Believe it or not, design instructor John McVey brought in — and proceeded to rhapsodize about — a piece of asphalt from ongoing construction work on Cabot Street.
His intention — or so he said — was to illustrate a believe-it-or-not situation. But he also gave a mini lecture on the history and cultural dimensions of asphalt (cure for blindness, its role in Egyptian mummification; its low status in civil engineering programs (vis-a-vis reinforced concrete); its essential feminine nature versus "male" structural concrete; its invisibility relative to the vehicles that travel on it; its vulnerability to microbes (who eat it); the wonderfully specific vocabularies used to describe meteorological and other insults to its integrity on the road and elsewhere; its role in the hygiene movements of the late 19th and early 20th centuries; even its poetic potentialities...
all to exemplify believe-it-or-not as a productive construct.
—
—
and, we discussed the fulcrum role of the word "but" in believe-it-or-not constructs...
and, looked at the Google Books archive of Weekly World News, including our instructor's favorite article, "The inventor of the yellow 'yield' road sign has yielded to the Grim Reaper. Paul Rice, 71, died in Oklahoma City, Okla., of complications after heart surgery."
Weekly World News (October 10, 1989), here
believe it or not
No comments:
Post a Comment