During interviews, I loaned a friend my copy of Dan Savage's The Kid, which both she and her boyfriend enjoyed so much that I decided to give them Skipping Towards Gomorrah. Browsing a downtown bookstore tonight, I picked up Robert H. Bork's Slouching Towards Gomorrah: Modern Liberalism and American Decline to couple with it. (I wonder if Bork would feel any better about Savage after reading The Commitment: Love, Sex, Marriage and My Family. Probably not.)

I flipped through the book on the way home, and discovered a passage that has delighted others:

One evening at a hotel in New York I flipped around the television channels. Suddenly there on the public access channel was a voluptuous young woman, naked, her body oiled, writhing on the floor while fondling herself intimately. Meanwhile, a man's voice and a print on the screen informed the viewer of the telephone number and limousine service that would acquaint him with young women of similar charms and proclivities. I watched for some time -- riveted by the sociological significance of it all. Shortly after that, men only slightly less nude advertised homosexual prostitutes.

I've complained before about the Federalist Society's deciding that I'm a Mr. -- my membership card declares me to be one, and all my subsequent communications with them, including an invitation to hear FedSoc stalwart Ted Olson's speech in a couple of weeks, identify me as a Mister. However, I realize that my name is ambiguously gendered to Westerners and I've made little effort to correct the mistake, so it's more of a joke about my general unfitness for the Federalists than a real gripe.

A law firm communicating with me about employment opportunities, on the other hand, may have found a way to avoid addressing me with the wrong title. Some take the route of leaving off the title altogether, while others assume as the Federalists do. But today's mail included an envelope addressing me as "M. PG." This continued in the letter as well: "Dear M. G." Presumably they are dodging incorrectness by including the first letter of the various possible titles without committing to any one of them.

Less likely, a firm that doesn't even have a Paris office is using the French abbreviation and thus has gotten it wrong like so many others.