T - 6: Itching for Knowledge

I have an itchy caruncle. In fact, it's been itchy all week and driving me crazy. I know I should not rub it, but I have such little will power.

OK. OK. I'll tell you. A caruncle is that little bit of harder, red stuff in the corner of your eye closest to your nose. (It's also the wattle of birds, but that isn't relevant here, even though I can make my double chin look like one.) My caruncle has been itching like mad this week as I suffer major bouts of hay fever.

As much as the itching irritated me, what really drove me crazy was that I didn't know the word for that part of my eye. I had searched the Internet to no avail. It was frustrating. I figured if something itched that much I should at least know what to call it.

Fortunately Samantha came through in the clinch. She very politely acted interested in my complaint yesterday. Then last night she sent an e-mail with a link to an illustration of the human eye she had located on the website of the Lucille Packard Children's Hospital at Stanford in Palo Alto. Besides winning the Wednesday Evening Search Engine Speed Test, Sam also illustrated one of the amazing things that has happened in this world of ours in the past dozen or so years. People now expect to be able to find out the most arcane and even trivial facts within seconds.

Thank God for Google, I guess. Twenty years ago I would have wondered briefly what that bit of my eye was called and then completely forgotten about it. Because before the worldwide web it was all too hard to find out and totally unnecessary. So am I better off now that I know I have a caruncle (two, in fact)? Probably not. And you are certainly not better off knowing that my caruncle itches. But there you are. It's the Internet era. I know something I didn't need to know and now I have shared it with all of you.

Happy Last Thursday of my working life. And just remember. If your caruncle itches and you rub it, be careful not to scratch your sclera.