“What kind of female clothes were promoted by the Franco dictatorship?” I ask in class.
“Latter!” students answer in unison.
“What is that?” I ask.
“A type of clothes?” students respond.
This makes me feel very perplexed. “I’m sorry but what are you talking about?”
“Well, it says here in the text that women were encouraged to wear polka-dot dresses and priest-like cassocks, especially the latter,” I student explains. “So “latter”must be a type of clothes.”
OH MY GOD! >hides under a rock<
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That’s exactly how I felt.
I keep telling them to write out new words, look up definitions, expand their vocabulary on a daily basis, but something tells me it isn’t sinking in.
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it is like we are watching the decline of the English language as wel know it. I would LOVE to see some sort of quantitative analysis of adult vocabs over time. I cannot imagine that they aren’t shrinking.
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So true- it’s not just students in Universities. Once, I was at an office supply store, and I was waiting near the registers until someone brought out a chair from the back store room that I was purchasing. One of the clerks asked me if I needed any help, and I responded “No, someone went in back to fetch a chair.” And the clerk then asks me if I’m British. Confused, I state that I am not and ask why. “Fetch is such a big word…” *sigh* Not only is it just five letters, but apparently only British people are intelligent and have a vocabulary.
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This story is much funnier than mine. 🙂 And then people say I invent this stuff.
We are in the middle of November and I still can’t manage to make my students stop referring to Latin America as “a country.”
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Oy vey and facepalm.
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I suspect you just made this up to make your blog more popular 😛
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Oh, I so wish that were true. 🙂 I could just drop everything and become a writer if I had this kind of imagination.
I don’t even publish the most egregious of my teaching stories because nobody will believe me anyways. 🙂
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My professor gets so angry when students repeat stuff they saw on a television show as if it were reality.
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You’re a much nicer person than I am, Clarissa. If I had been the professor, I would have went along with it, and explained that “Latter” was the name of the secret underwear worn by Mormons, hence them being called the “Church of Latter Day Saints”.
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bloggerclarissa :
This story is much funnier than mine. And then people say I invent this stuff.
We are in the middle of November and I still can’t manage to make my students stop referring to Latin America as “a country.”
One thing that came up over and over in my creative writing classes was this: truth is stranger than fiction.
People would write short stories based on things that actually happened to them, only to be told that it wasn’t realistic. Happened to me quite a bit.
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what age are they, 6?
and I would have invented something simmilar to what nominantissima has said, too. They deserved it.
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Try 18-20. 😦
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Interestingly, I had a moment like this when I was six. I was browsing through one of my father’s books on ranch life in Montana, and it mentioned a particular place which raised “cattle, deer, and horses”, but my six-year old mind interpreted it as “cattle: deer and horses”, so I thought the word cattle referred to all hoofed animals.
I got out of that after taking a trip to my aunt’s farm though, about six months later. No excuse for it at any age beyond that.
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A conservative literary critic and college professor
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