Monday, December 08, 2008

Adminstrative Assistants provoke bloodbath

I've enjoyed a few humorous gaffs by some students in a crazy class I've been taking this semester. These come from undergrads. Not to pick on them, and not to be too snobbish, but I find myself wondering in response to their comments, "How did you get in here?"

In one discussion, a girl kept referring to the Hegelian and Marxian "dialect". Now, one could assume that she was invoking some notion of jargon or terminology associated with these thinkers. One might speak in a "Marxian vein". But she was referring to a piece of reading we all had in front of us which was discussing, more appropriately, the Hegelian dialectic. But she kept calling it a dialect. So it got me brainstorming some cool title for an essay on "The Dialectics of Dialect" perhaps exploring, using postcolonial and linguistic analysis, the tensions in speech, phraseology and ideology encountered within the liminality of a colonizer/colonized binary and the disruptive modes of mimicry that might result. Or one could cogitate on the "The Dialect of Dialectic" and explore the multiple iterations of the usage of this conceptual tool.

A more humorous example took place in another session. A student was presenting on a topic that touched on "sectarian violence". Yet, she kept saying secretarian. Secretarian violence? Secretarian violence?! A problem to be dealt with, to be sure, but far less pressing. Invokes a riotous notion.

I went looking for some funny images or videos of secretarian violence, but instead came across a hilarous video of a simple office freak out.

Enjoy...