Has this happened to you?
You are walking through your Research City, when you come upon a tour group. You stop for a moment to listen in... and hear the tour guide assert something so patently ridiculous that it's all you can do not to shout "Oh my God. What a load of ignorant twaddle!"
This happened to me today. I did manage to restrain myself, but only just barely.
8 comments:
This happens to me all the time in NYC, where I hear tour guides saying all kinds of absurd untrue shitte.
I think any time you have an opportunity to shout the word "twaddle!" aloud, you should jump on it.
Though, I suppose you would need to know Blargish for twaddle.
CPP: I hadn't even considered it happening in my own city. That would be infuriating.
Squadrato: the group was English-speaking, so I think I'm okay. But Blarg City gets tour groups from all over, so I should probably learn the word for "twaddle" in a bunch of languages, just to be certain.
This used to happen all the time when I was a student at InternationallyRenownedUniversity. Cycling past groups and shouting corrections was a popular sport among some of the bolder historians of my acquaintance...
Ugh, yes. The twaddle here that makes me want to fling my arms and holler twaddle is that it is "scientifically proven" that if students cannot do (insert good luck charm here) that the average grades on campus drop a grade. It's the misuse of the term science that makes me batshit crazy...
OMG, yes. All the time. Don't get me started.
But what kills me is that as a kid, I *loved* tour guides, and so did my Mom. We traveled all over the place, and she *always* took the guided tour options. So god only knows how much twaddle I've imbibed myself.
Not the same thing, but along the same vein--I was in a coffee shop in Blarg City last week when we were there, and I heard an American woman first ask for a vanilla latte, and then for a double espresso. I also almost interjected, but decided to leave well enough alone.
(If you need to know Blargish for twaddle, let me know. I think I have an idea. It may not help the people on the tour, but I bet the guide would understand.)
Actually, I meant to reply to this post ages ago, when I first saw it, and forgot, because a few days before I'd heard an Oxford tour guide telling his audience absolute, sensationalist crap about the Oxford entrance interview. It's because of this that people get the idea that we care about the type of handshake people offer and what colour their tie is and whether they use the right cutlery at lunch and crap like that and none of this is true yet it will put people off applying. That misinformation has an actual harmful effect. And yet I was not, that day, quite strong enough of mind to wade in there and call him out. I felt bad about that for some days afterwards.
Post a Comment