With a deer, you would never grab the bull by the horns.

For a few good reasons: Male deer are not called bulls, they are bucks, and they do not have horns, only antlers. Antlers and horns are two distinctly different accessories.

If you heard the news, go to the “head” of the class.

Hot off the presses is the report that there is a new treatment for the perennial problem that plagues parents and schools everywhere. Lice now have a new enemy. After years of acclimating to traditional treatments and evolving resistant strains, the bugs will now have to contend with a new FDA-approved drug that gives parents a lice-ense to kill.

Petrified as it was, scared would not be the best way to describe it.

Shiny, smooth and colorful would do for the piece of petrified wood that was dredged up by an Island scalloper recently. And fascinating, too, would be another appropriate adjective to add after this sizable chunk of weathered wood was uncovered and its history unraveled.

Some proudly define them as one of a kind, others say that they are just too flaky. Both are correct when it comes to snowflakes.

Snowflakes are not frozen rain, but the conglomeration of many single crystals of ice that grow individually when water vapor in the clouds condenses and freezes. One ice crystal measures only .04 to .08 inches, but can have as many as a billion billion (10 to the 19th) water molecules.

There are days when we are all in a fog.

Even if your mind isn’t murky, there are other reasons for the haze in Vineyard Haven and all around our Island. Returning from holiday last Sunday, I was greeted with clouds at my feet.

More often than not, this column deals with the wonderment of wildlife and the peculiarity of plants. Today it takes on the idiosyncrasies of another of earth’s inhabitants — the habits of Homo sapiens.