Word: englishness
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...fine spring day toward the end of my freshman year I picked up a pen and wrote the words "English and American Language and Literature" on a piece of paper...
...night at the very beginning of my sophomore year when I was invited to a cultural event in which my department could strut its stuff--a poetry reading. Although I had heard a great deal of praise for the reading poet, described to me as the "darling of the English Department," I did have some misgivings. The collection of works from which he was to read had been composed in his bathroom, "one poem per sitting," and was titled "Grunts." Nevertheless, I was determined to keep an open mind...
People in other departments and other walks of life have wasted little time rubbing salt in my wounds--from a freshman roommate who snickered "English, eh? Goin' for the big bucks, ain'tcha?" to my financee parents, who equated my joining the English Department to joining a motorcycle gang as far as their daughter's welfare was concerned...
Nothing is more fun than a group of people complaining about their majors, rather like soldiers in a hospital comparing their wounds. "I'm an English major" is roughly equivalent in such language to "I've got gangrene," while "That's nothing, I'm an Ec major" corresponds indirectly to "I got hit in the head with a bazooka." "Well, I'm a Pre-Med" means, of course, "I'm slightly wounded, but I survived by throwing my buddies on a live grenade...
...private bathrooms in Holworthy, getting toilet paper meant waking up during toilet paper hours--they were about 3:30 to 3:35 p.m., as I remember--walking across the Yard to Mower and bargaining with a man who spoke little English to get a single roll...