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Indeed it is. It's called 'reciprocal altruism' and, according to one of my favorite reads, it works something like this: Let's say you and I are hunters and we meet in a clearing. I haven't caught anything in a week and am close to starvation. You have just caught a fat rabbit and hand me one of the juicy hind legs, thereby saving my life. You still have plenty left to eat so, while you're giving up a valuable resource, you're still likely to be OK. A couple weeks later, we meet in the same clearing and this time you're the one down on his luck and I've just caught a fat rabbit. Remembering how you saved me, I pull off a juicy hind leg for you and we both live to hunt another day. And, most likely, our genes get passed along and this 'altruistic' behavior becomes genetically encoded. If it weren't for this 'reciprocal altruism', we'd both be dead much quicker and our 'selfish genes' would be much less likely to get passed along. At some basic level, we humans know how to read these qualities in others and can select our mates accordingly. I know that, personally, I'd never marry a guy without knowing what's in his genes.

Please pardon this small sliver of light amidst the gloom, but a UN scientific committee announced today that the Earth's ozone layer is beginning to mend, following our 1987 agreement to ban chlorofluorocarbons. There was a statistically significant 4% improvement between 2000 and 2013 and, by 2030, two million cases of skin cancer will be avoided. "It's a victory for diplomacy and for science and for the fact that we were able to work together," said Nobel Prize winning chemist Mario Molina. Naturally, I'm thrilled that CFC's aren't the problem they were a quarter-century ago, but won't pretend I don't miss some of the good spray we had back then.

"He fills those Calvins pretty nicely." (borrowed from a recent AS post )

I think these folks who go willingly toward the tragedies to offer what help they can are amazing human beings. There was a segment last night on Frontline that followed the work being done by a Médecins Sans Frontières hospital in Sierra Leone. They built a sixty-bed field hospital a few months ago that they thought would be big enough to handle the victims from a cluster of surrounding villages. It wasn't. And isn't. Yet they bring every patient they can find into the hospital, treat what symptoms they can, hydrate them, and try to keep them alive until their immune system has a chance of kicking in. Remarkably, about thirty percent manage to beat the illness. They also track everyone the patient was in contact with, and educate everyone in the patient's home village as best they can. Some villagers are afraid of going to the hospital, thinking bad things may happen to them there, and some hide from the medics. Everything about this battle is uphill. Yet these medical workers soldier on, case by case, not only accepting whoever shows up at the hospital, in whatever condition, but also driving hours to find sick villagers they've heard about and bring them back. I'm not much on 'role models', especially from the world of politics and entertainment, but these folks who go into the world's hell holes to do whatever they can to help make things better are folks who have much to teach, and they've got my full attention.

UA is currently offering airfares for next March at $790 RT on certain dates. This is as low as I have seen it for quite sometime. Hell sometimes it costs that much to fly across the USA.

Apparently it is a part of the human genome, at least of some, to help others. Evidence of this certainly goes back as far as the "leper colonies". Hansen's Disease was known to be incurable all that time but still some preferred to try to help and did. And, yes, some of them contracted the disease. Best regards, RA1

In another thread, MsGuy posited that there were only so many ways to say, "Boy, that kid sure gives me a stiffie." While this may in fact be the case it seems that, in the millennia that folks have been lusting after youthful hardbodies, there must have been more than just a handful of such observations. One I recall, from an old book on lust through the ages, is that of a Persian gentleman that went something along the lines of, There's a boy across the river with a bottom like a peach but, alas, I cannot swim. Can't think of it at the moment, but there's another one on the tip of my tongue. I understand AdamSmith is on the hunt for such phrases through the ages. Anyone else have any favorites?

Some light etymological musings not on 'stiffie' but just the generic root (so to speak ). Research continues! Lumpy 05-25-2003, 04:43 PM "Penis" is from Latin, and every other commonly used word for it in English is an obvious slang phrase. What was it's proper name back in ye olde times? MC Master of Ceremonies 05-25-2003, 05:15 PM 'Cock' astro 05-25-2003, 05:50 PM Possibly "pintle". (http://www.bartleby.com/61/0/P0320000.html) pintle SYLLABICATION: pin·tle PRONUNCIATION: pntl NOUN: 1. A pin or a bolt on which another part pivots. 2. Nautical The pin on which a rudder turns. 3. The pin on which a gun carriage revolves. 4. A hook or a bolt on the rear of a towing vehicle for attaching a gun or trailer. ETYMOLOGY: Middle English pintel, penis, from Old English. Johanna 05-25-2003, 05:53 PM Wrong, MC Master of Ceremonies. Cock means a male chicken and was used to refer to the penis only metaphorically. Besides, it isn't from Old English at all. It came from French, derived from Latin coccus, a cackling. The real answer to the OP is pintel. The word survives in Modern English as pintle, meaning a pin on which a rudder or gun pivots. Also the second part of cuckoopint (http://www.edensong.com/garden/plants2001/cuckoopint-fruit2.jpg), originally cuckoopintel, a flower (Arum maculatum) with a phallic shape. Joseph Wood Crutch writes in his great book of botanical folklore, Herbal,No "signature" is more immodestly evident than that provided by the very phallic central column (actually a spadix bearing the small male and female flowers) and most of the popular names embody evidence, now somewhat obscured, that the folk imagination had deciphered the signature. Cuckoopint is short for Cuckoopintel, and Wake-Robin (though now gently poetic) was clear enough to those same Elizabethans who snickered when the mad Ophelia sang "For bonnie sweets, Robin is all my joy." ...It is the later Herbalists who stress the supposed effectiveness of the Arums as aphrodisiacs.... Here is what Coles has to say of the Cuckoopint: "It hath not only the signature which will sufficiently declare itself but the virtues also according to the signature, for they are notable for stirring up of inclination to copulation, being either well roasted under the embers or boiled." He then adds that among other names are Sacerdotis Penis, or, In English, Priests Pintle. Johanna 05-25-2003, 06:02 PM astro, I woula been first out of the box if I hadn't taken the time to delve deeper into the philology. I just want everyone to be conscious that answering GQ questions is more than merely a matter of Googling. To really dig into a question, often it helps to have read widely, to be able to draw upon a wealth of associations in one's memory, and to have a library of books at hand to research knowledge further than Google can take you. Agback 05-25-2003, 07:47 PM G'day 'Pintle' is originally derived from Old English 'pintel', which was a general term for pointed things. So even this is probably a euphemism, just an obsolete one. 'Prick' is another word for a penis that originally means 'pointed thing', and there are similar words in lots of other languages (eg. Danish 'pic', Swedish 'pick', Dutch 'tump', Russian 'chuj', Greek 'charkion', Spanish 'carajo'). 'Zerd' is another old word for penis (now spelled 'yard'). It originally meant 'rod' or 'staff'. In Old English there was also 'woepned' (the 'oe' is a ligature), which is a masculine form of 'woepen' (weapon). And 'teors' (related to the term for the boss of a shield-- it survives as the dialectal 'tarse', meaning penis). And 'teran' (etymology in doubt). Records of Old English are sadly few, so the undoubted use of words meaning 'swelling', 'tail', 'tassel', 'nail', 'tool', 'powerful thing', 'creative object', 'spear', 'sword', 'peg' etc. is not attested. According to Carl Darling Buck the Prote-Indo-European word has been reconstructed as '*pes-' or '*pesos-', from which Greek 'peos', Latin 'penis', Sanskrit 'pasas', Old High German 'faselt', and Modern English 'pizzle'-- my suggestion for the 'proper' English word for the membrum virile. Regards, Agback bibliophage 05-25-2003, 08:03 PM Just to throw in a few dates from the OED for synonyms older than "penis" in English (not all derived from Anglo-Saxon): ca. 1000 tarse ca. 1100 pintle ca. 1300 pillicock ca. 1400 verge 1483 tail 1523 pizzle 1592 prickle/prick 1618 cock Agback 05-25-2003, 08:09 PM Originally posted by Agback According to Carl Darling Buck the Prote-Indo-European word has been reconstructed as '*pes-' or '*pesos-', from which Greek 'peos', Latin 'penis', Sanskrit 'pasas', Old High German 'faselt', and Modern English 'pizzle'-- my suggestion for the 'proper' English word for the membrum virile. My apologies, you weere asking for an Old English word, not the Modern English word of native etymology with a non-figurative derivation. 'Pizzle' is not attested in writing before 1532, and its existence in some form such as '*pisel' or '*fisel' in earlier times would be conjectural--it might be derived from Dutch, or Frisian rather than Middle English. The words actually attested from Old English (a.k.a. Anglo-Saxon) would be the euphemisms I gave above: woepned, teors, teran, pintel. Regards, Agback Lumpy 05-27-2003, 07:17 PM Hmm... so we have a part of the body that effectively has no name of it's own, but has been referred to by euphenisms in every Indo-European language as far back as we have records. There's a profound implication somewhere there. Agback 05-27-2003, 07:35 PM Originally posted by Lumpy Hmm... so we have a part of the body that effectively has no name of it's own, but has been referred to by euphenisms in every Indo-European language as far back as we have records. Not exactly. PIE "*pesos", Sanskrit "pasos", Greek "peos", Latin "penis", OHG "faselt", and modern English "pizzle" are all 'proper' (ie. non-figurative) words for the male organ of generation. Cognate, too. But euphemisms, metaphors, and joke terms are rife. on the other hand, there is something to be said for the position that in English anyway, any masculine personal name and any improper noun or noun phrase can be used to refer to the genitals with perfect comprehensibility. If I tell you that so-and-so got kicked in the coach and horses, or that I want to try out my socket wrench, there is no doubt what I mean, even though (as far as I know) neither metaphor has ever been used before. I think that tells us something. Regards, Agback http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/archive/index.php/t-186295.html

Being from the South myself I can illustrate: Bless his heart, MsGuy is from Mississippi so he really can't help the way he is.

Of course in the context of most of Chomsky's writing, the piece linked above is positively an S.J. Perelman bagatelle.

Wow. Lovecraft fans here! The Aylesbury Pike and a lonely and curious country. Gambrel roofs and desolation. You're entering the Dunwich Country!

I love Terry Gross.

I'm sure he's at least 7. He'd make a great Master.

Quite to the contrary, my dear Sucky, I made a special point of complimenting you on your redeeming social value: Bless your prickly little heart, you really need to read my posts more carefully.

I'm pretty sure that counts as a compliment down there. It's when they say, Bless your heart! that you need to worry.

Let me just ponder a bit...

Funny! Is this another one of those "challenges"? If so, I think this time my money will be on AdamSmith. Could make for a fun thread.

PS Lurker, I've been working on a nominee or three for you but have had difficulty deciding on the most deserving in couple of the categories.