Parapets

A parapet is the current topic of study for all of you dedicated followers of my wisdom – I know of one person. Now you reading this will be considering: am I that one person? Unless, that is, you have randomly arrived on this page with no idea who I am and a desire to fill your little brain with all sorts of knowledge. If you have ever used this page to help with any sort of work that was/is/will be marked or assessed then please let me know. It would be nice to know that this page was responsible for the failure of people’s education other than my own…

A parapet is a raised area at the top of a main raised area such as a wall. If this definition has left you with any doubt as to what I mean then you are an idiot as the identification of a parapet is a simple and basic task that most human beings should have no trouble with. However if you are an idiot I will expand; if you do have a brain please skip ahead: A parapet can either be a raised fortification, such as a wall or battlement or a smaller raised barrier at the edge of a balcony or similar. I like to imagine that everyone will have read that regardless of how they responded to allegations that they live a brain-free life. ‘He can’t possibly know if I read this bit specifically designed for epsilon-minus morons, as Huxley may have said. I am loath to miss it lest I find myself without a key piece or knowledge or a witty insight.’ Of course, if you did skip that section then you did miss out
on a masterful piece of amateur psychology which is something of a tragic loss.

The origin of the word parapet is not what you’d think. It comes from a conjoining of the two words ‘paragraph’ and ‘petroleum’. ‘What is he talking about?’ you may be thinking, ‘it is common knowledge that parapet stems from the traditional fencing erected by paratroopers around their roofs when they are away from home for a long time designed to stop pigeons falling off their perches’. This is in fact wrong. A paragraph is a body of writing – of one or more sentences – which contains a new idea. The similarity between parapets and paragraphs is that they are both designed to protect people. You may have heard the saying “the pen is mightier than the sword” similarly a saying of my own devising is “the parapet-of-stone is mightier than the parapet-in-theory”. Paragraphs were commonly quoted during wars of the middle ages, particularly among many of the wars between the English and the Scots. This was seen as a sort of white flag indicating surrender of the individual – not the entire army - but it also invoked an ancient rite set out in the early drafts of the Magna Carta meaning that if the paragraph was of sufficient length and quality the individual was to be permitted to walk free from hindrance by either side and the listener was obliged to run themselves through with their own sword. It was a theory created, somewhat bizarrely, to make the lives of many soldiers easier. While this tradition may seem absurdly harsh and unjust from our modern hedonistic stance it was seen as a great honour among armies of both sides and during the early seventeen hundreds there were many soldiers who fell on their own swords simply for the pleasure of doing so and others who, instead of waiting for the customary paragraph, simply took any speech, be it grunt or murmur, as an opportunity to kebab oneself. Robert Burns wrote in his poem To a mouse about this debacle: “The best laid schemes o' Mice an' Men, Gang aft agley”.

The link to petroleum, or ‘rock oil’, is that petroleum, in its untreated form is very viscous and so was often sculpted, in countries where it was, and is, plentiful into garden ornaments. Where in British or American gardens one may have a pond or some other water feature; there, gardens often just contained a sludgy mound of petroleum in which children can play, small birds can fester and wealthy old men can lather themselves. This tradition almost died out completely in the early 1990’s but was recommenced when some American business people thought it would make a handy expression of wealth and status to have a petroleum pit in the workplace to wow investors. They considered it as indicating a free-thinking nature much more than a flash car or watch and often, before key meetings, would scoop up a handful and massage it into the scalp where it was thought to relieve tension. Tragically this was shown not to be true with the only effects being slightly increase the risk of cancer and the appearance of a dishevelled and unwashed hamster.

So I have guided you through the world of parapets and now you are experts in the field. There is nothing more about parapets that is worth knowing that you do not know. Feel free to contact me with suggestions for the next subject that I will study and relay to you for your pleasure and delectation. Aren’t you so glad you read widely?