Word: swotting
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Jannie was a big man on campus; Danie an obscure little swot. While Smuts rose like a rocket to become at the age of 31 a world-famed Boer War general, Malan studied theology under the protection of the Union Jack. His usual explanation of how he missed the fight: "There was martial law, and anyway the front was 500 miles away" (sometimes he makes it 700 miles). Jannie and Danie became lifelong public enemies. Smuts, who had fought the British, lived to become a British field marshal and one of the stout pillars of the British Commonwealth;* Malan...
...Swot. "Slang," decides Marples, "is a form of youthful ebullience," and nothing, no matter how sacred, is safe from its inventiveness. At Oxford and Cambridge, short academic gowns have been known as rags or cover-arses, bum-curtains or tail-curtains. In the 17th Century, venerable dons were called pupil-mongers, and in the 18th they were gerund-grinders. The heads of colleges were skulls ("a skull being an ancient and desiccated head"), and their meeting place was Golgotha...
Over the centuries, students have always regarded earnest study with deep displeasure. The deskbound undergraduate has been variously damned as a swot, a brown-bagger or a mug. Chemistry is still stinks, Thucydides is Thicksides, and studying education is doing Eddyoo. To be failed in an examination has traveled from being gravelled (after Marlowe's Faustus, who "gravelled the pastors of the German church") to being gulphed, ftoor&d, knocked out, pilled, pipped, ploughed or plucked...
...classmates at Harrow, George Macaulay Trevelyan seemed, as he himself tells it, like "a 'swot' of the worst kind . . . socially [a] misfit . . . a complete muff at cricket, and clumsy at football." He was "wrapped in literary and historical imaginings," and he was also a crashing bore. "I never had dreams of being a general, or a statesman or an engine-driver, like other aspiring children . . . I wanted to be [a] historian...
...Public School Boy hates to be seen exerting himself. His kindly contempt for the "Swot" is largely due to his belief that it is rather bad form to let other fellows know that you are exerting yourself. He hates fuss of any kind and he regards the man who is conspicuously busy as making a fuss...