how the hell did you get this job?

[dokidoki]

Try this one: irony. I'm willing to bet 100% of the teachers will think they know what it means but I suspect most will be wrong.

http://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2007/03/09

I had a pretty crappy prof for a 4th year university graphics course. This guy was a Smalltalk whore, and taught the course in that, but since our implementation of Smalltalk couldn't render very fast, he wrote his own C library to speed things up.

It was his first year teaching the course, and he admitted that he had spent the summer reading the book to prepare the course. He would spend class after class staring at and pecking away at his graphics-related Smalltalk code. One quote I recall: "I don't remember what this does any more."

It literally took us a month to draw a line. He spent weeks talking about parsing VRML, which was stupid. The first assignment was to write a VRML parser, and everyone worked overtime on it. When people turned it in, he said, "oh, gee, I just wanted a syntactic parser, not a semantic one." Meaning, we just had to be able to read "word, bracket, stuff, bracket", and not, "oh this is a Shape node so it may contain a geometry node and blah blah blah." (What I did was write a program to generate code based on a simple text description of the VRML spec)

I never bothered handing in the third assignment because he said it "wasn't important". (Everyone had problems with the way it was written) I never got my second assignment back.

For the final project, he gave us a sheet of twenty possible things to do, to improve his crappy Smalltalk rendering engine. What I wanted to do was improve the C support library he'd written, but I couldn't get it to compile and he didn't reply to my email about it.

So in a weekend I did a bunch of those twenty things, handed it in with some old BSP-related code I'd done before, said I had partnered with a friend of mine, and ended up with an A-. One of those twenty things was literally one line of code.

Unfortunately, this prof had somehow become pretty high ranking in the department. Our OS professor was retiring, and this guy insisted that any new hire be required to know Smalltalk. In a department meeting, another prof told him this wasn't a reasonable requirement and Mr. Smalltalk Whore stood up and told him he was an idiot.

On another note, one teacher in high school took off marks because I supposedly spelled someone's name wrong. It was an uncommon spelling, and I had to show her the book that day in order to get the marks back. Otherwise, she was a decent teacher.

[dokidoki]

Oh and I'd like to mention a second year stats prof I had. I only did kinda average in his course (heh), but the prof was pretty awesome. Every class he would take 5-10 minutes for a "culture break". But he had a thick Brooklyn accent so it would sound like "culcha brake". He would hand out photocopies of news articles (which I still have somewhere) about math in the news, such as the counting systems of Papua New Guinea, some guys who made a supercomputer in their apartment, or something about the RAND corporation.

I once put the following rhyme on his desk before he got to class:

As I was passing Project MAC,
I met a Quux with seven hacks.
Every hack had seven bugs;
Every bug had seven manifestations;
Every manifestation had seven symptoms.
Symptoms, manifestations, bugs, and hacks,
How many losses at Project MAC?
-- TGQ April 27, 1974

which of course is a geek version of As I Was Going to St. Ives.

[slackergirl]

You guys, give me three new words, and I'll quiz some teachers myself.
Something that would be normal to use in a sentance, but that you've gotten the puzzled look for using.

One I use all the time: facetious.
And one I've been surprised to get blank stares at: inane.

[Flint the Dwarf]

I dunno, I've heard a few of my teachers (economics, government, education) use 'facetious,' clearly proud of themselves and disappointed when no one looked too puzzled, but they kept using it over the year. I think it's one of those words that used to be pretty uncommon, but for some reason has spread and is no longer unknown.

Honestly, I almost never use large words in daily speech, unless there's no quick way to explain what I mean. For one, it comes off as pretentious and never sounds right and, two, I get the feeling most people don't know what the word means but they don't come out and admit, so they end up not understanding me. I know some people get off on using words most people don't know, but I just find it annoying.

[madbunny]

Honestly, I almost never use large words in daily speech, unless there's no quick way to explain what I mean.

Ari has commented on this in the past. I agree with her, It isn't neccesarily a 'large word', so much as a correct word. Most times, for example if you were to use 'facetious', then you'd be replacing a short sentance with a single word.

I'm sick as a dog right now (102.7 fever!) but if I'm feeling better on monday, I'll attempt to redeem myself. At least my wife took a look at list and scoffed. "too easy" she said; "pick something less common".

Sometimes though, I get mad when people won't think outside the box. For example, our school transports students to and from school on vans. They are your typical 10 passenger vans, nothing special. The problem is that there is never a jack, or a spare, or anything really when something breaks down, such as a flat tire.

Three times I've had to go rescue staff, along with the students on the van when this has happened. Each time, I tossed them all onto the new vay that I used to get there and either drove on the flat to a tire shop, or walked a block or so to an auto parts store and purchased the parts I needed (eg: a 7.00 breaker bar and deep socket).

I've found that this happens everywhere. Another example, is when I do secuity at a football game, or concert such as mettalica. I'll walk up on a security guy in a shouting match with a patron who's arguing over some quibble or other such, as having a counterfeit ticket. Usually, I'll tell the guy somthing like "hey! You have two choices and tend seconds. Either I call a bunch of police over here and you spend the weekend in jail getting processed, or you give me your fake ticket and to into the GA section. If you get caught again, you're out." Most of the time, they give me the ticket, and enjoy the rest of the concert. When you're in charge of an area with 15,00 people in it, you can't afford to get bogged down with the little shit.

/end ramble.
(blame it on the fever, I have a million stories)

[godix]

Honestly, I almost never use large words in daily speech, unless there's no quick way to explain what I mean. For one, it comes off as pretentious and never sounds right and, two, I get the feeling most people don't know what the word means but they don't come out and admit, so they end up not understanding me. I know some people get off on using words most people don't know, but I just find it annoying.

Sometimes there just isn't another word that can be used. Take pedantic for example. 'Anal prick' means almost exactly the same thing but there are times you can't say that, for example at work. If you have to stick to semi-polite speaking there's nothing else as short that carries the same meaning. Why say someone is an 'uptight demanding type-A person who would spend an hour organizing their paperclips in order of size and color' when what you can explain it all using the single word pedantic?

Other times it's a matter of I'm only willing to dumb down my speech so much before I feel like I'm engaging in baby talk. If someone doesn't know what a placebo is I'm not going to waste my time saying 'A sugar pill that does nothing but because sometimes the mind is able to make you feel better if it's fooled that something is done there are demonstratively times where it will help patients feel better despite the fact it medically does nothing'. Fuck that shit, it'd annoy me and it's probably make the other person feel like I'm talking down to them so they end up just as pissy as if I used a word they didn't know.

Occasionally you're right, it's just to be a prick. But as the above shows that's not the ONLY reason to use big words.

[Minion]

how about the word "caravan"?

i'm willing to bet you'll get people who say "it's a van made by dodge".

[Flint the Dwarf]

Ari has commented on this in the past. I agree with her, It isn't neccesarily a 'large word', so much as a correct word. Most times, for example if you were to use 'facetious', then you'd be replacing a short sentance with a single word.

"I was kidding" is simpler and shorter than saying "I was being facetious... that means I was kidding/not being serious, read a book, et cetera." I know kidding isn't exactly the same thing, but it applies pretty much the same way and anyone can translate/adapt it to fit the context.

By the way, it's spelled "sentence."

Sometimes there just isn't another word that can be used. Take pedantic for example. 'Anal prick' means almost exactly the same thing but there are times you can't say that, for example at work. If you have to stick to semi-polite speaking there's nothing else as short that carries the same meaning.

If I can't say someone's a douche, I probably won't say anything about them. And that's fine with me. It's probably the way I talk, but I couldn't make 'pedantic' sound natural. If I were reciting from a pre-written speech, that's another matter. But I wouldn't use that word in any daily conversation. Using pedantic is pedantic, and I am not pedantic.

[madbunny]

By the way, it's spelled "sentence."

Yeah yeah, good thing I'm not an english teacher.

[JudgeHolden]

By the way, it's spelled "sentence."

Yeah yeah, good thing I'm not an english teacher.

That does beg the question ... How did you get your job?