I'm currently grinding my nose on the double-spaced Times New Roman grindstone of 2008's Inaugural Batch of Essays. What with this being the Inaugural Batch and all, announcements of contenders for 2008's Most Clichéd Cliché are probably a tad premature. Let that not impede me from drawing your attention to "harsh reality" which I have read four times in the past ten hours, courtesy of four separate undergraduate authoresses. That would be four times, not counting this innovative twist on an old theme: “the harsh realisation of the horrid reality of real life”.
I am preparing a t-shirt slogan: "Reality ain't harsh, it just is." But I can't work out whether to illustrate my manifesto on behalf of an indifferent physical universe with a picture of a bunny wabbit or a volcano.
Meanwhile, as noone has punned in my vicinity for at least two days now, anyone for harshly Real Tennis?
6 comments:
I think your newly founded sloganismo would be best served by a picture of a very cute bunny wabbit frolicking in a field, and in the far background an incoming and very slightly less koot shrike, talons akimbo, silhouetted owing to its steep descent from out of the sun ala Biggles et al.
That ought to learn 'em.
Y'know, it occurs to me now that I may not actually know what the word "harsh" means. I'd been thinking of harshness as somehow tied up with malevolence, e.g., something had to want to be harsh to be harsh, and thus only persons (and other conscious entities, viz. God, etc) could potentially be harsh. But I am an idiot. The best I can say in defence of my slogan is that harshness is in the eye of the perceiver, rather than an innate attribute of the thing perceived: one chap's disagreeable roughness is another's pleasant abrasiveness.
In all honesty, I think the slogan works perfectly, else I would not have illustrated it thusly!
Also, incidentally, disagreeable roughness is a fine state of being. I find that it works wonderfully as a social filter: people who find it completely disagreeable are usually not my kind of people, in any case, and by being disagreeably rough/pleasantly abrasive, I'm able to find out that much sooner and subsequently dispose of these heathen blackguards in a ditch, bound with electrical tape.
Err, what I meant to type was, 'pleasantly bid them good day and leave them unmolested in the midst of dozens of eye-witnesses.' Damn typos. It's all these keys, they're all right next to one another!
Ah, harsh reality. That is something my students see a lot "in today's society" -- one of their favorite phrases. They also like things that are "real and true," though, presumably, not harshly so.
howdy harlinator. essays won't start weighing me down for a few weeks yet. i can, however, transmit the confusion of a student as to the meaning of the term 'the literature of descent'...Dissent, fair lass. It's all downhill from here...
In today's society, one's gotta write what one's gotta write.
Trixibel, helloooo. I see your employment cup runneth o'er. Enjoy that train trip.
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