All that time we've been searching for the answer, and it was right in front of our noses.

As the Greeks gape at women heaped up in selfslaughter, / They hear of Aeneas's flight with the loot. Referencing events from the second act of Berlioz's Les Troyens.

In America alone, people spent $170 billion on “direct marketing”—junk mail of both the physical and electronic varieties—last year. Yet of those who received unsolicited adverts through the post, only 3% bought anything as a result. If the bumf arrived electronically, the take-up rate was 0.1%. And for online adverts the “conversion” into sales was a minuscule 0.01%.

Some slurs like “slut” and “retard” vary in their perceived offensiveness to those polled, but also include some incredibly offensive words like the “N-word.”