Max, a gloom monger since the death of his WASPy-wife Janey, first meets Nora at the White Palace hamburgeria where she works, and later at a redneck dive where he goes to do what one does at such places, namely, drink until you’re more depressed than when you first got there.

While there are many die-hard Caryl and Bethyl shippers who have argued for Daryl’s heterosexuality, others have maintained that Daryl is gay.

Early Christian wisdom rhetorolect blends human experiences of the household, one's interpersonal body, and the geophysical world (firstspace) with the cultural space of God's cosmos (secondspace). In the lived space of blending (thirdspace), God functions as heavenly Father over God's children in the world, whose bodies are to produce goodness and righteousness through the medium of God's wisdom, which is understood as God's light in the world. In this context, wisdom rhetrolect emphasizes fruitfulness (productivity and reproductivity). The goal of wisdom rhetrolect is to create people who produce good action, thought, will, and speech with the aid of God's wisdom.

But by the sea-banks where at morn their foes / Might find them, lay those knightly name-fellows, / One sick with grief of heart and sleepless, one / With heart of hope triumphant as the sun