Word of the Day: limpid

This story is also inspired by Shark Week, but, I think it’s essentially a one liner with a hyperactive thyroid. I’ll let you be the judges. If one of you decides to be Simon,  well, he’s usually right, so, let me have it.

Today’s Word:

limpid

As in:

As in the human world, the demand for qualified nurse-sharks in the ocean has grown so quickly that the supply cannot keep up.  And, despite a large pool of qualified candidates, the biggest thing thwarting would-be nurse sharks?

They can’t get into schools.

“It’s a difficult situation,” says headfishtress Wanda. “We’ve got a shortage of qualified teachers, a limited about of classroom space, and facilities for practicals and labs. To have qualified and trained graduates, you have to maintain standards, and we’ve got very real limitations”

With the aging baby boomer population, and shark lifespans often reaching to the century mark, the crisis of caring for the aging population, especially amid the shrinking food supplies and limited feeding grounds, a health care crisis is on the horizon.

“The writing is on the wall. It is limpid, and sounds an alarm for all in the sea. We have an obligation to care for our own, and without nurse sharks the suffering will be immeasurable,” noted the tired administrator.

“Contrary to popular belief, sharks *do* get cancer and other diseases.  And, with the recent oil spill in the Gulf, we expect to see a number of environmental ailments to make a sharp increase,” said Wanda. “The pollutants from the oil and dispersant in the food chain, and the water cannot be completed filtered out by gills. And do you think we’ll see so much as a dime from BP? Yeah. That’s what I thought. No oil company is going to pay for a shark’s chemotherapy.  Sure, they might pay to clean it off your fins, but, forget about the long term health of a fish-winner. ”

Despite their vital role in the ocean ecology, nurse sharks are not widely respected in the shark community, as they are a smaller, bottom-dwelling shark that consume mollusks and crustaceans, instead of the impressive hunter type of shark. Their tireless efforts to heal the ailments of their brethren are not widely appreciated, as most sharks tend to see illnesses and injury as weakness, and are ashamed to admit they are susceptible to weakness, preferring to suffer in silence. 

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That’s all I have to say about that.

limpid / LIM – ped / clear and simple in style. I chose this word because a spam bot, much more literate than they normally are, used this word in one of its comments on a friend’s site.