The poor water Rhine

I once read an anecdote about a university professor and his young son, a clever little boy. They were standing on a bridge over the River Rhine and the child wanted to know what the river was called. His father told him that it was the Rhine. (In German, Rhine is pronounced like the word “rein” which means “clean.”) Now the boy asked whether it was called Rhine because it was “reining” (clean). His father had to answer “no,” since in fact the river was not “rein” (clean) at all, but was named after its source in the Rhine valley. The boy was not satisfied with this explanation, however, and repeated his question why the river was not “rein” (clean). Now his father put him off, saying that he would explain the whole matter to him when he was older.

The journal of the World Health Organization for January 1977 published an article entitled “Water, the Key to Health.” The Germans, it said, spent three thousand million dollars just on various purification systems alone in the course of four years. This was for no other reason than to prevent increasing pollution of the river from getting worse. France was said not to have contributed as much, but rather added hundreds of thousands of tons of waste salts to the river.