Me: Oh, last night at dinner I heard about an Earth Systems professor whose two chocolate labs had just had a litter of nine puppies. NINE! Isn't that a lot of puppies? Nine puppies is a lot of puppies. Oh, and one of them was the runt. And Karen* said that the runt was much nicer and cuter than the other puppies because it knew it had to work its wiles on the humans to survive and the puppies puppies pup—

Alex: **So what is a runt, exactly?

Me: Well, runts are the ones that are definitively smaller than the other puppies. Like, you can recognize that they're smal—***

* girl from whom I heard about the puppies
** point at which the trap was laid
*** point at which I recognized that I'd walked into the trap