evadne_noel | Weird List Thing

You know you're an English Major when:
by Noelle, Lisa and Erin

1) You feel the need to edit everything you read.

2) You read the scholarly introductions of books because you’re genuinely interested.

3) You walk into a Starbucks and think of Moby-Dick.

4) You know Moby-Dick has a dash in it.

5) You think The Iliad and The Odyssey are fun reads.

6) You haven’t needed to consult the MLA Handbook for years.

7) You think Shakespeare’s comedies are actually funny.

8) You know who the real protagonist of “Antigone” is.

9) You use the word “protagonist.”

10) Thanks to Paradise Lost, you think Lucifer is the hero of Genesis.

11) “I knew him, Horatio.”

12) You know how to use a semi-colon properly.

13) You secretly believe that no one has actually ever finished Finngans Wake.

14) You know which character Frankenstein really is.

15) While Holmes may be smarter, you know that Dupin could still totally kick his ass.

16) You think a 20-page research paper is a weekend project.

17) You know “The Crucible” isn’t really about the Salem Witch Trials.

18) You’ve been forced to read Pamela.

19) You’ve read the second ending of Persuasion.

20) You know why “To boldly go where no man has gone before” is grammatically incorrect.

21) You know that Les Misérables is not really like the play. Neither is Phantom of the Opera.

22) You own a Norton anthology. Or twelve.

23) Thanks to Shakespeare, you can name the kings of England better than the presidents of the United States.

24) You think Hawthorne wrote Italian Romances better than the Italians.

25) You know the difference between romance and Romance.

26) If you have to read Poetics one more time, someone will DIE.

27) You think being buried beside your true love in an open-sided casket so your bones can mingle for all eternity really shows you care.

28) You think Susan Glaspell is soooo much better than Eugene O’Neill.

29) You’ve read Edith Hamilton.

30) You crane your neck to see what other people are reading on the metro (and probably judge them accordingly).

31) You specifically look for T.J. Eckleburg glasses.

32) There is absolutely no research whatsoever on your paper topic.

33) You are seriously considering naming your child Hrothgar, Phinneas, Ursula, Una, Cordelia, Dorothea, Eustacia, Scout or Pearl.

34) You know how to pronounce “Giles Cory.”

35) You compare your social circle’s various dramas to Belinda and the Baron.

36) You have the Webster word of the day e-mailed to you.

37) You’ve read more by Louisa May Alcott than Little Women.

38) You love the smell of old book.

39) You’re insulted by a service station named after Walt Whitman

40) You avoid dead letter offices because of Bartleby.

41) You’re afraid your language is turning into Newspeak.

42) You know that it’s “far from the madding crowd.”

43) You know that Joyce Kilmer is a man and that George Eliot is a woman.

44) You know that Hawthorne actually added the “w” in his name.

45) You think there needs to be a cage death match between MLA and APA.

46) You can tell the difference between all of Oscar Wilde’s plays.

47) Someone calls their fiancé their “intended,” and you run away screaming, “The horror! The horror!”

48) You’ve read Huckleberry Finn so many times that you don’t believe it is actually a banned book.

49) You know that David Copperfield isn’t just a magician.

50) Marion Zimmer Bradley has killed your love of the tales of King Arthur.

51) Your video collection is largely made up of BBC productions.

52) You know that this is not the best of all possible worlds.

53) Your dog is named Argus, Shiloh, Toto, Benji, Buck, Sounder or Old Yeller (not recommended).

54) You get the old Looney Tunes joke “I will hug him, and squeeze him, and call him George.”

55) You are upset when life doesn’t happen in terms of exposition, inciting forces, rising action, a climax, falling action and denouement.

56) You think there needs to be more Peter Ackroyd available in America. But Hawksmoor was still eff-ed up.

57) You think Redcrosse is an insult to Saint George.

58) You can spell "Houyhnhnms" without looking. (from

dreamstrifer)

59) You think the funniest thing in Gulliver's Travels is that he goes to Japan.

60) You learned more about Anne Boleyn from the poems of Sir Thomas Wyatt the Elder than from history class. And it was more interesting too.

61) You know that Ophelia made the most famous grammatically incorrect statement ever.

62) You go to a play, see a gun on the wall, and, well, you know the rest.

63) You're an English major, not a spelling major. So quiet [sic] asking you how to spell things off the top of your head.

My friend Lisa and I came up with most of this list while wandering around Washington, D.C. on New Year's Day. It started in a Starbucks when I came up with the third quote on the list. From there, we came up with about 45 more English Major jokes until we drove back to Connecticut the next day. It was a lot of fun. We'd be looking at the Hope Diamond in the Natural History Museum, and Lisa would say, "Okay, how about...'You know who Frankenstein really is'?" We are both crazy English Majors. Or were. Technically we are both crazy English degree holders. Anyway, my friend Erin came up with a few more later in January.

Feel free to add more in comments. I can't say they'll be added to my list because I don't have final editorial say all by myself. But if you want one added, I'll ask Lisa, and if we put it on, we'll put your name after it.

I suspect Lisa and I will be adding to this list, oh, probably for the rest of our lives. Because even if we move on to other things, we are still, at heart, English Majors.

Current Mood: mischievous
Current Music: Jann Arden - Insensitive