18.10.07

True Story: 'E' is the most commonly used letter in the English alphabet.

"After you've been in college for a year or so, you're supposed to choose a major, which is the subject you intend to memorize and forget the most things about. Here is a very important piece of advice: Be sure to choose a major that does not involve Known Facts and Right Answers. This means you must not major in mathematics, physics, biology, or chemistry, because these subjects involve actual facts. If, for example, you major in mathematics, you're going to wander into class one day and the professor will say: "Define the cosine integer of the quadrant of a rhomboid binary axis, and extrapolate your result to five significant vertices." If you don't come up with exactly the answer the professor has in mind, you fail. The same is true of chemistry: if you write in your exam book that carbon and hydrogen combine to form oak, your professor will flunk you. He wants you to come up with the same answer he and all the other chemists have agreed on. Scientists are extremely snotty about this. So you should major in subjects like English, philosophy, psychology, and sociology -- subjects in which nobody really understands what anybody else is talking about, and which involve virtually no actual facts. I attended classes in all these subjects, so I'll give you a quick overview of each: ENGLISH: This involves writing papers about long books you have read little snippets of just before class. Here is a tip on how to get good grades on your English papers: Never say anything about a book that anybody with any common sense would say. For example, suppose you are studying Moby-Dick. Anybody with any common sense would say that Moby-Dick is a big white whale, since the characters in the book refer to it as a big white whale roughly eleven thousand times. So in your paper, you say Moby-Dick is actually the Republic of Ireland. Your professor, who is sick to death of reading papers and never liked Moby-Dick anyway, will think you are enormously creative. If you can regularly come up with lunatic interpretations of simple stories, you should major in English."---DAVE BARRY, 'College'

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Most of you were aware that it was too late, but today I made it official. I am an English Major (emphasis on the Brit Lit & Creative Writing).

And proud of it.

4 comments:

Allie said...

Ha! I love that, especially "Scientists are extremely snotty about this".

Congratulations on being an English major. Much more fun than any other subject, except, of course, History.

Jacq. said...

E is for English. Yah!

Ali said...

We always knew that it was at the core of you. Now it's just official. Oodles of congrats, honey.

Anonymous said...

That is true. For example, look at Quentin Tarantino's speech in Reservoir Dogs about Madonna's "Like A Virgin." It is genius. And I'm someone whose degree is in Physics.

P.S. Good luck finding a job with an English Degree.