Tales of Tails and Trials

On the first day of the Summer Semester of 2017, I walked into my English 203 class with a rat in my purse – well a furry toy equivalent of a mouse, to be exact. In an attempt to make their first session memorable, I asked my students to assume this mouse was a real mouse, with a real active and busy lifestyle. They were then supposed to describe to me, in a short paragraph, who it really was that we were looking at it: What was this mouse’s name? Where did it go? What sorts of things did it like? What did it hate? What did it do to earn a living? To have fun? There were no rules, and as I was soon to discover from my students, no limit to what a mouse can do, apparently – if only we imagine hard enough:

Below are snippets from three especially creative students of mine:

by Anthony Mrad:

This little rat’s name is Bob. He’s one of a kind because of his voice. In fact, he barks every time he’s hungry, happy, or sad. I’m sure you know his friend Ratatouille: they are both great cooks. He’s from Japan and is the 780th child in his family. The most amazing thing about Bob is that even though he is 82 years old, he’s still as active and energetic as his son Juan and they go together to the gym regularly. He’s been cheating on his wife Bella for 12 years but she doesn’t complain because she is so afraid of him barking at her. He also painted his nose red in honor of his childhood hero Rudolf who died several years ago. Bob is just an amazing little cute rat.

by Dimitri Saad:

It was in my darkest hour that Donald showed up at my doorstep. I was frightened seeing him stand there and wiggle his tail for hours nonstop, which he often does when he feels cold. The sombre and dim scene only brightened up his wide scary eyes even more. It turned out that this vigilante mouse had come to seek justice. Laughing ignorantly, I tried to shove him out of my home but this only further triggered his explosive red nose in the process. I then passed out. When I woke up, I realized I was tied to a bed by means of mousetraps. I screamed in agony until Donald flew in using his aerodynamically modified fur, which makes his flight easier and smoother. Nothing made sense. Donald offered me some cat meat, as he was ironically allergic to cheese. The teenager then explained that he was a rat who desired to become a mouse so badly. So, he followed mouse customs, married a female French mouse named Theodora, and even had offspring with her. Despite the expenses of having to buy cat meat instead of cheese, his life was going well, up until his family were killed by rat poison. It was I who murdered his family. I shamefully apologized but he refused to show me any mercy. I begged and pleaded for my life and freedom; however, since he was a former cop, he decided to play judge, jury, and executioner. He took my life without ever looking back. It was then that he became known as the evil rat/mouse-wannabe-human/killer/vigilante: Donald Trump.

by Michael El Moualem:

Meet Tony: 

Unlike his friends, he doesn’t really have much of an appetite, 
he hates cheese too, so he isn’t worried about any traps. 

His nose is red and quite bright 
but unlike Rudolph, no light. 

His friends all have legs but he’s happy with his wheels, 
only rough floors really grind his gears. 

Humans wind him up a lot but he’s ok, 
soon as they put him down he scurries away. 

Straight away he goes, no twisting or turning 
if you see him you’d think that the floor was burning. 

“Gotta go fast or I’ll end up in jail, 
don’t forget to tell them about my crazy tail!”. 

As he runs off his tail writhes and wriggles, 
all he leaves is a fading giggle. 

The beginning of every college semester, 
marks the best time of the year for this beady eyed critter. 

Mrs. Jessy prepares his breakfast in bed, 
always his favorite, chocolate corn bread. 

A few minutes later they hop in the car 
and he’s more than ready for his day as the star. 

Off to AUB, where he’ll meet some new friends, 
he’s more than comfortable in that shiny new Benz. 

As he enters the classroom he’s always frantic and shy, 
everyone’s excited to meet the little guy. 

All these new faces, his little brain took its time, 
just long enough for me to write this silly rhyme.

And now, dear reader, it is *your* turn! What is *your* make-believe mouse like? Is he a coroner, astrophysicist, or botanist? Can he play the flute or do cartwheels? Does he take the flying carpet to work or does he prefer the metro so he can nap while blasting away Freddie Mercury on his headphones on his way to get a massage? Let your imagination scurry along and share your story in the comments below!

A Planet by Any Other Name Would Still be A…Planet?

In an effort to get the creative juices flowing, and inspired by one of the latest posts I happened to be casually browsing on 9gag (yes, we teachers check it too!) I asked my students what they would name the seven new planets that NASA discovered recently. Since their creative answers had me laughing so hard I decided I simply had to share what they came up with! (with their permission of course):

1.“New Planet, New Planet 2.0, New Planet 3.0, New Planet 4.0, New Planet 5.0, New Planet 6.0, Frank” ~ Joelle Oussta.

2.“As mentioned on the nasa.gov website: ‘In contrast to our sun, the TRAPPIST-1 star – classified as an ultra-cool dwarf – is so cool that liquid water could survive on planets orbiting very close to it, closer than is possible on planets in our solar system.’ So since it's an "ultra cool dwarf", then why not name the planets as the seven dwarfs? Dopey, Bashful, Sneezy, Sleepy, Happy, Grumpy, Doc. And the Sun could be called Dwarf.” ~ Aya Abou El Zoulof

3.“The seven deadly sins: Pride, Envy, Wrath, Gluttony, Lust, Sloth, Greed” ~ Fidel Badran.

4.“So you know how the planets in our solar system were named after Roman gods and goddesses? Now they should name the new planets after their Greek equivalents:

• Zeus - The Roman king of gods was actually "Jupiter", & they named the planet Jupiter after him. Now they should name one of the new planets after his Greek equivalent, Zeus (the Greek king of gods)

• Poseidon - Roman equivalent: Neptune

• Cronos - Roman equivalent: Saturn

• Ares - Roman equivalent: Mars

• Aphrodite - Roman equivalent: Venus

• Hermes - Roman equivalent: Mercury

• Hades - Roman equivalent: Pluto (but then they'll discover Hades was never a legit planet)

PS: The sun, however, shall be named Apollo (god of the sun).

Makes perfect sense!” ~Nour Nasrallah

5.“I would've named the planets the following: Winterfell, Casterly Rock, Pentos, Castle Black, Kings Landing, Riverrun, The Eyrie. And finally I'd name the sun Khalesee or Deneris (a.k.a mother of dragons). All of these are city names in Game of Thrones, except for the sun which is named after the queen.” ~Abed El Rahman Kibbi

As for me, to be quite honest, Fidel’s answer is exactly the first thing that crossed my mind too: I thought of the seven deadly sins. But, and because I actually went ahead and bothered to blog about this subject, I figured I might as well take this to the next level by actually researching the significance of the number “seven” in world literature. After quite a few unexpected and hectic hours of research, I realized that in retrospect, I’d name the seven planets after the “seven ages of man”: infant, schoolboy, lover, soldier, justice, Pantalone (exceptional greed/money in the commedia world), and old age (facing imminent death), in reference to a monologue from one of Shakespeare’s most frequently quoted plays As You Like It:

"All the world's a stage,
And all the men and women merely players;
They have their exits and their entrances,
And one man in his time plays many parts,
His acts being seven ages. At first, the infant,
Mewling and puking in the nurse’s arms.
Then the whining schoolboy, with his satchel
And shining morning face, creeping like snail
Unwillingly to school. And then the lover,
Sighing like furnace, with a woeful ballad
Made to his mistress’ eyebrow. Then a soldier,
Full of strange oaths and bearded like the pard,
Jealous in honor, sudden and quick in quarrel,
Seeking the bubble reputation
Even in the cannon’s mouth. And then the justice,
In fair round belly with good capon lined,
With eyes severe and beard of formal cut,
Full of wise saws and modern instances;
And so he plays his part. The sixth age shifts
Into the lean and slippered pantaloon,
With spectacles on nose and pouch on side;
His youthful hose, well saved, a world too wide
For his shrunk shank, and his big manly voice,
Turning again toward childish treble, pipes
And whistles in his sound. Last scene of all,
That ends this strange eventful history,
Is second childishness and mere oblivion,
Sans teeth, sans eyes, sans taste, sans everything."

In this excerpt (and play overall), the world is compared to a stage, and life, to a play that is categorically divided into a series of ages. And while Shakespeare did adapt this philosophy and succeed in doing so, the concept of the seven ages of man actually predates the famous playwright. Renaissance humanist Erasmus, for example, in his work The Praise of Folly first printed in 1511, once noted: "For what else is the life of man but a kind of play in which men in various costumes perform until the director motions them off the stage."

A bit bleak, perhaps. But until human knowledge of the universe progresses faster than the speed of light – till now, a definite impossibility – everything remains uncertain, with the fine exception of the certainty of those seven stages from cradle to grave.

Too macabre for you? Then leave me a comment below and share what you would have named the seven planets yourself!

References

1) NASA: https://www.nasa.gov/press-release/nasa-telescope-reveals-largest-batch-of-earth-size-habitable-zone-planets-around/

2) 9gag: http://9gag.com/gag/aKVx2v6?ref=tp

A Standardized Love for Non-Standardized Words

Let’s get one thing straight from the start: I certainly don’t miss prepping for lengthy English Proficiency tests like the GRE, SAT, or TOEFL. Who does? But, and maybe this is the inner linguist in me speaking (as a literature graduate I’m surprised I even had a linguist doppelgänger to begin with!), there is actually one part of the test-studying process that I do genuinely miss, and that’s when I used to sit for endless hours memorizing the meanings of the strangest selection of never-heard of words by tirelessly flipping through various flashcards back and forth. And because there is a charm to complicated words, I decided to include a couple I happened to come across recently and find quite amusing to pronounce:

1.     Limerence (n): The state of being infatuated with another person.

2.     Petrichor (n): The pleasant earthly smell after rain.

3.     Syzygy (n): An alignment of celestial bodies.

4.     Phosphenes (n): The light and colors produced by rubbing your eyes.

5.     Velichor (n): The strange wistfulness of used bookshops.

6.     Defenestration (n): The act of throwing someone out of a window.

7.     Sonder (n): The realization that each passerby has a life as vivid and complex as your own.

What are some of your favorite “odd” words? Leave me a comment and let me know! J

References:

https://www.buzzfeed.com/danieldalton/bob-ombinate?utm_term=.blbPk7ZQL#.ycrkvOXor

Have it More than Ten Ways in More than Ten Different Languages

There are ideas for blogs that have to be forced and provoked until they can be channeled into something useful, ideas that manifest themselves instantly but require days of writing and brainstorming, and then there’s this one: This is the blog post I never planned for, the one I had no idea I’d end up researching, and the one I accidentally thought of – and completed all in one sitting – while actually researching something else entirely. 

I stumbled onto the idea for this blog while actually finishing up my previous post on my word of the year for 2017. As I was proofreading it, I found myself quite bored with the cliché proverb “You can’t have your cake and eat it too”. First, for a little bit of insight regarding the origin of this bizarre expression, it all began when the Duke of Norfolk wrote a letter to Thomas Cromwell in 1538 in which he explained how “a man can not have his cake and eat his cake”. Oddly enough, the lesser known fact about this statement is that after this first mention of the expression, it was actually reversed for the next couple of centuries to: “You cannot eat your cake and have your cake.” While President Franklin D. Roosevelt used this version of the saying in his 1940 State of the Union address, since then, the phrase has reverted back to the form we all know and use today. 

That said, and despite finding the source of this idiom fascinating, I still felt that nowadays, this expression was too overused and hence, lost a bit of its luster. So for a fresher perspective, I thought I’d shop around for something more novel. And that’s when I discovered the fun fact that when the expression is translated into different languages, the statement being made changed quite drastically, though the message of one needing to give something up, in order to be able to have something else as he can’t have both things, remains the same. So, since I found some of these variations to be absolutely hilarious, I thought I’d share my favorite versions of it:

1) Albanian: Te hysh ne uje e te mos lagesh 

    To take a swim and not get wet.

2) Bulgarian: Не може и вълкът да е сит и агнето цяло

    The wolf cannot be fed and the lamb intact.

3) Czech: Nejde sedět zadkem na dvou židlích 

    You can't sit on two chairs at the same time.

4) Danish: Man kan ikke både blæse og have mel i munden

    You cannot both blow and have flour in your mouth. 

5) French: Vouloir le beurre et l'argent du beurre

    To want the butter and the money from (selling) the butter. 

• Note: To stress the idea more, one can add et le sourire de la crémière to mean: “and a smile from the [female] shopkeeper.”

6) German (1): Wasch mir den Pelz, aber mach mich nicht nass

    Wash my fur but don't get me wet.

7) German (2): Man kann nicht auf zwei Hochzeiten tanzen

    One cannot dance at two weddings (at the same time).

8) Swiss German: Du chasch nit dr Füfer und s Weggli ha

    You can't have the five cent coin and a bread roll.

9) Hebrew: אי אפשר להחזיק את המקל משתי הקצוות‎‎ 

    It is impossible to hold the stick from both ends.

10) Hungarian: Egy fenékkel nem lehet két lovat megülni

      It is impossible to ride two horses with one butt.

11) Italian: Volere la botte piena e la moglie ubriaca

      To want the barrel full and the wife drunk.

12) Malayalam: കക്ഷത്തിലുള്ളത് പോകാനും പാടില്ല ഉത്തരത്തിലുള്ളത് വേണം താനും! 

      You want both the one on the roof, and the one in your armpit.

13) Portuguese: Querer ter sol na eira e chuva no nabal 

      Wanting the sun to shine on the threshing floor, while it rains on the turnip field.

14) Brazil: tentar assobiar e chupar cana

      Trying to whistle while chewing on sugar cane.

15) Russian: И рыбку съесть, и в воду не лезть 

      Wanting to eat a fish without first catching it from the waters. 

16) Spanish: estar en Misa y repicando or estar en Misa y tocar la campana

      To be both at Mass and in the belfry, bell-ringing.

17) Argentina: la chancha y los veinte 

      The pig and the twenties.

• Note: This is in reference to the traditional piggybanks that children used to keep for storing 20 cents. Since there is no other way to retrieve the coins than by breaking the piggybank, the expression shows how only one of the two scenarios is possible, but not both. The expression can be emphasized by adding y la máquina de hacer chorizos, which translates into: “and the machine to make sausage.”

18) Tamil: மீசைக்கும் ஆசை கூழுக்கும் ஆசை 

      Desire to have both the moustache and to drink the soup.

Finally, it’s worth noting that while all these languages reiterate the same point that you can’t have it both ways by consuming the entire cake and simultaneously still having some cake leftover, the good news is: You can instead devour your treat while reading this blog at the same time. And that’s sort of the same thing ☺

References:

https://www.babbel.com/en/magazine/have-it-both-ways