CHERNOTA

Chernota is a concept not yet furry known in the US, though it is, often unwittingly, promoted by members of the professoriat who yell "Academic Freedom" out of one corner of their mouths and "Lemme sit on the planning board" out of the other.

The heretic on the Soviet side who had sinned against bureaucracy by approving the link was Academician Boris P. Vvedensky, a marvelous physicist of the old guard (1892-?) who was then chief editor of the Great Soviet Encyclopedia, and it was giving him plenty of trouble. They had had to send out copies of a long article on the Bering Sea to every one who had bought the corresponding volume, with instructions to paste it over the article extolling Beria, former minister of the interior and head of the secret police, who had since been executed.

But by then all the volumes except no. ... [I have forgotten] had been published. And what was wrong with that volume? "Letter S," he said, looking at us significantly, and we all understood. They were scrounging the length of the Soviet Union for subjects beginning with S so they could replace the hundreds of pages (the entire volume?) that had originally been devoted to the Coryphee of the Sciences and Leader of Nations.

Coryphee is a word of Greek origin which is not worth looking up, for since it was never applied to anybody but Stalin, it became meaningless when the old butcher died, its useless shell buried in obscure dictionaries.

Its fate is reminiscent of some words in English. Ecology used to be the name of a respectable (and very interesting) branch of science. The word was not killed by Stalinist terror, but was driven to semantic insanity by the radical chic. Some years ago, the City of Boulder had an official with the proud title of Ecology Officer. He was in charge of collecting the garbage.

By now, presumably, he has been converted to a human resource.