny—and not the New Jersey part. So is Hackensack and also Weehawken. As a matter of fact, if you throw in Secaucus—which is not a bad thing to do—and Hohokus, you’ve got quite a state there. But, on the other hand, Camden isn’t funny, and Hasbrook Heights has never doubled up anybody. Elsewhere in the country, Kalamazoo and Oshkosh are always good for a laugh, as is Cucamonga. Out there, of course, the whole state of California gets more and more hilarious. Still, Kansas isn’t humorous and, goodness knows, Hell’s Canyon is no laughing matter.Honolulu is somewhere in the middle—of the Pacific Ocean, I mean. Blandings, Florida, is about the best place for a rest.

Q. Where does the salt go when evaporating ocean water lifts up in droplets, which fall again somewhere as pure rain?

A.     Most but not all droplets are distilled, leaving their heavy salt particles behind on the surface of the sea. But a minority of droplets retain light molecules of salt and are still able to rise up and form little-known “saline cumuli.” These clouds tend to group together over the Antarctic, where they discharge themselves as roaring salt storms. Some people, especially geodetic personnel who have been stationed down there too long, believe that they are ordinary snow storms; but they definitely are not. Snow falls, it does not pelt or knock you down. And it never makes very great noise by itself. As for hail, it simply does not occur in extreme southern latitudes for some reason. What we’ve got is sodium chloride, all right, no two ways about it. The proof is penguins. They have been obviously victimized by the fury of periodic salt-ball bombardment, accounting for their unsteady gait. If they could talk, what they would say! On the other hand, if they really could, they might only ask where the party is.

Q. I recently heard the expression, "I find the whole business are cane." Shouldn't it be "is cane?"

A.     No, it’s “are cane”—although nowadays you’ll find it abbreviated or, as the grammatical experts say, elided. In its original stage it had an apostrophe, “ar’cane,” which closed up into the modern “arcane.” This modern elision effectively conceals its earliest usage in Jamaican sugar fields, where it referred not to sweetness, as some ignoramuses think, but to the dense obscurity of the thick cane breaks. “Ah’m not goin’ into the ar’cane” was the common expression then, signaling fear of the lugubrious and unknown—now applicable to fields of any mysterious or unpenetrable endeavor. In any case it is never singular, though it is unexpected.

Q. I feel bad that I don't know what a "broomschlager" is.

A. We are not allowed to deal with emotional problems.

Q. Are glaciers on the move—and, if so, how fast?

A. They certainly are, but at highly variant speeds. You can’t see them move at all in

Greenland; you can’t even tell if they’re coming or going. Actually, they are moving above a  
millimeter a day in the east and sliding back the same in the west, all of which is very hard on 
the upper peninsula, especially the crust. Underneath, where all the fairies live, there’s no 
stress at all. On the other side of the Arctic Circle, though, in Faintheart, Alaska—on the cove, 
where the fishing colony keeps re-establishing its tiny village every twenty-three days—the 
saying is, “Here she comes again!” Nowadays, they have snowmobiles and can make quick 
getaways, but in the old days it was almost perilous. Why, incidentally, glaciers are female I 
don’t know, since there is no gender in that Esquimo dialect. It just gains something in 
translation, I guess.

Q. How come there’s no difference between “fat chance” and “slim chance?"

A.     It is what’s technically known as an idiot’s syncrisy of the language. Like, for example,

“slow up” and “slow down”—the same thing. Or “regardless” and “irregardless.” And “I couldn’t care less”—or, nowadays, “I could care less.” See? Still, to get back to the original query, and it certainly is queer, “slim” isn’t always equated with “fat,” as in the following joke:

First girlfriend: “Have you slept with him yet?”

Second girlfriend: “Fat chance!”

Well, who would, if the lover in question is some slobiferous pachyderm with a midriff like a Goodyear blimp and rapine in his bloodshot eye? But, come to think of it, I’ve never heard of some slender youth being turned down with “Slim chance!” either. Girls usually say, “Get lost!” and—I’m sorry, we can’t give advice to the lovelorn, this is a science feature.

Q. Are pilot fish associated in any way with flying fish?

A. Not at all. A pilot fish lives in the mouth of a whale. When he goes to work in the

morning, he says to his wife, “I’m leaving for the orifice,” and that’ll be his day, darting in and out  

of whale’s teeth for his sustenance. His name is a misnomer, and he has nothing to do with your   true flying fish—or your fake one, for that matter. Flying fish, by the way, do have a sort of lateral 

fin-wing on each side. But they do not have, and never have had, propellers. Also, they never fly 

non-stop anywhere, but only make short hops. That might be because they've been de-

regulated. They’ll discontinue stewardesses next.

Q. Is "eftsoons" used anymore?

A.    No. The word was split in two after the seventeenth century, and we have used only half of it ever since. Remember, they used to say “Zounds!” a lot back then, and a simple expression like “Zounds! I’ll be over eftsoons” tended to confuse “Zounds” with “soons.” So they gradually dropped the “soons” part for about 150 years, saying “Zounds! I’ll be there eft” before hanging up the telephone, even before they had telephones. But in the middle of the nineteenth century, just before Alexander Graham Bell invented the cracker that bears his name, they shifted back over to “soon,” leaving off the s, which they really didn’t strictly have to do because they had dropped “Zounds,” both with and without the exclamation mark, entirely by then. Linguistic change is so skittish.... “Eft,” by the way, dropped the t by animadversion and became ef, the sixth letter of the alphabet.

Q. How come frigate birds are found in Montana?

A.     They are male frigate birds, the ones with the big red throat sacks that fill up like balloons during sexual arousal. Some of these birds become so excited, with such great expansive balloons, that they rise straight up, their wings pinned back, floating clear off from the whole Galapagos archipelago. They drift helplessly on upper wind currents all the way to places like Arvada, Montana, where the coolness of the jetstream produces gradual contraction and they waft gently down. A frigate bird was also in North Dakota once, where it was mistaken for a turkey with a goiter and sold to Wisconsin for Thanksgiving.