You know, if you’re trying to take a roomful of people by surprise, it’s a lot easier to hit your targets if you don’t yell going through the door. - Lois McMaster Bujold

The parents of the preceding generation had taken galactic sex-selection technologies much too far in their foolish passion for male heirs, and the very sons they’d so cherished—Miles’s contemporaries—had inherited the resulting mating mess. Go to any formal party in Vorbarr Sultana these days, and you could practically taste the damned testosterone in the air, volatilized by the alcohol no doubt.

“I thought you already knew everything.”
“Knowledge is not the same thing as understanding. I have a profound need to understand. Everything.”

It was all sympathetic magic. When you couldn't do something truly useful, you tended to vent the pent-up energy in something useless but available, like snappy dressing.