Therefore, it would be of no small interest to compare, for example, the possibilities of a world where people speak and write and think only the words of the Merriam-Webster Pocket Dictionary (2005 edition), with the world of people whose possible utterances come only from the most recent edition of the OED.

Unfortunately the Research Committee at Corporate State University didn't see it that way and our proposal was denied.

But, rather than give up on work with such profound implication, we renounced our steenking tenure at CSU and took it down the street to GU, Garage University, where simply walking in the door entitles you to all the research fellowships and assistantships your resume, backpack or iPod can hold.

Originally founded by the distant sons of distant fathers, Garage University was anti-everything and gladly sponsored all research that could be done for under $10 and a bag of Cheetos.

Designed as an open-source think tank, it created new unheard of departments on a daily basis, and its Self & Other-Criticism Department, whose ultimate goal was to tear everything down so everything could be rebuilt from scratch (based on whatever the consensus of Garage University was as to how things should be that day), was already running a fully accredited self-parody university, Garbage University, whose catalogue described its purpose as "to parody the living crap out of Garage University in order to keep it from becoming just another douchebag".

Immediately upon our arrival there, we started the Comparative Lexicographically-Generated Worlds Studies Department and e-mailed the 2-page outline of our goals to the University's Pure and Utter Computation Department for them to code up and run the 2 dictionary world simulations described above.

Since this would take several years, at the end of which time a few graduate students could quickly scan the data and write up accurate summaries, our lifetime of intellectual work was thus pretty much done, and we headed off to the beach for a much deserved lifetime sabbatical.

And the story of this moral is that once upon a time there had been a vast and rapid growth in knowledge and understanding. Eventually, however, this growth slowed and stopped -- yet the vast infrastructure which had grown up to nurture and support it not only didn't stop, but continued getting fatter.

So that now the only body of knowledge that needs to be mastered is the one with the methodology for generating the kinds of cons that allow dead disciplines and their irrelevant objects to maintain funding and prestige at a level commensurate with the analogous ever-inflating worthlessness of money, human life, and civilization.

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