Some of my best friends are scientists. Naturally, I take this is as an opportunity to settle the grand issues of time, space and everything else that I slept through in kindergarten.

"Does lighting come from the sky or the ground?" I quiz a physicist hurrying home in the rain. "Are people more like monkeys or apes?" I ask a biologist finishing off a banana. "How do you get stuff to explode?" I query a chemist shooting-'em-up on a Super Nintendo. This is great fun--and occasionally even educational when I stay awake long enough for the answers ("Both," "Apes" and "Shut up! I'm at the end of the %#@$! level," respectively).

Yet all is not joy in humanities-ville. With one question of their own, my comrades and classmates in the sciences sadistically wreak their revenge. "Tell me," they entreat innocently, "what's postmodernism?"

My brow burns. My shorts shrink. My toes turn over in their sockets. If I'm lucky, I pass out.

After this happens for the fifth time, my podiatrist strongly suggests that I come up with an answer.

So I look it up. Postmodernism is "literature that reacts against earlier modernist principles," page 1069 of my dictionary boldly asserts. Modernism, it tells me back on ol' 876, is "the use of nontraditional innovative forms of expression." All the way over on 1434, I find that traditionalism is--drum roll, please--"adherence to tradition." If I connect the dots correctly, that means postmodernism is literature that reacts against rebellion to tradition. This would be what exactly? The Pope's latest book? Pamphlets from the Daughters of the American Revolution? Alan Keyes campaign posters?

Maybe I shouldn't expect a straight answer from a book that defines one as "not two or more."

I decide to try the next best authority on all matters erudite: the Harvard University English Department. A few cold calls later and a sage, sonorous voice greets me at the other end of the line.