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?

Anecdote in the Swiss Alps

         Setting: The Hotel Arosa, in German Switzerland. Easter Skiing Season. It is dinner time. My family waits for me in the little anteroom just before the dining room. I am in a water closet on the first floor hall, having pulled up the plunger on the commode. This machine is infernal to an American because instead of having an activating handle on the front of the tank, it has a plastic disc on the top. The device seems to invite a downward pressing palm motion to work the toilet, but, actually, one must lift it. I have been frequently confused between pressing and pulling the disc top.Now, after once again pushing or pressing it falsely, I over-correct myself and pull it up sharply. I do so too violently, however, and break it off. To my consternation the disc top flies right out of my hand and caroms off one wall and the ceiling above. It bounces down directly into the toilet bowl, whose seat is still up. Before my startled eyes it disappears in the whorl of flushed water eddying out of the bowl.

In the ensuing silence that beats on my eardrums, I find myself staring incredulously at my handiwork….But who is to know whodunnit? Either more cowardly than embarrassed, or more audacious than either, I quickly leave the scene of the crime. The concatenation of events still boggles my mind: my wrong initial movement, my impatient recovery and over-reaction, my fascination and paralysis at the quick course of subsequent events, demonstrating the immutable old law of gravitation or the unearthly new principle of magnetism between plastic and descending water.

The Parrot

District Attorney:       For the court record, your name, sir?

Witness, Parrot:        Polly.

D.A.                            Is that your full name? Don’t you bear a longer appellation?

Parrot:                        If you’re suggesting Wannacracker, no.

Judge (to Parrot):     Answer the question directly, please.

Parrot:                        I am Polly Z. Psitlaciformes, according to the book.

D.A.:                          What’s the Z stand for?

Parrot:                       Zygodactyl, meaning pair-toed, unlike, say, the stork or the rook.

D.A.:                          That is a mouthful, if I may say so.

Parrot:                        I don’t see why: you’re here to ask a series of predictable dumb questions,                                             not to say anything in particular.

D.A.:                          Your Honor—

Parrot:                       Withdrawn.

D.A. (to Parrot):        You have been accused, among other things, of complete, off-the-wall                                                     smart-ass remarks that frequently deviate into sense.

Parrot:                       That may be. It depends.

The Koala

Enough said about the koala bear, enough about his irresistible charm, that cuddly fluff that keeps people coming. Crowds are mad about him, but a koala never puts on a show, never actually tries to act so cute, stoop that low to gain salute, the way a lot of lap dogs do to captivate you.

No, hundreds may watch while he romps in his gym, but that doesn’t remotely concern him. He never calls attention to himself, he goes on being he or she, and that is the secret of koala success, his un-self-conscious celebrity.

Moral: Never actively seek a flattering press lest you forfeit natural happiness.

Incident at Glacier Park

Two summer tourists sat in their lone car at a Glacier National Park overlook, admiring the sunset splendor in the Montana peaks. Gazing far out and long down through the oncoming dark, each saw something—a shape—something approaching in rear and sideview mirrors: not a person but a looming staggering hulk, shaggy, lumbering, stupendous, wavering, clumsy but closing in, an enormous bulk.

“I’m shutting the windows,” he said, but she re-opened hers and aimed her camera straight at the massive hump-necked beast as he drew parallel, turning his head toward her just then, his whole form abreast when she clicked, a full gratifying action shot, as far as she could tell, and he—fell! collapsed in one imploded heap of fur and crumpled flesh, directly down, not three feet away from their car. 

“You just killed a bear,” her husband shouted, “with your instamatic flash! You must have scared him silly, with lightning in a box, given him one of those rare heart attacks an animal can get from sudden fear, even a giant grizzly bear, and you plain up-and-down killed him.”

“Maybe,” she tried weakly, “he just fainted.”