The disciplinary machine: the boots and epaulettes and pointer, the Pukers, the mellowed elder-statesman

texture · UNDATED (standing regime; ~YDAU)

• When: UNDATED (standing; the "mellowed" present is ~YDAU, "his whole nine years at E.T.A.")
• What: At near seventy, Schtitt has "mellowed to the sort of elder-statesman point where he's become mostly a dispenser of abstractions rather than discipline, a philosopher instead of a king" — his pointer (a weatherman's telescoping stand-in for the "now-forbidden old riding crop") "has not made corrective contact with even one athletic bottom in Schtitt's whole nine years at E.T.A." He still favors "high and shiny black boots" and epaulettes, and keeps "Lebensgefährtins and prorectors to administer most of the necessary little character-building cruelties." ("Lebensgefährtin" is Schtitt's own term for deLint specifically — it "means technically 'soulmate' or 'spouse' but isn't meant at all sexually w/an online forum deLint, we can rest assured," n31 p. 0994.) He and deLint make out the daily A.M.-drill schedules, and certain drills ("Pukers," e.g. a disciplinary Tap & Whack) are attitude-adjusters "meant to do nothing but hurt you," describable to parents as mere cardiovascular conditioning — which is why "Schtitt and his prorectors are way more feared than" the academics. The deniability was once actually tested: a "Clipperton-level legend" holds that a long-gone little E.T.A. phoned MA's Department of Social Services calling disciplinary Pukers child abuse, bringing "two stitchy-mouthed and humorless D.S.S.-ladies" to the portcullis for a day and requiring "Schtitt's actually confining Aubrey deLint to his room, so purply furious was deLint with the kid who'd dropped the dime" (n215 p. 1035).