Word: asses
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Dates: during 1920-1929
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Legitimate criticism is appreciated by everyone, and is to be encouraged everywhere, but the braying of an ass is ever objectionable, and particularly so when it occurs outside of the barnyard. And it would seem that several asses have got loose in and about the college yard...
Last Friday Ass No. 1 was heard braying a pitiful complaint against the English 72 examination. "Woe is me, the naughty professor gave us an examination on outside reading and outside reading only. And the nasty man didn't even ask us anything about the lectures." Such was the tenor of the wailing of Ass No. 1. It is rather difficult to know just what this particular ass meant by "outside reading." A certain amount of reading was assigned to be done outside of the class and why one should consider any of this reading as more outside than...
...Ass No. 2 opened his mouth this morning. Says he, "the examination was obviously designed to test, not understanding of the reading, but whether one had done the reading." Far better would it have been if the mouth of Ass No. 2 had been so stuffed with hay that no noise could have issued thence, for he accomplished nothing more than the admission; that he is one of that small, but ever present group who pass examinations through an understanding of reading they have never done...
...Ass No. 3 is he who is convinced that Professor Rollins does not understand the spirit and "essence" of poetry. When one has glanced through several of the volumes Professor Rollins had edited, this statement appears even more absurd and ridiculous than the later statement about "novels, chronology, and similar bricks and mortar of literature". Neither of these statements is any more worthy of serious comment than the "skillibooch . . . gmmk" of a baby-or the braying of an ass. Such noises speak for themselves-certain vibrations have issued forth from a cavity into the surrounding atmosphere causing a meaningless noise...
...Three asses have brayed, and what have they accomplished? Nothing, except that smug feeling of satisfaction that every ass gets when he feels he has uttered something of surpassing sagacity; which feeling he communicates to the world by a certain lazy wagging of his aural appendages...