The plain white envelope, as those anonymous ones do, just sort of showed up in the County Lines mail slot. Inside was a cute decal of Freddy, the cartoon alligator mascot of the South Florida Water Management District. There also was a note, which no doubt referred to a recent column that sniped at the SFWMD, as the government jargonauts call it.

'Mode' could now use a rest. 'Slipping into a failure mode' is an admiral's jargon for 'failing.' Whenever a scientific term is embraced by jargonauts, the parameters are stretched beyond recognition. Let us return 'mode' to fashion, and to the large dollop of ice cream that lands squarely on top of the pie.