My history professor’s index finger, and Kate

Here is why I love going to my research methods in history class (apart from the fact that it’s dead useful and I’m learning loads of stuff): My history professor does air quotes all the time. But we’re in Britain! So he only uses his index fingers! Oh, it’s so funny! Every time I see him do it I laugh and laugh (quietly, inside my brain) because I know all along that really it’s done with two fingers. And he’s probably not even thinking “air quotes” when he does it. He’s probably thinking “air inverted commas”.

Furthermore, today he showed us an advert asking for sciencey assistance, to make the point that if you don’t know the jargon in a certain field you’re going to be totally mystified, and when he read it out to us, and when he got to the word “neurofuzzy” he started laughing and couldn’t go on.

Which leads me to a mostly unrelated story about my younger sister’s best friend Kate. Kate is like one of my favorite people in all the world, and whenever she comes over or I remember she exists, I get very excited because I love her so much. I love her so, so much that I’m going to include a picture here. Here is Kate. Aren’t you glad that I reminded you about her?


Well, anyway, there was this one time when lil Kate was in English class reading aloud part of Washington Irving’s humorous History of New York, and Washington Irving was humorously comparing Dutch ships to Dutch women, and Kate was cruising along reading (extremely well, I am sure), and then she reached the part that said, “…with a pair of enormous catheads, a copper bottom, and withal a most prodigious poop”, and it proved her undoing. For she managed to make it to “prodigious” and then it was all just way too humorous, and she burst out laughing.

(Which Robyn saw coming.)

So valiant Kate, she tried again, and yet it was just too funny and she could not restrain her giggles which escaped in spite of her most earnest attempts to control them, and in the end her English teacher gave her up as a hopeless case (and she was).

But “prodigious poop” is just objectively funny. Say it out loud to yourself. Prodigious poop. Prodigious poop. Tee-hee.