What every happened to "weird," or "strange" or even plain old "unusual"?

If a person calls your room and asks for you, it obviously isn't a wrong number. So it isn't random. It is just unexplainable. So is the unexplainable random? I think that only my "Space, Time and Motion" section leader--who spent an entire year trying to convince me that the universe is completely random in an orderly way--would buy that argument.

ANOTHER strange--pardon me, random--system of terminology at Harvard is the ever-growing "romantic encounter" slang. In a true melting-pot method, every student has brought a way of referring to the process of seduction from his or her high school. In a true Harvard semiotic (and pathetic) argument, the number of signifiers far outstrips the mystical signified object. (In other words, we have a lot of words for it, but it doesn't happen much.)

First you scope. If you find something you like, you try to hook up. If you are successful, you move on to scamming, otherwise known as messing around.

If any of the above are perpetrated under the influence of (illegally obtained) alcohol, you may have beer goggled. (Drinking habits, by the way, open up a whole new chapter in the study of Harvard slang, including at least 50 words for the act of imbibing and the condition of intoxication, not to mention about 100 more words to describe the regurgitation that follows. Even the word party, which most of us grew up thinking was a noun meaning "celebration," is now a euphemistic verb for "to drink.")

The eskimos have a lot of words for snow, but they have a lot of snow. I am not convinced that we have cultural justification for matching up every step of the very well-defined process of hooking up with a word from every part of speech.

When residents of the Real World go strolling through the Yard, wondering in awe of the brilliant students they see sitting on the steps of Widener (students who are probably blowing off work and bagging classes), they must be perplexed by the unfamiliar vocabulary they over-hear. The tourists are probably under the mistaken impression that our diction is just too sophisticated for them to understand--that it has something to do with Kant, Nietzsche or Wittgenstein.

Who knows, perhaps they really did listen in on a genuine, brilliant intellectual converstaion. That would be completely random.