<< Oh shit! | Main | Oppressed consumer! >> March 23, 2005 >> I love it a lot It occurred to me today that language can be a fragile and dangerous thing. Case in point: Pimlott's office. I'm standing there with Erin, a classmate from Politics of Writing and Publishing, and blathering on about how my excuse for missing last week's class was entirely true. See, I was tired and cough-y and just generally bleeeeeeeeeh and even though I actually love the class, I decided to bail just that once. You know. For me. Well apparently Sassy Jenny Assy and/or various undisclosed classmates ratted me out, which irked me because this was the one time I was actually sick and telling the truth. The whole "I've been sick" thing has been used way too much in academic history, and consequentially you can't drop it as an excuse anywhere without raising suspicion. It's getting to the point where you have to say that you were driving your mom to the airport or something when you're actually dying of cancer. It's balls. Anyways, Pimlott was fucking with my head, as Pimlott is wont to do, and apparently an F+ in participation is headed my way as a result of my ditchiness. It probably didn't help matters that I was at his office to pick up the class readings roughly 45 minutes before class commenced, but what can ya do? In my blathering, I happened to stumble upon a particularly poignant phrase: "Usually I'm ambitious about these readings." Because, you know, I'm not, but I still needed to recover a bit. How is he gonna know if I do the readings an hour or a day or even a week before seminar? Ambitious is generally a good word when you need to build yourself up, and I rely heavily on its graces. So of course he zeroes in on it: "What do you mean by that?" *Blank stare by me* "Is that some kind of colloquialism?" Me and Erin look at each other, confused, and I start stuttering and attempting to explain. How the fuck do you explain "ambitious" to a university professor? Luckily, the photocopying is done by this point - the man nicely reproduced the readings for us out of his own pocket - and we bolt. Later in class, I find out that he thought I said "I'm bitches about these readings." Bitches. Yes, bitches. Thank you English! Posted by Chris at 04:59 PM >> Commentations (4)
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