Fish - Fish - Fish

What need is there for fish to sing, when I can roar and bellow?

Oh, several months have passed, and I have not one excuse for the pure neglect that seems to characterize my treatment of you, Blog. But I recently returned from a trip to the Bahamas, and I have a thought.

I was thinking about how on my trip I only saw one (living) fish, and how that was odd given the amount of water I encountered. It seemed a bit disappointing that I’d in fact seen much more interesting fish the previous week in a Chinatown bar, whose toilet had one wall that was entirely fish tank. You end up doing your business in a room that's lit by aquarium-glow while staring at brightly illuminated fish. Weird. (this is NOT to imply that the rest of that bar is anything resembling "normal." Please. DO NOT make that logical leap.) Amazingly, no one on the other side of the fish tank could see through---I'm not sure how that works. There was one fish with a really large lump on its forehead, the kind of lump that makes you think he's not long for this world. He swam more slowly than the others, and we hypothesized that Brain Fish was the only one with the powers to grasp the absurdity of tanklife, and had a very bad headache.

The Bahamanians, by contrast, were much more interested in doing devastating things to groupers and conches and dolphins (!! I suspect this was code for mahi mahi) and serving them on plates.

But this fishlessness also reminded me of my science writing class's strange discovery last year that there are no ants in Riverside Park (we counted--even the professor, the world's finest ant man, was stumped). So I thought, what is up with this lack of biodiversity? Or rather, to be more upbeat about things, what’s up with this bio university. Now obviously that’s a weird term with all its scholarly implications. But then I ran into trouble comparing ‘diverse’ and ‘universe’. Universe as we know it means the everything, the one whole thing, but shouldn’t it perhaps also mean half of diverse? Ick, I broke language. I also looked up universe and ended up with a definition telling me that the universe is the only closed system, and I'm not sure how I feel about that.

I suspect if I became more attuned to these sorts of constructions-—or through some bizarre time warp (or twisted parental joke) had to learn English as a native Latin speaker-—things would become completely incomprehensible.

Yeah, yeah, mono- would probably resolve my troubles with uni-. But that’s not nearly as enjoyable as the University of Bio.