Scheherazade

I have elsewhere—you will have to trust me on this—professed my profound dislike for most things Slate and all things Dear Prudence, although disliking a certain thing rarely—and again you will have to trust me on this—prevents me from engaging with it. Sometimes I am grateful for my acts of self-flagellation, at least insofar as they yield onomastic insight. To wit, from a recent Dear Prudence column:  

Dear Prudence,
I am a 30-year-old Middle Eastern journalist who has had a girlfriend for several years. Both of us are virgins. Because of the government and our families we can't have intimate sexual relations, but we will marry next year. I love my girlfriend but the problem is I daydream a lot about sex. Half of the sexy daydreams are about my girlfriend and half of them about other women friends, workmates, actresses, and porn stars. I do not dream about being emotionally close to them, only about sex. Is this a betrayal? Could this end my marriage? How can I stop?
—Daydream Problem

Dear Daydream,
So you want to stop your sexual daydreams—I’ve heard death is a very effective cure. Until then, despite what you may have been told about your sexual fantasies, they are perfectly normal. From your brief description, yours are pretty much standard issue. Your thoughts are not a betrayal and they shouldn’t interfere with your marriage. You and your wife may even want to share some of your fantasies as you get to know each other better in bed. (Leave out the ones about how hot your co-worker Scheherazade is.) I don’t know how accessible sexual reading material is in your country, but as you approach the happy day, you might want to do some boning up on what’s coming. Sex Made Easy, by Debbie Herbenick, is one place to start.
—Prudie

At issue here is darling Prude’s parenthetical—for are we not to be amused by the prospect that someone by the ghastly name of “Scheherazade” could be hot? This, after all, is an advice columnist smitten by lousy puns (“boning up on what’s coming,” hyuck!). She is, I hate to say it, attentive, however superficially, to the rhythms of language—i.e., what sounds funny. And “Scheherazade,” that sounds funny: the only thing remotely feminine about it is the “her” in the middle!

The insight thus yielded is that our dear Prudence is not above the occasional racist larff. Tune in next week when she joshes about a well-read LaceDarius and Malice the mathematician.