(FORTUNE Magazine) – In which Kindly Dr. Keeping Up deconstructs a sacred text: the latest fund- raising letter to alums of Harvard and Radcliffe, or is it Radcliffe and Harvard? Dear Kindly: What's all this then about the sequence in which the various Cantabrigians get to be dragged onstage? Sequence is all. The letter, mailed out in June, was signed by prexies Derek Bok of Harvard and Matina S. Horner of Radcliffe (she has since left the job) and manifests concern to the point of suspected neurasthenia about the order in which the two sets of alums get mentioned, the obvious difficulty being that whoever goes first might be considered primus inter omnes (first among all) and not merely primus inter pares (first among equals), thereby triggering imputations of sexism and insensitivity. Dear Up: An example would help here. We begin with the salutation -- ''Dear Alumna/Alumnus:'' -- which puts the ladies first and instantly signals that Derek does not plan to lord it over Matina even though his endowment is an estimated $4.2 billion vs. her paltry $90 million. Dear Keeping: Okay, but since when is ''ladies first'' a big deal around here? Wait, there's more. In the second line of the letter, the boys make a comeback when it emerges that the two institutions will now seek funds from ''alumni and alumnae.'' And more still: In the next paragraph we run into a dizzying new slash-based formulation -- ''alumnae/i'' -- that puts the girls back in first place. Dear Dr. Up: From which, one senses, they will instantly be dislodged. Correct-o. The sexism-imputation-forestallment strategy on display is one of seesawing back and forth between alumnae/i and alumni/ae and hoping that alums reading the missive out loud at breakfast to their possibly guffawing spouses will not call in seeking guidance on pronunciation. Dear Doc: But could not one argue that, even if those suffixes give you the giggles, the whole song and dance does ultimately have a reasonable point, to wit, the need to keep reassuring loyal Cliffies that their concerns and traditions are not being ignored in the wake of the famous 1977 merger/ takeover deal with Harvard? Here we sidle into a definitional question: Are those suffixes necessary? And to a fascinating answer: Nyet. We learn from Webster's Third New International -- the latest unabridged version of the most widely used American dictionary -- that whereas ''alumna'' is clearly female and ''alumnus'' usually male, ''alumni'' is ''used . . . often of men and women.'' Dear Upkeep: So what gives? If the easy and obvious solution is to just keep saying ''alumni,'' why are they sweating so hard over the problem, or is the above-named lexicon unavailable in the Bay State?

We reject the hypothesis of dictionary dearth at Harvard, also the possibility that Derek and Matina are playing the crowd for laughs. This leaves only one admissible explanation of their usage. (''When you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth.'' -- Sherlock Holmes.) Explanation: They believe themselves to be scoring points with their locutional clumsiness. By calling attention to their infinite concern about sexism, the clumsiness becomes a plus. It manifests an iron resolve to put sensitivity above sense. It proves they know which end is aloft in Harvard Square. Whether it will win out at the breakfast table is, to be sure, another matter.