Harold Campanini was a kid at my school who was brilliant beyond belief. He was always coming up with wild ideas that, when you got to thinking about them, weren't as wild as they first seemed. Everyone said that he could turn shit into gold. "I make lemonade out of lemons," was a phrase he liked to bandy about.

One earth-shattering idea that he not only thought up but also used his considerable skills to implement, was the harnessing of pheromones. You probably remember how all the dogs in the neighborhood came running with eyes gleaming and tails twitching when your bitch was in heat. They hung around outside the house with the most nonchalant looks on their faces, with a sort of casual "Who, me?" expression which, if there were only one or two of them, might have taken you in, but with twenty or thirty of them hanging around and every one of them with that identical look on his face, you knew that something was up. Then it hits you. Of course! My wolf-like dog, Loba, is in season! Estrus time! But how is it that so many of those damned curs know about it?

That's when we learned about pheromones. They fly through the air with the greatest of ease, and all it takes is a keen nose, which dogs especially have; they use their noses like we use our eyes, and they get the message muy pronto! Let me reprint the dictionary definition of pheromone here since the definition is such a marvelous example of the word "euphemism."

PHEREMONE \ fair-uh-moan \ noun [(from the Greek pherin - TO CARRY) + mone (as in hormone) -more at BIRTH] : A chemical substance that is produced by an animal and serves especially as a stimulus to other individuals of the same species for one or more behavioral responses-

"One or more?" I'm thinking who needs more, when you have the one? I'm also thinking that I wouldn't know what the hell that definition meant if I didn't already know. That's the trouble with euphemisms, sometimes they're a bit vague. Take the phrase "passed away," for example. One meaning of the word "pass," is to do a number-two. So when someone goes to the restroom, one could say that he's passing away. Some fool, misunderstanding your comment, might break the door down in a well meaning but violently misguided attempt to practice his newly learned CPR. Euphemisms have the potential to do a lot of damage and one should be extremely judicious in the use of them. I could go on all day about the various dangers inherent in the sloppy use of language but let's get back to Harold.

I'm sure you've heard about it by now. Chances are that you probably participate in it one way or another without even knowing it. It was Harold who figured out how to capture and market pheromones from horny flies.

He had been fascinated by the fact that tiny amounts of ground-up rhinoceros horns fetched a fortune, especially in Asia, where rhino horn was considered to be the world's greatest aphrodisiac. Harold, being very fond of etymologies, explained that the word aphrodisiac comes from Aphrodite, the Greek Goddess of Love. He also had a theory that the word, rhinoceros, (the Greek origin of that word being rhin meaning "nose," combined with cerous coming from keras, the Greek word for "horn,") was the source word for the expression "horny," and in his opinion, all sexual arousal was really almost totally the result of nasal activity, smell dominating far and above any of the other four senses thus solving the mystery of why your nose would start twitching when you felt horny. He also explained that the rather elegant English word "cyprian," which means "prostitute," also originated from Aphrodite, the connection being that the island of Cyprus was said to be Aphrodite's birthplace.

This is getting a little desultory so let's see if I can simplify it a bit.

Harold's idea was that the rhino-horn dust was really only a metaphor but was nevertheless such a powerful analogy that people were willing to pay enormous sums of money for this oddball metaphor's "First Universe of Discourse." FUD, in case you didn't know, means the first, literal part of a figure of speech, as opposed to the conceptual point that the trope is hoping to make. The FUD, in this case, being the precious ground-up rhino-horn. You probably already knew that but I had to be sure.

Therefore, if a mere concept could help a somewhat lagging man to do a little better, then a real, physically existing substance already proven by Mother Nature to have that same effect in spades and then some, would be a real winner. So here's what Harold did.

Do you know what's going on when you see a bunch of flies hysterically buzzing around in circles in an open doorway or empty room or anywhere the wind's not blowing hard? I'll tell you what. They're madly emitting lots of pheromones to invite all the other flies in the neighborhood to come and join their orgy! Even a single fly that you might notice lazily looping around the center of a room is stealthily emitting pheromones in the role of an explorer scout sending messages of the newfound bordello back to the troops. It was Harold who invented that weird machine that captured those pheromones right out of the goddamned air and processed and analyzed their chemical constituents. You may have seen him hovering around in semi-secluded spaces in front of various public buildings, navigating that crazy, far-out machine with all those strange, funny looking tube-like ligatures wiggling and waving about in the air. There he was, with a great big smile on his face, gleefully prancing around in the middle of swarms of weirded-out flies that had absolutely puzzled looks on their faces.

The Pfizer Drug Corporation paid him more money than you can think of for that machine but you know what? Harold gave all that loot but his basic costs to his beloved grandmother's favorite charity. I hesitate to tell you which one it was.

© 2003 ___Muldoon Elder