ABSTRACT
In the department of ... but better not to name the department. 1 There's nothing touchier than departments, regiments, offices—in a word, any kind of official body. Nowadays each individual considers an insult to himself to be an insult to all of society. There's the story of the petition received recently from a certain police captain—I don't recall what town he was from—in which he clearly explained that state directives were doomed and that the state's sacred name was definitely being uttered in vain. As proof, he enclosed an oversized volume of some romantic composition in which a police captain appeared every ten pages, in some passages quite drunk even. Therefore, to avoid any unpleasantness, better to call the department in question a certain department.
