Whatever happened to......?

[Lateralthinking1]

.................Harry.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ILVVeeIZ3F4&feature=related

[mangerton]

#85 mangerton



Oh, you literary people do set the bar rather high. You must have done it for 'O' level. I did 'Julius Caesar', but not very well, we science types didnt have much time for serious literature, we were too busy with the anatomy of the dogfish. Yuk, the smell of formaldehyde! And those damn cranial nerves are VERY difficult to reveal satisfactorily.

No, I did Henry IV Part 1, and Chaucer's Prologue to the Canterbury tales, and was bored rigid. I scraped a Grade 6 pass in E lit.

I also had to do the dogfish, and I still haven't got rid of the smell of formaldehyde. From memory, the optic nerve was 2, and the trigeminal was 5. Haven't a clue about the rest.

[umslopogaas]

mangerton, I'm most impressed, at this distance I cant even remember how many damn cranial nerves there are in a dogfish, let alone what any of them are called. Not knowledge that I've found much use for during my working life.

Which got me thinking (and is, inter alia, a very tenuous attempt to stay on topic of "Whatever happened to ...?"), whatever happened to the O level curriculum I had to study in the 1960s? I bet today's teenies dont have to cut up frogs, dogfish and rabbits. This was before the explosive growth of modern molecular biology, all that old fashioned anatomy must have gone out the window in favour of DNA.

I always wondered what happened to the back ends of the dogfish front ends that came to the zoology teacher for dissection. I rather suspect they ended up in the fish pie we had for lunch.

Another rather random memory is the dissection I had to do for my university entrance scholarship exam. Instead of a dogfish, the sly b*****ds gave us a skate: which is the same, but flattened out. I spent the entire three hours painstakingly revealing what I thought was a cranial nerve, only to discover five minutes from the end that it was actually a tendon. I didnt get the scholarship.

Apart from not having much use in subsequent years for accurate knowledge of the dogfish's nervous system, another utterly useless body of knowledge was the kings of Israel of the Old Testament. What a ridiculous exercise, which I had to perform in order to get Scripture O level. Yea, Sennacharib begot Jeshoshaphat, who begot Forgottarib, or maybe it was Forgettasplat, even unto the fifth generation. I did once know them ... for about a week leading up to the exam. I scraped through with a five.

Can anyone think of anything even more useless that they were forced to learn at school?

[MrGongGong]

Can anyone think of anything even more useless that they were forced to learn at school?

how to ask for an ice cream in French
what you really need to know (in my experience) is
how to say (I do know now )

My battery is dead can I borrow your jump leads ?
and
Is this socket on the same phase as the main PA ?
and
Where can I buy a roll of Gaffa tape / Sitar string / F>M Xlr lead

etc etc

[mercia]

Can anyone think of anything even more useless that they were forced to learn at school?

the future perfect passive of to love in Latin?

on second thoughts that's not really useless, it's just that I can't remember it

[mangerton]

how to ask for an ice cream in French
what you really need to know (in my experience) is
how to say (I do know now )

My battery is dead can I borrow your jump leads ?
and
Is this socket on the same phase as the main PA ?
and
Where can I buy a roll of Gaffa tape / Sitar string / F>M Xlr lead

etc etc

Indeed. The phase question could easily be a matter of life or death.

I can add two to that list. Waterproof elastoplast, and the thing you put on a knitting needle to count the rows. (Don't ask!)

[teamsaint]

All the stuuf about the Romans and Normans in Britain. All taught as if the invasions and occupations were a great leap forward for the dim witted natives, whereas they were both violent repressive exploitive invading powers.

[mangerton]

the future perfect passive of to love in Latin?

on second thoughts that's not really useless, it's just that I can't remember it

amatus ero, eris, erit

amati erimus, eritis, erunt

I refreshed my rather rusty Latin when my daughter was doing her Higher. She went on to do Hebrew at university, but I know when I'm beat.

[mangerton]

All the stuuf about the Romans and Normans in Britain. All taught as if the invasions and occupations were a great leap forward for the dim witted natives, whereas they were both violent repressive exploitive invading powers.

(Cue Python....)

What about the roads? And the cathedrals?

You're right, though. Learning history by kings and battles and lists of dates is an appalling experience, as Sellar and Yeatman pointed out.

[MrGongGong]

Indeed. The phase question could easily be a matter of life or death.

I can add two to that list. Waterproof elastoplast, and the thing you put on a knitting needle to count the rows. (Don't ask!)

Of course if you get the jump leads translation slightly wrong it comes out as Girls rather than Cable (Filles as opposed to Fils )

[umslopogaas]

I did ponder on choosing Latin as even more useless than Scripture, partly because I was forced to do it and it took three tries, and special extra tuition, before I scraped through the O level. However, I have found two areas where a knowledge of Latin has some value. One is in remembering the Latin names of plants and animals: as a biologist, I've had to remember quite a lot of them, and knowing what the Latin means is helpful to fix them in the memory. Not, however, that being able to recite the future perfect passive of "to love" really comes into it.

At this distance, I cant even remember if that is declining or conjugating.

The other is the fact that a lot of english words have latin roots, and knowing a bit of latin can help with an appreciation of english writing.

With regard to history, I agree that an endless list of dates, kings and battles is pretty mind numbing. An additional problem I recall is that the way I was taught it, we would start every autumn term with 55BC, then progress forwards until we ran out of time at the end of the summer term. By then we had usually got somewhere in the 18th or 19th cent. Next autumn we'd move up a year and start all over again with the Romans in a bit more detail. As a result, I toiled through the Wars of the b****y Roses half a dozen times, but I never got to study the 20th century, which to me was the most relevant bit. However, I have read Shirer's 'The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich' more than once to help fill the gap, and its a great book.

And if history hadnt been taught so badly, we'd never have had Sellar and Yeatman's effort, which is one of the funniest books I've ever seen. As the Observer review said "Quotation is hopeless: every sentence clamours for it."

By the way, can anyone explain the joke in the dedication: "Absit Oman"? My Latin isnt up to it.

[Serial_Apologist]

(X-ray machines in shoe shops)

Yes! I remember them. You climbed up two steps, stood on a platform, and put your feet (encased in your possible new shoes) into a hole at the bottom. You looked down on to a green cathode ray (TV type) screen and you could see your toes. There were two other viewing windows, one for the shop assistant, and one for your mother*. You would then be instructed to "wiggle your toes" to ensure there was enough room in the shoes.

These machines were removed when the dangers of high exposure to X-rays became better understood.

* Not sexist - that's how things were in the fifties.

I overlooked this message yesterday, sorry!

One memory of those shoe shop x-ray machines remains as clear as if it was yesterday. I would have been about six years of age, I guess. As we were waiting our turn to be attended to, another little boy of around my age came over and said to me, "Hey, if you put your hand down where you look at your feet, you get a funny feeling in your hand". Inquisitive, I walked over to the machine, and did as he suggested. The next second I was on the floor, having experienced my very first electric shock. I imagine the voltage would have been very high, since the current seemed to bridge across the space within the viewing chamber, though thankfully I wasn't in any way upset and had no after effects, and as no adult had noticed any disturbance I kept quiet about it. Needless to say, the other little boy was no longer to be seen!

[mangerton]

By the way, can anyone explain the joke in the dedication: "Absit Oman"? My Latin isnt up to it.

Not surprisingly in "1066 and All That", it's a pun.

"Absit omen" means "Let evil be absent". Sir Charles Oman was a (well known at the time) military historian.



(ps: verbs are conjugated; nouns and adjectives are declined.)

[Chris Newman]

( verbs are conjugated; nouns and adjectives are declined.)

Yes, my Latin master used to say that occasionally followed by "Those that give them up completely speak somewhat curtly."

[umslopogaas]

Aha! Thanks mangerton.

I've just been chuckling my way through Asterix The Gaul (eclectic mix of great literature in this house) and "We decline!" is what the Roman legionaries say when Asterix knocks them flat.