evadne_noel: A man and the cresent moon in a rowboat (scarygoround.com)
[personal profile] evadne_noel
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 [livejournal.com profile] 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.

(no subject)

Date: 2005-01-30 09:03 am (UTC)
From: [identity profile] evadne-noel.livejournal.com
Yay! Louisa May Alcott deserves more love than she gets. Little Women is great, don't get me wrong, but she wrote such great other things as well.

Personally, I love "Fruitlands." Nothing like a little sarcasm at the expense of the transcendentalists.

(no subject)

Date: 2005-01-30 06:02 pm (UTC)
From: [identity profile] piyo-halliwell.livejournal.com
"Little Women" introduced me to LM Alcott (and my obsession with the movie versions, though no one has gotten quite right yet). I recieved two very old and hard to find novels of her's this last year for Christmas and find that one of my favorites of her novels is "A Modern Mephistopheles".

(no subject)

Date: 2005-01-31 01:06 pm (UTC)
From: [identity profile] evadne-noel.livejournal.com
I only have a chapter from "A Modern Mephistopheles" in my collection of her letters and diary entries. Is it next to impossible to get a copy of it to read?

(no subject)

Date: 2005-01-31 04:09 pm (UTC)
From: [identity profile] piyo-halliwell.livejournal.com
My finding it was a fluke. I think I was in some cheap bookstore at an outlet mall and saw "Louisa May Alcott" and begged to have it, never thinking about what the novel was. Unless you found it online, I think it would be kind of hard to find.

"Modern Magic", "The Inheritance" and "A Long Fatal Love Chase" are some of her novels/short stories which are now a little easier to find. If you should ever get a copy of "A Modern M." give it a good read, I recomend it.

(no subject)

Date: 2005-01-31 08:15 pm (UTC)
From: [identity profile] evadne-noel.livejournal.com
Well, I'll keep my eyes out (maybe someday when I have more money to bargin with).

Thank you for the recommendations! I love LMA, and when I have a place for more books, I will definately make her a feature of my collection.

(no subject)

Date: 2005-01-31 08:46 pm (UTC)
From: [identity profile] v-airniidroog.livejournal.com
wow...thats all I have to say...wow.

(no subject)

Date: 2005-02-01 07:45 am (UTC)
From: [identity profile] v-airniidroog.livejournal.com
I didnt know she wrote that many books. Thats cool that you and Dana know so many of them. I'mm have to find em somehow.

(no subject)

Date: 2005-02-01 04:32 pm (UTC)
From: [identity profile] evadne-noel.livejournal.com
Well, someone out there finally realized what a fabulous writer she was, so it's getting easier and easier to find her stuff.

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