In the 80s I attended a conference titled ``Rigid Bodies with Flexible Attachments''. The sad part is that nobody, me included, saw anything strange about that title. It took my wife and her friends, looking at me with incredulous humor, to catch on that there could possibly be anything ... biological...meant to be construed from the title.

I could not find the conference proceedings .. maybe they changed the name: but here is a title from that period: ``Hamiltonian Structures and Stability for Rigid Bodies with Flexible Attachments, Arch, Rat. Mech. Anal., vol. 98, no. 1, pp. 71-93. ''