Kenton Robinson in The Day touches on piles of topics of interest to us:

OK, you've really got to pay close attention here. You've got to keep track of the upper and the lower case.

Letters, that is.

Because our subject today is Lesbians. Note: Not lesbians. Note: Well, actually, Lesbians and lesbians but with the emphasis being on Lesbians.

If you follow the news of the world beyond your daily ration of McCainage and Obamaphobia, you already know what I'm talking about.

If not, here's the scoop:

Several Lesbians, which is to say folks who live on the island of Lesbos, are asking a Greek court to forbid lesbians to call themselves lesbians.

This is because, they say, Lesbians are merely Lesbians and not necessarily lesbians, and being thought lesbian when you are merely Lesbian invites no end of painful ridicule.

For those of you who skipped your classical studies class on the day they taught this, the reason lesbians are called lesbians in the first place is because Lesbos' most prominent resident was Sappho, who lived some 2,600 years ago and was known as “the tenth muse” for writing some of the hottest erotic poetry of all time.

Indeed, even though only one of her poems has survived intact and all the rest are mere fragments, those fragments make for some steamy reading.

For example:

”Once again that loosener of limbs, Love,
bittersweet and inescapable, crawling thing,
strikes me down.”

As it happened, Sappho was both a Lesbian and a lesbian, though they didn't call lesbians lesbians then.

Actually, if her poetry is any indication, Sappho was a lover of both women and men, but for some reason, we use the word lesbian to describe women who love women alone.

At any rate, after two millennia of lesbians calling lesbians lesbians, Lesbians who are not lesbians finally have caught wind of it and want it stopped.

This would be known, even back in Sappho's day, as closing the Lesbian door after the lesbian is out.

And that, of course, is the trouble with trying to legislate language. Words are a lot like mercury. Try to nail one down and it's gone before you've raised your hammer.

Which is, in its own way,

similar to other ancient news lately. Just as the law wrestles with language, so does science wrestle with myth and with, most recently, The Odyssey.

As you may recall, after helping the Greeks beat the Trojans, Odysseus heads back to Ithaca. But, due to his crew punking Poseidon, it ends up taking him 10 years to get home.

Meanwhile, there being no cell phones, a bunch of greedy suitors are pressing his wife to marry them.

When Odysseus does get home, he slaughters them all, then chills in the bosom of his family.

It's a great story, but scientists weren't satisfied with that. They had to know: Did this really happen? And if so, when?

Fortunately, Homer sprinkled his tale with a few astronomical clues, from which these scientists were able to deduce that (a) it probably did happen and (b) it happened on April 16, 1178 B.C.

All of which leads me to think that both the litigious Lesbians and the literalists reading Homer could take a tip from Pliny the Elder, who was not Greek but Roman, and who, many would argue, was the first scientist.

Pliny was a man full of prescriptions for what ails you. No matter your infirmity, Pliny knew a cure. Got a fish bone in your throat? Go soak your feet. Etcetera.

As for the aforementioned subjects, Pliny would recommend that they rub beaver testicles on their foreheads.

That was his cure for idiocy.

Well, not quite, but here's what Pliny does say (32.29 ... part of a long section on the medicinal uses of beaver testicles):

somnum conciliant cum rosaceo et peucedano peruncto capite et per se poti ex aqua, ob id phreneticis utiles

"Phrenitis" is some sort of mental derangement ... whatever the case, in the future when I write 'break out the beaver testicles', you'll know what I'm referring to.