Truly it has been a quiet week, and if you keep coming back here hoping that something magically appears, I appreciate it and am sorry there's not more to read.
As I hinted, I'm in Louisville, KY for the week, scoring AP essays and hanging out with a hell of a number of English teachers and professors from all over the country.
You know how certain nouns have certain appropriate words that go with them to indicate a quantity of them? Like a flock of seagulls (brought to mind because somebody was making fun of my 80s-ish glasses earlier in the week), a murder of crows, etc.?
I have often thought that a gathered quantity of English professors should be called "a pretension of English professors."
Friend and colleague Andrew H. proposes "a wank of English professors."
Each has its merits, it seems to me. Mine, with its Latinate feels, strikes me as more pretentious and therefore more appropriate. His, on the other hand, has a kind of Anglo-Saxon directness that I approve of. And no, I do not know the etymology of "wank." Although discussing the etymology of the word "wank" is, in fact, wankery and underscores the aptness of the term.
5 comments:
And what of my trip to the OED to find out if it had any etymology notes? (It doesn't).
But a Google search on the terms "etymology wank" puts your blog in 6th place, above Merriam-Webster.com.
Thanks, Don--you saved me a trip to the basement, provided I could even find the OED down there.
Hey, I wasn't picking on your glasses! I just noted that I have the same ones.
And some day I'll have to tell you about the time I almost died at a Flock of Seagulls concert.
Now, Flock of Seagulls, they were some wankers!
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