Posted: Sat Sep 8 2001
Expert Seeks To Discover What "The Thing" Is.

We have all been in conversations where someone will blithely state exactly what "the thing" is. "The thing is I called you three times." "The thing is: What do we get out of it?" "The thing is I'm not really 16." yet none of these statements can really be taken as being definitive answer to what the thing is. At least according to Placenta Day, a linguist at the University of Kansas, Lawrence.

"It's just far too easy to make statements about what the thing is.", Says Placenta with an intensity that is next to unnerving. "The thing is this, the thing is that. Well I'm saying 'Prove it!'"

She began her search last summer at a party when a young man informed her that the thing was that she was too hung up on words. "I'd had enough. I recalls through clenched teeth. Then with a smile and a cocked eyebrow "He couldn't."

Since then she has never backed down. If anyone tries to tell her what the thing is, she immediately demands proof in a never ending search for its true identity. So far years of research have only produced an ever growing number of dead ends. Yet Day remains optimistic. "The thing is to keep trying.", She says, "or is it? I'm not sure. I can't really prove that."

But at what cost knowledge? I ask Day if the search has effected her relationships with her friends to which she replies somberly, eyes downcast, "That is no longer an issue."

--Phillip Matanka


--prove that