History of Science OnlineCourse Info: HSCI 3013 - section 995 - Fall 2008 |
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How NOT to write an essay!
Richard Lederer pasted together the following “history” of the world from certifiably genuine student bloopers collected by teachers throughout the United States. Read carefully, and you will learn a lot about semantic ambiguity and the time period we will be studying in this course.
“The inhabitants of ancient Egypt were called mummies. They lived in the Sarah Dessert and traveled by Camelot. The climate of the Sarah is such that the inhabitants have to live elsewhere, so certain areas of the desert are cultivated by irritation. The Egyptians built the Pyramids in the shape of a huge triangular cube....
“Without the Greeks we wouldn’t have history. The Greeks invented three kinds of columns—Corinthian, Doric, and Ironic. They also had myths. A myth is a female moth. One myth says that the mother of Achilles dipped him in the River Stynx until he became intolerable. Achilles appears in the Iliad, by Homer. Homer also wrote The Oddity, in which Penelope was the last hardship that Ulysses endured on his journey. Actually, Homer was not written by Homer but by another man of that name. Socrates was a famous Greek teacher who went around giving people advice. They killed him. In the Olympic Games, Greeks ran races, jumped, hurled the biscuits, and threw the java. The reward to the victor was a coral wreath. The government of Athens was democratic because people took the law into their own hands. There were no wars in Greece, as the mountains were so high that they couldn’t climb over to see what their neighbors were doing....
“Eventually, the Ramons conquered the Geeks. History calls people Romans because they never stayed in one place for very long. At Roman banquets, the guests wore garlics in their hair. Julius Caesar extinguished himself on the battlefields of Gaul. Nero was a cruel tyranny who would torture his poor subjects by playing the fiddle to them.
“Then came the Middle Ages. King Arthur lived in the Age of Shivery, and victims of the Black Death grew boobs on their necks. Finally, Magna Carta provided that no man should be hanged twice for the same offense. Another tale tells of William Tell, who shot an arrow through an apple while standing on his son’s head. In midevil times most of the people were alliterate.
“The Renaissance was an age in which more individuals felt the value of their human being. Martin Luther was nailed to the church door at Wittenberg for selling papal indulgences. He died a horrible death, being excommunicated by a bull. It was the painter Donatello’s interest in the female nude that made him the father of the Renaissance. It was an age of great inventions and discoveries. Gutenberg invented the Bible. Sir Walter Raleigh is a historical figure because he invented cigarettes. Another important invention was the circulation of the blood. Sir Francis Drake circumcised the world with a 100-foot clipper. The greatest writer of the Renaissance was William Shakespear. Shakespear never made much money and is famous only because of his plays. Writing at the same time as Shakespear was Miguel Cervantes. He wrote Donkey Hote. The next great author was John Milton. Milton wrote Paradise Lost. Then his wife died and he wrote Paradise Regained. During the Renaissance America began. Christopher Columbus was a great navigator who discovered America while cursing about the Atlantic....
“Meanwhile in Europe, the enlightenment was a reasonable time. Voltare invented electricity and also wrote a book called Candy. Gravity was invented by Isaac Walton. It is chiefly noticeable in the Autumn, when the apples are falling off the trees....”
"A word to the wise ain't necessary; it's the stupid ones who need the advice." Bill Cosby
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HSCI 3013. History
of Science to 17th century
Many thanks to Mythology
and Folklore and other online courses developed by Laura Gibbs.
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