Way back in high school, I took driver’s ed in a dumpy complex adjacent to Austin’s Burnet Road. That’s BURnet. One of my instructors, of uncertain wisdom, taste in clothes, and sexuality, frequently told me to turn onto BurNET. I wanted to slap his rat-tail for not knowing how to pronounce the street printed on his paycheque.
I discovered a more tactful way I could have taught him. The Texas Hill Country has a line for this very occasion: ‘It’s Burnet, durn it, can’t you learn it?’
Overheard by the water cooler:
I had a wooden whistle, but it wooden whistle. Then I bought a steel whistle, but it steel wooden whistle. Then I bought a tin whistle…and now I tin whistle.
Is there a punchline somewhere? Is it a cruel prank, like a brain computer virus, intended to lock up victims’ brains as they pursue meaning that isn’t there? It doesn’t matter. By joke conclusion, my head had imploded in a rush of joke anticlimax.
My friend (who shall remain nameless, lest her inferiors gang up on her) is following in the footsteps of blogs that examine human weaknesses. FMyLife logs f-ed lives. So does grouphug.us. There’s even a collection of the ‘mom mails’ that make us roll our eyes, Postcards From Yo Momma.
My friend contributes to the field with Worst Job Applications, which I can only hope is a tentative name that will become less self-descriptive and more artsy in coming revisions. As a job interviewer, she receives self-indulgent résumés and melodramatic cover letters that cry out for public shaming. WJA is her quick and easy vector towards that goal.
She is working off her own received content at the moment, but she welcomes contributions from other interviewers.
I’ve taken an unfortunate scapegoat approach to pinpointing romantic shortfalls. Common sense indicates that I am single because I’m the one in control. It’s much easier, though, to blame everyone else, and I do that to an astonishing degree. Facebook indicates you have a new flame? You’re holding hands on the street? You’re walking slightly abreast of someone of the opposite sex? Then you are the cause of everything that makes me miserable, and I will secretly want to take an axe to your face in lieu of leaving my apartment and meeting people. Count on it. Good lord, I’m a cranky 70 year-old 45 years too early.
Unlike schadenfreude—’taking pleasure in the misery of others,’ literally ‘pain pleasure’ in German—there is no word to describe this sensation. Jealousy or envy doesn’t quite cover it, as there is no sense of misery and too much sense of covetousness. The nameless phenomenon is an odd absence in English.
I propose, then, what is essentially (schadenfreude)-1: freudenschade, ‘finding misery in the pleasure of others.’ ((This probably means the body of English words is not an abelian group: commutivity of multiplication is violated.)) I know you feel it; why not speak it now, too?
I misread tubal ligation as tubal litigation earlier, and spent the following minute or two figuring out what the latter process involves. If tying up your tubes sounds painful, perhaps tying up your tubes financially…
What makes a cat hat irregular? I for one would call all cat hats irregular: no cat looks regular wearing clothing. One San Diego woman knows the distinction, however, and is willing to explain through her lugubrious cat hat tale. Pix included, natch.
It’s been a little over a year since I graduated from Case Western Reserve University (May 20th, 2007). My commencement was god-awful, with laughter in all the wrong places. The commencement speaker Richard Lederer ((Who? Yeah, that’s the question I asked.)), a man who makes a living cracking jokes about motherfuckin’ grammar, failed to score points with most of the crowd. Grammar can be funny, but he talked about his professional poker-playing kids ((Both their Wikipedia articles are longer than his; the latter is three times so.)) more than his livelihood, so I had all the reasons I needed to take a nap for 20 minutes.
All the laughter was pent up in preparation for Case Western’s alma mater song. A tune that should inspire pride and honour in alumni instead made me struggle to keep from snickering. It was written in 1990, even though CWRU was founded in 1826.
Shine on, forever, Case Western Reserve.
Loyal and true are we (are we).
Your brave sons and daughters,
Your knowledge we use to make our history.Our school days we will cherish forever more,
A lifetime of friends from the start (the start).
Shine on, forever, Case Western Reserve.
You’ll be forever in our hearts.
Let me outline a few rules for any future anthem writers that may be reading:
If you’ve ever spoken to me, you may have noticed I speak with a slight stutter. It’s so slight, you may not have even noticed it until just now. Indeed, I never noticed. For my entire life, everyone I’ve ever known has either been polite it not bringing it up or just unconscious of the fact. Only last spring did someone point it out. On the day I had arranged to perform a soliloquy from Paradise Lost for an English class, I got an odd e-mail from the professor:
Hi Will,
It occurred to me that asking you to do a recitation in class might not be entirely fair and I wanted to give you the opportunity to do some other written assignment in lieu of this one or recite the lines to me in my office. I’m sorry I didn’t think of this earlier. I think last time we talked you mentioned you were scheduled for tomorrow, but it’s fine if you would prefer not to do it in class.
That class, I proceeded with the recitation and bombed, due more to memory failures than stuttering. Afterwards, she elaborated on the e-mail with me privately. She assumed I had a diagnosed speech impediment. The confused but not hostile look I had on my face must have made her want to curl up in a ball and die on the spot. I have the feeling I got a high grade on the project as an apology.
Prior to that class, I was pretty loose with my words. The impact of my professor’s misunderstanding goes beyond stuttering. Self-criticism of my stuttering spills over into general speaking ability. Everything I say is analysed by my brain after the fact for damage control purposes. I’ve become obsessed with the twelve-second past that most people retain as short-term memory. Did my sentence come out in a continuous stream? If not, rephrase it and say it right. Did I say unintentionally creepy? Panic and backpedal. Was there an unintended double entendre? Tack on a ‘That’s what she said’ and turn it in my favour.
No—scratch the last item. According to the laws governing that phrase, it has to be in response to another person’s comment, not your own. The best I can and will do is laugh along.
The deeper recesses of Wikipedia tend to have the worst and least creative vandalism. In researching yesterday’s post about obnoxious riddles, I encountered Wikipedia’s analysis of the hypothetical question. Contrary to tradition, the article has been lovingly molested and twisted into brilliant absurdity. The examples cited are below, in case future authors trash the article in a last-ditch effort to maintain academic standards. (Ha!)
I love riddles, but the one that aggravates me the most is also one of the oldest, dating from 1650 or earlier:
As I was going to St Ives
I met a man with seven wives
And every wife had seven sacks
And every sack had seven cats
And every cat had seven kits
Kits, cats, sacks, wives
How many were going to St Ives?
The sucker’s answer is 2,401 or 2,402, depending on whether you include the narrator. This response is typically followed by a clever smirk by the riddler, because the actual answer is one: everyone is coming from St Ives except the narrator. Furthermore, the narrator is not the group of listed items, so in some circles the answer dwindles to zero.
This riddle plays the language game so much that it’s unfair for the victim not to be able to play it back. What is the context of meet? There is no preposition from or to detailing the travels of the narrator’s polygamous friend. Just as the victim is mocked for believing everyone is travelling together, the questioner should be chided for assuming the two characters are travelling in opposite directions.
It’s generally just a horrible Mother Goose rhyme to read to your five year-old. The ambiguity of it will make his face implode. Stick to the tried-and-true questions with no loopholes: how many angels can dance on the head of a pin?