For sixteen years I lived in a ghetto. Not your average ghetto, but one inhabited by members of the faculty and staff of the University of Notre Dame. The ratio of PhDs to other folks was about 1.6 per household.

Most of them were nice, normal sorts of folks. They cut themselves, they bled. There were others, though...who seemed to feel that a PhD who wrote a dissertation on the use of the thorn in "Piers Plowman" made them an authority of everything, and the more remote from "Pier Plowman" the subject was the more of an authority they were.

I particularily liked the guy who drove an Acura with an oblong "GD" in the back window. My wife and I puzzled over it for about a year -- Grosse Deutschland? Greenland? -- and then she met him one day and asked him.

GD. Grateful Dead.