Ken Werner
10-28-2006, 10:41 AM
What follows is a whimsical essay I wrote, in the first person, as if I was a doctor, pondering one of life's mysteries. It is meant to be funny, and I apologize in advance if it offends anybody.
Just Where is the Wazoo Anyway?
by Ken Werner, M.D.
The other day my wife and I were discussing our sixth-grade son’s lunchroom monitor. She’d force the kids to line up in a smallish holding area, before they could enter the cafeteria. Ben, being a pretty smart fellow, used all of his advanced mathematical skills to figure out the area of that hallway, divide by the number of kids, and come up with how many square feet each kid had to stand on. Now you know those signs you see in bowling alleys, legion halls and diners that say something like “Occupancy by more than 93 people is prohibited by law”, well they’re based on the same principle. Speaking of principals, needless to say, the principal of Ben’s school was rather annoyed that my wife called the local code enforcement officer to find out just how many square feet per kid was legal. By the way, Ben was right, and the school policy did change. And the lunchroom monitor was pissed, which gets me back to the beginning of my story.
You see, this particular lunchroom monitor likes to wear short skirts. I mean the kind that make sixth grade boys go a little wild, without quite knowing why, or on second thought some of them do know why. “Oh yeah” I said to my wife “isn’t Miss Haboob the one that wears skirts up to her wazoo?”
And that innocent remark led me to the realization that I, a family physician, had no idea what part of the body the wazoo is. I thought back to anatomy. No, I learned about all sorts of exotic body parts – the xiphoid process, the coccyx, the olecranon, even the ischial tuberosity, but no wazoo. Not anywhere.
Yet everybody seems to know that there is most certainly a wazoo. It’s a place that things go out – as in “out the wazoo”, or up -- as in Steven Bochco’s quote aptly made about attorneys, and meaning in excess: “we’ve got lawyers up the wazoo”. Which I find an extremely frightening notion. I don’t particularly want anybody up my wazoo - and certainly not a lawyer, even if I don’t quite know where my wazoo is.
I asked my good friend and colleague, John Bowen, MD if he knew where the wazoo is. Now John is a board certified Ob-Gyn. You figure he oughta know where a wazoo is. But John wasn’t any more sure than me where it is.
Finally, I turned to my Stedman’s Medical Dictionary, and there between Way, Stanley, a British Ob-Gyn, and WBC, a white blood cell, was, well nothing. Now as I said before, my son Ben is a pretty smart fellow. He bought a new dictionary this year to help beat me at Scrabble. And there in the Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary, 10th Edition, complete with various definitions and combinations of the F word, lies the wazoo. And how is it defined? Anus. Imagine that. And they never taught me that in medical school.
Just Where is the Wazoo Anyway?
by Ken Werner, M.D.
The other day my wife and I were discussing our sixth-grade son’s lunchroom monitor. She’d force the kids to line up in a smallish holding area, before they could enter the cafeteria. Ben, being a pretty smart fellow, used all of his advanced mathematical skills to figure out the area of that hallway, divide by the number of kids, and come up with how many square feet each kid had to stand on. Now you know those signs you see in bowling alleys, legion halls and diners that say something like “Occupancy by more than 93 people is prohibited by law”, well they’re based on the same principle. Speaking of principals, needless to say, the principal of Ben’s school was rather annoyed that my wife called the local code enforcement officer to find out just how many square feet per kid was legal. By the way, Ben was right, and the school policy did change. And the lunchroom monitor was pissed, which gets me back to the beginning of my story.
You see, this particular lunchroom monitor likes to wear short skirts. I mean the kind that make sixth grade boys go a little wild, without quite knowing why, or on second thought some of them do know why. “Oh yeah” I said to my wife “isn’t Miss Haboob the one that wears skirts up to her wazoo?”
And that innocent remark led me to the realization that I, a family physician, had no idea what part of the body the wazoo is. I thought back to anatomy. No, I learned about all sorts of exotic body parts – the xiphoid process, the coccyx, the olecranon, even the ischial tuberosity, but no wazoo. Not anywhere.
Yet everybody seems to know that there is most certainly a wazoo. It’s a place that things go out – as in “out the wazoo”, or up -- as in Steven Bochco’s quote aptly made about attorneys, and meaning in excess: “we’ve got lawyers up the wazoo”. Which I find an extremely frightening notion. I don’t particularly want anybody up my wazoo - and certainly not a lawyer, even if I don’t quite know where my wazoo is.
I asked my good friend and colleague, John Bowen, MD if he knew where the wazoo is. Now John is a board certified Ob-Gyn. You figure he oughta know where a wazoo is. But John wasn’t any more sure than me where it is.
Finally, I turned to my Stedman’s Medical Dictionary, and there between Way, Stanley, a British Ob-Gyn, and WBC, a white blood cell, was, well nothing. Now as I said before, my son Ben is a pretty smart fellow. He bought a new dictionary this year to help beat me at Scrabble. And there in the Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary, 10th Edition, complete with various definitions and combinations of the F word, lies the wazoo. And how is it defined? Anus. Imagine that. And they never taught me that in medical school.