Wednesday, November 30, 2016

What plague do you wish on your enemies?

I take attendance by having the students answer a question. As we near the end of the semester, I am asking the truly deep and personality-revealing questions:

What plague do you wish on your enemies?

Traditionalists:
  • darkness
  • bubonic plague
  • bugs (pun intended)
  • boils!!
  • locust swarm
  • black (bubonic) plague
Tradition with a bit of a twist:
  • really cuddly locusts
  • flaming dog rain
  • hairless cats
  • bees?
Dark or too honest:
  • endless Mondays & cumulative finals
  • long Sharples lines
  • my life
  • misery
  • life
  • perspective
  • classes where you learn nothing & never get any grades back
Not really feeling malicious today:
  • teddy bears
  • plague them with love
  • none
  • happy and healthy lives
  • pass
  • N/A
  • no plagues
Earnest and unsortable plagues:
  • having to deal with people like them
  • P=NP nightmares
  • man-eating snowmen
  • piece of hair always stuck in mouth
  • very droppy icicles form around them and often lightly stab them
  • eternally dry eyes
  • your face turns into a plague doctor mask with the beaks and stuff
  • a case of mitosis, aggressive osmosis

I am fond of "piece of hair always stuck in mouth" as a low-level continual irritation which is not directly harmful, but definitely the sort of thing to wish on an enemy. The icicles also earns points for convoluted (preplanned?!) detail. However, the winner must be "eternal ear wax" which is something we all have, but I guess as a plague it would be unusually bountiful?


This post's theme word is vouchsafe (v. tr.) "to grant or give something as if as a favor" or (v. intr.) "to condescend." I vouchsafed to post the homework several days early, to raucous applause.

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