A study conducted by the State University of New York at Buffalo Medical School suggested that in times of stress a dog is likely to be more help in calming you down than a spouse or partner. Most dog owners can guess the reason why: dogs never judge us and never compete with us.

The dogs in our lives, the dogs we come to love and who (we fervently believe) love us in return, offer more than fidelity, consolation, and companionship. They offer comedy, irony, wit, and a wealth of anecdotes, the shaggy dog stories and stupid pet tricks that are commonplace pleasures of life.

If any era should be aware of the temptations to rewrite history, it is our own.

Jargon marks the place where thinking has been. It becomes a kind of macro, to use a computer term: a way of storing a complicated sequence of thinking operations under a unique name.