What Is A Linear Arrangement of Waterfowl?

What am I doing at a URL called "quackinthebox.blogger.com"? What is a linear arrangement of waterfowl? Well, while it has deeper connotations, I must state up-front that ducks rank highest as the most intrinsically funny animal.

While the author of “The Far Side” finds cows to be intrinsically humorous and hence you find them often included in his work, I will argue that a duck is funnier than a cow. While cows brag the benefits of udders and various milk jokes, they simply do not have webbed feet, or a bill. Finally, let’s face it. If a cow falls five stories, we get a simple splat. With a duck, we have a comical noise, and a puff of feathers, and are unsurprised to find that the duck is, in fact, alive and well. My hat is off to AFLAK for their commercial endeavor to inform the public of the duck’s intrinsic humor.

More specifically, with “quack in the box” we have a duck in an unexpected place. (an unexpected outcome is another element of humor, often referred to as irony, however this is not all that is involved in irony, but it is the part of irony that Alanis Morissette missed in her song) I enjoy complex, ironical humor. I try to work it into everything I do. Often I only succeed in revealing that I am a big nerd. On the up side, nerds have been recently popularized because we can do your homework and fix your computer.

To tie it all together, a linear arrangement of waterfowl is a fancy way of saying “ducks in a row” (however my preference for the term waterfowl makes room for loons, geese and storks as well). Basically what I want to create here: A place where I can sort things out, bring the complex out of simple issues, draw the unexpected (or expected) conclusions, and line the complexity up like a shooting gallery to then knock them back down into the simple little compartment we started with. An example:

Being a word nerd, I like to dissect words; anyone with some basic greek and latin knowledge can suck the majority of English words down to their roots

(sorry Spanish freaks out there, the roots of all those words that you think are of Spanish origin is actually latin, as English and Spanish are not stand-alones, but rather they are adjectives modifying Latin. Spanish is Spanish Latin [ie. Latin as spoken in Spain] and English is English Latin [Latin as spoken in England] and any overlap is actually from the fact that we are both speaking an evolved variety of Latin, not because the Spanish came over here and the Mexicans taught us how to talk, contrary to 10th grade logic.)

So lets dissect the word “Pretend” quick and simple prefix of “pre-“ core word of “tend” pre meaning: prior to, preceding, or before. Www.m-w.com has a great list of pre words if you search for pre there. Then the core word of tend: to apply oneself, or to work as an attendant to something. To work at something, or to do it. When you tend a garden, you are gardening! So we slap the meanings back together: Pre-tend: before apply yourself. In other words pretending is what we do before we do something. We see it all the time! Little girls pretend to have a family, little boys pretend to fight wars, junior high kids pretend they are in high school, high-schoolers pretend they are in college, and college students pretend they are drunk after one very wet apple-tini.

The implications here are paramount. To be frank, when we are pretending to do something, we are actually in the very first act of doing it. Before you pick the pencil up to write, a thought is formed. Before the star quarterback makes the pass, he sees it in his head, he is pretending, and by pretending he is actually performing the first step of the action. So the kid that pretends to shoot his classmates is actually performing the preparation to shoot them, the girl playing house is actually in the first step of caring for a family, and the little boy playing at war is actually patriotically dying for his country by taking the first step in that direction.

We must know what it is we are pretending to do, and pretend to do only the things that we really want to do, because, in fact, when you pretend you are performing the first step of the action. So don’t take away kids play guns, just get involved and see what they are pretending to do with those play guns, if you don’t let your little boy pretend to protect his family, he’ll fall flat when it’s time to do it, because you robbed him of years of preparation. Giving little girls a play kitchen isn’t “chauvinist training of women to fit an outdated societal role” it is allowing those little girls to pretend to do what they come out wired to do: love and nurture, and when you rob them of that, they fail to love and nurture later, they have had no time to get ready to do it. The less we pretend, the less we will actually do, so let’s make believe our way to a future where we actually do something, rather than demand that the world entertain us with falsehood.

Hopefully you found the quack in the box, and now have our waterfowl linearly arranged!