CALL ME SNAKE

I got a letter today from an editor at a science magazine who was writing about the use–and misuse and overuse–of the term “holy grail” in the scientific literature. She sought my advice as I was, in her words, “the chief grail hunter in all of science.” I earned that moniker, in a sense, by virtue of three “scholarly” papers on the subject, plus a talk (mostly incoherent) that I delivered at last year’s conference of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. She was interested, in particular, in historical trends on grail use and my “thoughts on what’s made scientists so grail crazy.”

I’ve never received a letter like that in my almost 15 years of grail tracking, which  has mostly been a solitary pursuit. The only other letter I’ve received on this subject, as best I can recall, was from a classics scholar who told me I didn’t know the first thing about the holy grail. He was right about that. But I did know the second thing, and the third and fourth, as well as the five thousandth.