CSotD: A most evocative gag
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Pros & Cons is always worthwhile and often laugh-out-loud funny, either because Kieran Meehan has found a new spot to tickle or because he's gone back to one of his best and hit it yet again, sharply. (I've mentioned both Jack Benny and the old, classic Bob Newhart Show enough that readers should recognize by now my affection for the gag you see coming but can't avoid giggling at.)
Today, though, he sends me into a reverie of my senior year in college, which was many decades ago, O Best Beloved, and takes on mythical stature.
It was basically a Great Books major, not as intense as St. John's, where the students are either certifiably insane for going there or become so as a result, but it was all-encompassing enough, thanks. You started in the major sophomore year and had only one elective per semester. I always took a creative writing course because it allowed me time to do a little creative writing among the other demands of the major.
We started with the Epic of Gilgamesh and the Odyssey, pursuing great literature, philosophy and the history of science forward in a manner such that, when the campus magazine published a course-selection book one year, they included, as a spoof, an alleged course in our department entitled "All Previous Thought," and it didn't sound so far off.
And when the ROTC ran a full-page ad showing four students in Army, Green Beret, Navy and Air Force uniforms in front of the church with the headline, "Do You Have What It Takes To Become A Leader of Men?" the magazine ran a satiric ad, purportedly for our department, showing four extremely shaggy people in front of the library, under the headline "Do You Have What It Takes To Become A Philosopher King?"
Both of which did a nice job of attracting interesting students to the program, which was already full of interesting students to begin with.
The core of the program was a twice-weekly three-hour seminar and, by senior year, it had become quite collegial and we had begun to outgrow taking ourselves so seriously, so we instituted a couple of "rules."
One of which was that a question was deemed "unfair" that referred to something in the second two-thirds of a book unless it had come up in the last 50 pages. The theory was that everybody read the first third of the book to find out where the author was coming from, and then read the last 50 pages to make sure he hadn't reversed himself, but that nobody read the rest of the book.
Obviously, the reasoning behind the rule wasn't airtight or nobody would ever bring up anything from that part of a book. But when somebody did, someone else was sure to say, "Oh, well, that's an unfair question …" and we'd all laugh and pretend not to notice that, all of a sudden, the conversation was being carried by maybe six of the 15 or 16 people around the table.
The one we took more seriously (and the point of all this) was a prohibition on the word "evocative."
If we learned nothing else in three years of spending six hours a week talking about Great Books and several other hours also in seminar format discussing poetry, novels, drama, art and music with undergraduates who had a high regard for their own intelligence and sensitivity, it was that anybody who claimed that something was "evocative" was about to say something about it that was "asinine."
There was no punishment for using the forbidden word, except that the second half of your sentence would be drowned out in a storm of derisive laughter.
Which is pretty harsh punishment for the sort of person who uses the word "evocative" and expects to be taken seriously.
It has been 40 years since I sat around those seminar tables, but just a few days ago, some reviewer on NPR claimed something was "evocative" and I guffawed so hard that I nearly went off the road.
And, as I listened to the rest of what he had to say, I was able to ascertain that our rule had been correct.
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