When I first moved to Utah some fifteen years ago, the house that I lived in abutted a large field of shoulder-high sagebrush and tall, yellowish grass. One day, a neighborhood girl excitedly ran out from the field to alert my parents that she had found something unusual among the brush. “There’s a dead peasant in your yard”, she cried with enthusiasm! I was struck by her comment in two ways. First, I thought it odd that she would refer to an indigent person as a peasant, though I discounted this somewhat given the rather affluent circumstances of the community. Second, I wondered why she would be excited to have discovered a dead body (this predated CSI and the Forensic Files). I leapt from the chaise lounge upon which I sat and rushed to investigate the matter.

As it turns out, in a malapropian blunder, what the girl had found was not a peasant, but a pheasant, which is quite another thing entirely. Poking it a few times to ensure it was dead, I shoveled a few turns of dirt on the bird. The mystery solved, I returned to my station in the lounge chair.