One day, a child sitting in his grammar school classroom, I swallowed a ferrule, the metal eraser-holder cap at the top end of the pencil. I had been chewing the end of my pencil, thinking, I like to think now, was why, or maybe I was just hungry, but, in any case, I had like a beaver at work on a log, bit through, and suddenly the ferrule shot like a pill right through my mouth and down my throat. I hardly felt a thing. It didn’t lodge or get stuck, just down it went, where things go when you swallow them.
As if chewing the pencil through and swallowing the ferrule wasn’t foolish enough, when I got home, I told my mom. That night, in the hospital bed, after visiting hours, the nurse came in to turn out the light and told me in the morning to use the bedpan so they could check to see if the ferrule had gone all the way through. The ferrule was never found, but I was discharged after the one night’s stay anyway.
Yesterday, I Googled “Why did I chew on the end of my pencil?” and found this, from a site called “Pen Heaven,” an article titled “Pen Behaviour; Chewer, Clicker, Twiddler…?”: “Those who are in the habit of chewing and/or nibbling on their writing implements are generally nervous souls. Other than not wanting to borrow their pen, this person needs to be handled with care as they are often anxious, thin-skinned and take offence easily.” Nailed it? Not sure, but it was the most interesting answer in between all the more obvious dental hygiene warning posts.
It’s a neat trick, of course, naming things based on casual observation of ticks and such. You can do it with just about anything, works like astrology. When something is given a name, a certain amount of control is exchanged, and explanations exceed their boundaries. But the trick after time is often exposed. Several recent articles serve to demonstrate.
In “Why We’re Turning Psychiatric Labels into Identities,” Manvir Singh takes a close look at the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (The New Yorker, May 6, 2024). The DSM is the desktop guide of the American Psychological Association, used to reference diagnoses. Behavior is given a name, and the named one assumes an identity. One problem with the process, as Singh makes clear, comes when the names are changed or deleted and those assumed identities are abandoned: “Revamping the DSM requires destroying kinds of people.”
In “Who’s Afraid of Judith Butler?” (The New Yorker, April 29, 2024), Parul Sehgal profiles the Berkeley based philosopher. Butler, Sehgal says, “recently adopted they/them pronouns but doesn’t ‘police it.’” Sehgal refers to Butler as an academic celebrity – is that a non-sequitur or oxymoron, I wonder. Certainly Butler had not set out to achieve celebrity: “Butler told me that they had little notion of what was happening at first. ‘Someone from the Village Voice asked, What are you thinking about the new directions in queer theory? I said, What’s queer theory? They thought I was being Socratic.’”
In grammar school, we were required to have two pencils, one red, the other black, and one pen, blue ink. At the top of each loose folder page we wrote “JMJ,” invoking the Holy Family to bless our work, no matter how messy or failing it might become. The pencil was used for math; in fact, to use ink for math (or arithmetic, as it was then named), cost points. So I must have been involved in some arithmetic function at the time I swallowed the ferrule. I doubt the word ferrule was at the time part of my speaking or even reading vocabulary. Imagine swallowing an iron bracelet.
Pope Francis may seem by some bound by something like iron bracelets, but he always seems able to break free from them. In “The Pope Goes Prime-Time” (The New Yorker, May 21, 2024), Paul Elie comments on the Pope’s recent appearance on the news show “60 Minutes.” I missed the show, but found Elie’s comment piece noteworthy. The Pope had to respond to questions as if he were running for political office. Elie comments: “In substance, it was something like a highlight reel of topical remarks similar to those the Pope has previously made in interviews, homilies, and blessings. The wars in Ukraine and Gaza; women, children, and migrants; sexual abuse and climate change; the nature of the Church; the need for hope; and the attitude that Francis calls ‘the globalization of indifference’—were all mentioned, if briefly. When Francis was asked about antisemitism, for example, he replied, ‘All ideology is bad, and antisemitism is an ideology, and it is bad. Any ‘anti’ is always bad. You can criticize one government or another, the government of Israel, the Palestinian government. You can criticize all you want, but not ‘anti’ a people. Neither anti-Palestinian nor antisemitic.’”
Also of special interest, the Pope’s definition of conservative: “A conservative,” the Pope said, “is one who clings to something and does not want to see beyond that. It is a suicidal attitude. Because one thing is to take tradition into account, to consider situations from the past, but quite another is to be closed up inside a dogmatic box.” The Pope seems to be trying to speak without a dogmatic ferrule bound around his neck.
Dogma may be the practice of naming things. We used pencil for arithmetic because it was assumed in math we make errors, which need erasing (seemingly contrary to that was the requirement to show one’s work). I’m not sure why it was not equally assumed we’d make errors in writing sentences. The red pencil was used for both math and writing, where the lines of a diagrammed sentence would be drawn in red. We named the words diagrammed: noun, verb, adjective, adverb, pronoun, preposition, conjunction, interjection. Grammar became dogma.
Once you start thinking about ferrules, you might begin to see them everywhere, as, indeed, they are ubiquitous. Without them, things unravel, fall apart, come undone.
The Coming of the Toads 