Mrs. Malaprop strikes again: a student in one class wrote on a quiz that Julian of Norwich desired to experience the “wombs of Christ,” while another student described a happily married couple living in a house that was “white with blue shudders.”
I’ll be writing up our NYC experiences (including a review) later, but it’s all teaching today, then being a literary guest at Skidmore tonight, so it will be a while yet.
A new Shakespearean curse is “born” — “Christ’s womb” or “S’womb”
My all time favorite is a student describing a scene from the revolutionary war which features “an evil British kernel.”
Kim: LOL! Those accursed grains — they’re invading our porridge and puddings.Wendy: My ancestors are guffawing. We’ll have to find a new fill-in-the-blank for “I bite my ___ at you.”
Norm Crosby would be proud!
Seems like every fanfic author I used to read in the 90s would have the heroine “shuttering” in ecstasy.
Perhaps they were shy and didn’t want any one to see them in ecstasy… Closing the shutters does maintain privacy! Oh, all right. Clearly they were just confused. Again. Tee hee.
My own worst Malaprop moment came during my Ph.D. qualifying exams. In one of my essay answers for the Rhetoric/Composition exam, I discussed Helene Cixous’ “The Laugh of the Medusa”. But during my final spell-check, somehow I allowed the software to substitute another word for “Medusa.” So Prof. Bloom was rightly surprised when she read about Cixous’ “The Laugh of the Madhouse.”Always spell-check; but always spell-check attentively.
Likewise the student who, writing about “What I Did on my Summer Break,” inadvertently made his work at the warehouse seem like a far more interesting job than he probably intended.Who checks the spellcheck? Not many, it would seem.[Now I know Miss Wendy told me this story, but the last time I said so, she insisted I had told it to her. I remain certain it is her story — mostly because I can’t recall ever assigning that topic — and always credit her as the wise tale teller.]