A few years ago when I was teaching at a small private school in Perry County, all of my botany students managed to do poorly on their final exam. It was suggested they be offered a second crack at it. Not surprisingly, they did just as miserable on the latter effort. The headmaster offered what little support he could for this “it’s only a vocabulary test.”

As the world continues to rotate on its axis while revolving around the sun, it occurs to me that everything is just vocabulary. How one applies and understands this vocabulary becomes more important each day.

A pharmacist as he prepares his medication provides a recommended dose, so his clientele can reach the required threshold to fight off the “bug” that has them out of equilibrium. In my environmental science class, my students learned that dose is the amount of a contaminate to which we might be exposed, while threshold is the quantity required for an adverse effect to occur.

The common sense thing then would be to make every effort to keep one’s dose to a minimum. But how is this possible? With formaldehyde in the carpets on the floor and within the composite desktops of my students, how can they limit their dosage? With acetones lurking about in painted walls and organophosphates within the pesticides we spray along the base of our walls inside and out, how can our students limit their exposure? Both of these cancer causers are used without malice, but they are used nonetheless.

Another piece of vocabulary is assimilation. The cells of our bodies, while protected with cell membranes, are designed to assimilate resources from their environment. As a result, our body systems absorb from water and the air those nutrients we need and often things that are not necessarily good for us.

Luckily, our liver was designed to break down toxins found within our bodies as they course through the bloodstream. These same toxins once broken down and converted to smaller, more manageable molecules are then filtered from the blood by the kidney. For the most part these digestive and excretory organs work well carrying out these functions, but while we are all created equal, we are not all created with the same genetic code nor do we all have the same background, nor are our environments the same.

As a result, each individual’s tolerance for the dose of the various toxins we wittingly or unwittingly ingest is different and again, as a result, some suffer with liver disorders, kidney failure and countless other maladies from nerve damage to dementia depending on the toxin and the dosage of said toxin. This dose is determine by the level of our own ignorance and the ignorance of others as we go forth adding toxins to our environment.