there is that laugh-out-loud wonderful bit in nooteboom where herman mussert sits in on maria zeinstra's biology class and exclaims: "egg chambers! this woman was teaching me new words! there's no doubt about it, i loved her." i feel a little like that and my "new word" from yesterday is "the wings of ilium," which are the identical petal-like parts of your hip skeleton on either side of your sacrum. how can anyone not rejoice in a glorious name like that! the wings of ilium!* it's even better than the isle of langerhan in which we so delighted in secondary school biology for it shimmers with romance and lost myths. i wonder who named that particular bone. i should quite like to read up on the history of the science of anatomy perhaps one of the med cats we know will lend me one.
* minyin has decisively punctured my undue enthusiasm pointing out that the body part in question is so named as it protects that lowest portion of the small intenstine known, in its more common orthography, as the ileum, and not the ilium, as in the topless towers of, as i wanted to think. alas! biologists have no romance in their souls!