I have a mole in my background. The grass, which hardly existed when I moved in, have grown nicely over the last four years, but I have hardly spent any time in the backyard and so I let the mole dig around. There is this vague idea that it might actually be a good thing if the soil is turned over somewhat.
I expected the mole to migrate to greener pastures, because for the last couple of year there have been many days when the whole backyard is under water. Due to the builder’s brilliance, the yard slopes the wrong way and the water collects. At some point in the future (if I haven’t moved to another spot) I’ll have to do something about that. My suspicion is that the mole won’t like this state of affairs and, in fact, I think it moved into my yard for exactly this reason. Little did it know. Now, however, we’re having the driest winter I can recall in a long time and it looks like it’s the mole who is having the last laugh.
Hmph. Oh well, we’ll see what happens.
On an entirely unrelated note, I have to record two words that I encountered and never saw before. One is “retrosexual”, which refers to a man dressing in 50′s style and perhaps also adopting a more 50′s-style attitude. I’m not sure if this is conscious reaction to metrosexuals (metrosexuality), but perhaps it is some kind of higher-level shift in society. I’m not so much interested in the philosophical underpinnings as in the witty observation of the similarity of “metro” and “retro”. There aren’t many other candidate prefixes with this pattern. The only ones I know are “tetro-” (more usually “tetra-”, meaning “four”) and “petro-”. Perhaps “tetrosexual” is someone who enjoys a foursome? Petrosexual obviously refers to someone who is really into fossil fuels.
The other word is “youtubification”, as in, “The youtubification of the education industry will have a dramatic impact on universities.” That was not the exact context in which I first heard it, but it seems apt.
I am kind of puzzled why they use the word “-sexual” in the first place. It’s not like metrosexuals have a sexual apetite for things metropolitan, things related to measuring, or subterranean transportation. Now that these words (retro- and metro-) have been introduced in this fashion, I gather “petrosexual” could refer to a person who drives around in a fancy petrol-engine car looking to attract sexual partners, or, more appropriately, the prospective mates of such a driver.
The “-sexual” suffix is explained by the origin, I guess. The term “metrosexual” was coined for heterosexual men who take great care of their appearance, are into fashion, and so on. In short, a dandy. A common stereotype is that homosexual men are also interested in these kinds of things, and that metrosexuals may at first sight fit this template, but that they are not “into” other men, so to speak. And the “metro-” part is probably down to the fact that they tend to live in metropolitan areas and not in the countryside (as much).