Why being an English major makes me behave inappropriately in church

I love my family for many reasons, one of which is that they get my sense of humor.  I had more hearty belly-laughs with them in five days out-of-town for Christmas than I have for probably the entire fall semester (no offense, dear friends…you do make me laugh!).  However, it doesn’t take much at all for my family to set me off.  There’s really no point in sharing most of the anecdotes, though; you had to be there.  However, there was one instance that fellow English nerds might possibly sort-of appreciate.

After declaring myself willing to go to church as long as they “sang lots of songs and didn’t talk too much about Jesus,” I went to mass twice in one weekend.  Now, I’m pretty good at maintaining an appropriately contemplative demeanor at church, but as midnight mass commenced with the “Proclamation of the Birth of Christ” I lost it.  I’m not proud of it–it was completely disrespectful how hard I was laughing–but picture this:

An elderly woman in a maroon choir robe stood at the lectern.  She was built like a brick, a big, square brick with a marble perched on top, connected with four or five wobbling chins in lieu of any apparent neck.  It was Christmas and after all the poor woman couldn’t help her appearance; I would have cut her some slack.  Her voice was an extreme iteration of the old-lady quaver…she could have out-warbled Glinda the Good Witch from the Wizard of Oz.  Christmas or not, I probably would have rolled my eyes at my dad and made some sort of snide comment on the walk home.  But it was what she was quavering out of the large mouth in her gray-curled marble of a head that did it:

Proclamation of the Birth of Christ

Today, the twenty-fifth day of December,
unknown ages from the time when God created the heavens and the earth
and then formed man and woman in his own image,
several thousand years after the flood,
when God made the rainbow shine forth as a sign of the covenant,
twenty-one centuries from the time of Abraham and Sarah,
thirteen centuries after Moses led the people of Israel out of Egypt,
eleven hundred years from the time of Ruth and the Judges,
one thousand years from the anointing of David as king;
in the sixty-fifth week according to the prophecy of Daniel,
in the one hundred and ninety-fourth Olympiad,
the seven hundred and fifty-second year from the foundation of the city of Rome,
the forty-second year of the reign of Octavian Augustus,
the whole world being at peace,
Jesus Christ, eternal God and Son of the eternal Father,
desiring to sanctify the world by his most merciful coming,
being conceived by the Holy Spirit,
and nine months having passed since his conception,
was born in Bethlehem of Judea of the Virgin Mary.
Today is the nativity of our Lord Jesus Christ according to the flesh.

I was shaking silently by “Ruth and the Judges” and at the word “Olympiad” I turned my audible snort into a cough and buried my fingernails in my wrist as an attempt to master my ill-timed hilarity.  Unfortunately, the proclamation was only half done.  At “nine months having passed since his conception,” with deep red welts in my wrist, I gave up, hid my face behind my hymnal, and laughed long, hard, and (thank goodness) silently.

It was over.  I took some deep breaths, composed my face, and bowed my head meekly.  And then I started to think, like I do, about diagramming sentences, specifically, the 180 word sentence of the proclamation (which, as you no doubt noticed, contains only two sentences).  The core of the sentence, which took approximately three minutes for the venerable chorister to warble, is “Jesus Christ was born” (which is essentially covered in the title…).  Having so recently exercised my laughing muscles, the thought of this sentence diagram was enough to send my face back into my hymnal during the entirely un-comical first reading.  Oops.

Had the wrathful arm of God chosen to smite me for my sacrilegious amusement, I might have re-considered my non-thesim (although, come to think of it, it would probably have been too late).  As it was, I hope the brick-and-marble nightingale didn’t notice anything amiss and that I didn’t seriously compromise the spiritual experience of those around me.  As for me, I had more fun at church than I have since…ever, probably.

Booksbooksbooksbooksbooks!

I slipped on the rain-slick wooden stairs this morning in my haste to retrieve money for the annual library book sale.  With soft covers at fifty cents and hardcovers one dollar, it’s worth running to get there early before others snap up all of the delicious texts.  While the pickings seemed a little slimmer than usual (or rather, I already owned most of the amazing books I saw) I managed to procure The Professor by Charlotte Bronte, Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert, Jazz by Toni Morrison, Uncle Tom’s Cabin by Harriet Beecher Stowe, and a little book of poetry by the chief Romantics.  While Madame Bovary and The Professor are rather ugly-ish editions, and Jazz is of low-average attractiveness, the poetry is a pleasing little volume hardbound in red cloth with a 1909 copyright.  It is in remarkably good shape and includes little biographies of Byron, Wordsworth, Shelley, Keats, and Browning (I’m assuming they mean the male Browning…it being 1909 and all).  Uncle Tom’s Cabin, too, is a treasure.  It has seen significantly more wear than the poetry volume, but has the remains of faded beauty.  The green cloth cover sports a half-worn-away image of two young woman who appear to be either sewing or looking at jewelry, surrounded by a border of oak foliage and acorns.  It was owned at one time by Harold Hinds (a UMM professor of history) and also by a young man named John B. who contributed pencil scribbles and a sloppy signature to the front and back flyleaves.  A woman named Helena, presumably the first owner, received the book as a gift for Christmas 1904.

I fall for books as I fall for men–generally and ultimately, it’s what is inside that counts, but an aesthetically pleasing exterior makes my hands long to reach out and touch.  I admit freely to my superficiality–I will read Uncle Tom’s Cabin before I do Madame Bovary, despite the fact that I think I will prefer the content of the later.  I love my books.    They’re so much more to me than paper and cardboard, ink and glue–my collection? My menagerie? My treasures, certainly.  Some with their histories–Uncle Tom’s Cabin, or my century old copy of Daniel Deronda I picked up at last year’s sale– and some that have belonged to my hands and my eyes and my mind alone.  Some I have read, some I have read many times, and some waiting still to be opened.  I love them all, for what they contain and what they are and what they represent.  And I’m greedy for them.  I want more and more and more.  There can be too many books to read in a lifetime, but there can never be too many books.

Whom do you love?

I was shoving massive strawberries into my mouth this morning on the drive to work while singing along to the song “Who Do You Love” when I realized that the lyrics really ought to be “whom do you love?”, and then I realized that I’m a gigantic nerd, and then I also realized that I couldn’t listen to the incorrect grammar any more and I changed the station.  It’s strange that I reacted so strongly, because usually grammatical license in songs doesn’t really bother me.  Bob Dylan is constantly saying “ain’t” (which, of course, ain’t grammatically correct) and yet he remains my favorite songwriter ever.  I fully realize that singing “whom do you love?” would be incredibly distracting to listeners, but I think that is actually what bothers me about the situation.  Sometimes I get so worried for “whom”.  If it sounds so wrong to say “whom do you love” in a song, then clearly mainstream listeners are not accustomed to that usage in common speech.  And if that is the case, then I worry for the survival of “whom” as a word, even though it sounds so nifty and has that awesome Old-English-ending-remnant-m thing going on.  I, for one, will persist even if the little heart-rate-monitor thingy blipping to the sluggish heartbeat of “whom” goes flatline.  But I may never be able to listen to that song again (no great loss…I wasn’t too attached).

P.S. I actually don’t have a problem with the word “ain’t” because I’m pretty sure it’s just a (possibly corrupted) contraction of older words meaning “is not” and I don’t have a problem with contractions.  I actually think there should be more contractions.  When I was a kid I used “imn’t” for “am not” and I still use it every once in awhile when I’m feeling nostalgic.  English is an ever evolving language…I’m just not willing to concede that “whom” might fall prey to survival of the fittest.

Latin!

Occasionally I find myself pleasantly stunned to realize again how well-suited I am for the life of professional geekdom that I hope to live. Or, perhaps, what is stunning is how ill-suited I am for the mainstream workforce and how lucky it is that “lit nerd” is a viable career option. Anyway, one of those occasions was this morning, when I learned that I will probably be able to take a course in beginning Latin next semester. I’ve wanted to learn Latin since elementary school. Why? Well, initially because I thought the Romans were the most super-cool ancient civilization ever. I had a computer program in which you could build simulated Roman cities (I dug it out over Christmas Vacation, and it’s still so cool!) and read the book Rotten Romans until the cheap binding fell to pieces. I still think that their empire is at the root of our current society, and that’s neat. Although I continued to love the Romans, my desire to learn Latin took a new turn in my teens, when I realized Latin was a part of the old-school educational system learned by the characters in the classic British literature I had begun to read for fun. Why, I wondered, did they get to learn all that cool stuff like Greek and Latin back in the day, and now we have to take dumb classes like phy ed and health? Now, while I still harbor a love of the Romans and a secret wish to have lived a few centuries ago, I have other additional reasons for wanting to learn Latin. There’s a language requirement in graduate schools–for most, you have to know at least two languages (besides English) well enough to read them. My Spanish is rusty, but could be recussitated. However, I need another language and Latin could provide a nifty and potentially useful option. If I were a medievalist (which is, at the moment, probably not what I’m interested in doing but it’s a close tie for second) I would of course need to know Latin. Since I don’t know for sure that I won’t be a medievalist, it’s probably in my best interest to learn the pervasive literary language of the middle ages.

Isn’t it sweet when you can further your budding career goals by fulfilling a childhood desire? How often does that happen?