A Very Double-Edged Sword

Yesterday my husband, a linguist, was trying to help a student recognize noun phrases in a sentence diagram. This proved an impossible task. Even when he drew a little syntax tree and asked her to point to the standard designation for the noun phrase--that would be "NP" for "noun phrase," which was right there on the chart--she still couldn't do it. She kept pointing to other letters, such as "PP."

"PP" stands for, um, prepositional phrase.

This was one of those rare moments when my husband, ordinarily the patron saint of patience and detailed explanations, confessed to giving up and just laying his head in his hands and groaning. What else can you do?

But as he was explaining this to me I was reminded of one of my own linguistic encounters with a student a few years back. This student, among other things, coined the phrase "very double-edged sword" for use in one of his papers. It's an expression I have found useful on more than one occasion.

A very double-edged sword would be one, of course, that doesn't just cut in more than one way, but that REALLY cuts in more than one way. Or something like that. The precise meaning in the context of my student's paper was not immediately clear. But no worries. I continue to find the expression extraordinarily useful.

This is, for example, the perfect expression for describing a coprophagic dog, such as our corgi Cletus, who unfortunately sacrificed her status as family pet when she refused to give up her pooping ways. Cletus liked to punish me when I was at work too long by ostentatiously squatting down and peeing on the carpet in front of me. Ordinarily she liked to do this right after returning from a walk explicitly intended to help her relieve herself.

Unfortunately she tried this trick once too often: one day, exhausted after work, I was cleaning up one Cletus-dookie when I glanced over just in time to catch her laying out another one. Right in front of me! And it was deliberate, too, because she was glaring at me balefully the entire time, in a "take that!" kind of way.

It was, unfortunately, the end of our relationship. Thankfully my ex-husband was willing to take in the ungrateful beast, which made Cletus a much happier pooch all round. Corgies like to travel around in cars with you and be taken into work and a half-dozen other things that simply aren't options in our household. But they were in his, and so there was a happy ending--for Cletus, at least, whom I'd been on the verge of surreptitiously dumping in a landfill before the alternative option appeared.

I did not realize until the dog was gone, however, that coprophagia has its uses. Coprophagia is, in fact, "a very double-edged sword." Cletus, you see, had made a habit of checking out the cat box every day and keeping it clean and poop-free. It was the first thing she did every morning, and she seemed to look forward to it. In fact, at one point in the early days of this behavior I'd gotten all upset that perhaps the reason why there were no dookies in the cat box was that the cat was so constipated that she was going to explode or something.

That was when we took the cat to the vet and learned the upsetting news that there was absolutely nothing wrong with her colon. The problem lay elsewhere.

"Do you have a dog?" the vet asked.

Uh oh.

So anyway, back to the very double-edged sword. Coprophagia is a completely disgusting phenomenon and, sadly, has a measurable affect on the amount of time you want to spend rubbing your dog's head and letting it lick your face.

But on the other hand, cleaning out cat boxes is pretty darned disgusting, too. When you have a coprophagic dog, you never have to clean out a cat box.

It's a VERY double-edged sword.