As 9,000 e-mails to my inbox on Thanksgiving have proved, I was right all along when I wrote “Buffalo Shank”, and needn’t have corrected it to “Buffalo Flank”.
Working the way I work, there are few times that I miss the presence of an editor — but me unnecessarily correcting *myself* was one of those times. Here’s why: “Shank” is an inherently funnier word than “flank”. That’s not a qualitative call, that’s quantitative: “Shank” is funnier, mathematically.
So, on this most rarest of occassions, I think I’m gonna change the word *back* to what I originally had written, with smiling apologies. I’d rather have “shank” in the books and in the archives.