One of the things Ford had always found hardest to understand about humans was their habit of continually stating and repeating the very very obvious, as in 'It's a nice day', 'You're very tall', or 'You seem to have fallen down a thirty-foot well, are you alright?' At first Ford had formed a theory to account for this strange behavior. If human beings don't keep exercising their lips, he thought, their mouths probably seize up. After a few months' consideration and observation, he abandoned this theory in favor of a new one. If they don't keep exercising their lips, he thought, their brains start working. After a while he abandoned this one as well as being obstructively cynical, and decided he quite liked human beings after all, but he always remained desperately worried about the terrible number of things they didn't know about.