Janie Boschma

Dear Ask Anything,

-Mr. Clean-ish

Dear Mr. Clean-ish,

Personally, I think my dog, Bear (the dog), has one of the cleaner mouths in my immediate family. This probably resulted from me training her at an early age that foul language was for sailors and communists, letting her know she could express her feelings in more socially acceptable ways. Why, I can’t even recall the last time I heard her say anything close to derogatory, much less any four-letter word.

Oh, wait. Do you mean clean in a sanitary way? You probably do … I’m going to assume you do. Well, if that’s indeed your question, the answer is no. This is another myth we can safely lay the blame on doctors, history’s most consistent villains. In early medical literature, researching the infection rates of bite wounds, doctors found a much higher rate of infection involving human bites compared to other mammalian bites. Assumptions were made quickly, stating the reason there is a higher infection rate is because humans have less sterile mouths than dogs.

Of course, the doctors looked past the fact that the majority of these infections came on “closed-fist injuries,” meaning the infected person had punched another person in the mouth and had cut his or her hand. This was for some reason classified as a “bite” even though it was a much deeper and more severe injury, leading more easily to infection. Many researchers today say this skews the results of the earlier studies, and they would be right. Other tests have been conducted in recent years showing a much higher amount of bacteria in dogs’ mouths compared with humans,’ so it really comes down to whether you believe the villainous medical community of the past or the virtuous revisionist researchers of our modern, enlightened time.

Honestly, though, I don’t know why this is even a question in people’s minds. Dogs, for all the cute things they do, are heinous creatures. They don’t have hands to grab and use toilet paper, so they use their tongues instead. THEY USE THEIR TONGUES TO WIPE THEIR BUTTS, FOR GOD’S SAKE. If you saw a person doing that, you wouldn’t assume they have a cleaner mouth than yourself, would you? Use some common sense, people, I shouldn’t have to answer questions like this. Next time I suppose I’ll get a question like “Why does broken glass hurt to swallow?” and I’ll have to spend eight hours going through medical records trying to empirically show why that will kill you. I have better things to do, like feeding my dog or something.

Dear Ask Anything,

-Four Eyes

Dear Four Eyes,

My quest to find the answer to your question lead me to a short history of the eye chart you speak of. This is, as you can imagine, a mesmerizing tale of how one man put letters on a poster and made people read them. It all starts out like many great tales of our time, with a young wide-eyed ophthalmologist (Herman Snellen) trying to measure people’s ability to see from a fixed distance. After years of conflict, both external and internal, Snellen created a poster with letters on it. Thrilling!

But why the big “E” at the top? Why not more exotic letters, like “T,” “I,” or “M?” The history of Snellen and his chart gave me precious few clues to this mystery. It seems there needed to be a standard letter on the chart to determine the chart’s size and the distance it should be from the patient, but couldn’t this have been done with any letter in particular? Why did Snellen pick the “E?” Any guess as to why would be pure, unfounded speculation, most likely wrought with inaccuracies and lies. So yeah, I’m going to take a few guesses.

The first thing I thought was maybe the “E” was the first letter in the name of a lover of Snellen’s. I extensively pursued this theory for more than two minutes before deciding no record of Snellen’s love life existed. Despite the success and fame his chart brought him, it appeared Snellen died the same lonely death that seems to plague all of history’s most noted ophthalmologists.

The next idea I came up with was because the “E” was so huge and at the top of the chart, it actually stood for “easy” as in “it should be easy to see this unless there’s something terribly wrong with you.” This ended up making the most sense to me, since I recall a certain Commodores song that paid tribute to the Snellen chart. The song is sung from the “E’s” perspective, proclaiming why exactly it is easy to see. The “E” is so easy to see, in fact, it’s like Sunday morning, which is pretty easy in case you didn’t know.

In the end, the reason for the “E” at the top of the eye chart will probably remain a mystery for all time, joining the ranks of world famous historical unknowns such as Amelia Earhart’s true fate, where all of Rhinelander’s Hodags went and why I wasn’t featured in the Men of Eau Claire swimsuit calendar last year. It is just another one of the many enigmas in the fascinating life of Herman Snellen.