The Ducklings and Bill Bryson

Hello there!

Today is Christmas in my country (so I suppose to be in the rest of the world, lol), but I'm not really a religious person, so I'm not really celebrating it. The only thing I celebrate today is that Team Focata (my TF2 clan) has a new game server. If you play TF2, add this IP to your favourites: 85.234.148.41:27115

But today I don't want to talk about TF2 (the last two weeks have been exciting enough). Today I'm talking about University.

Exams have started for un poor students of T&I. The first we did was an English reading exam about one of these two books from Bill Bryson: Notes from a Big Country or Notes from a Small Island. I chose the latter.

This is the audio-book's cover, but I read the physical-book version.

I admit that it is quite a funny book. If I had read it for pleasure, without having to do an exam, I would really have enjoy it. But exams have the extraordinary ability of making the best novel into a tedious piece of crap. But, hey, now I'm finished with it, I think I liked it a bit. I recommend it, yes, why not. Anyway, the exam consisted just in writing an essay telling which places described on the book we'd like to visit the most, and a place that we wouldn't like to visit. You must be thinking you could answer it without actually reading the book. Well, I also think that.

Also, we did a linguistics exam. Everybody was terrified about this, I don't understand it. I almost didn't study, and I think I did it quite well. I think. Maybe I've got it all wrong, who knows. The syllabus, a big piece of boring crap. But, as I promised, I have to talk about one of the last lessons.

We were learning something about semantic roles (syntax), but that's not the important thing. The stars of the lesson were the examples. For the first semantic roles, the example was:

"The farmer killed the duckling."

Imagine how the class reacted to this sentence. Well, there was not a general reaction, but I bet everybody started to pay attention. Some people said "oh" and "ah". I would have liked to shout "Murderer!", but I just mumbled something about how sadistic university professors are.

Then, the next example outcame.

"The farmer feeded the duckling."

At this moment I thought "But the dickling didn't eat... because you killed it. Murderer!", and so I told my classmate Christian. I started to think that the professor has some kind of childhood trauma with ducks. The next example went as follows:

"The farmer saw the duckling."

At that point, I had the idea of murdered little ducks inside my mind, so I understood the word "saw" as "cut with a handsaw". "Oh, great", I said, "Now the ducklings had been shot and sawed. What will be next?"

"The farmer loves action movies."

That explains everything. That farmer is a heartless psycho who likes watching Chuck Norris films and killing ducklings with saws. Why the hell isn't he already in prison?

"The farmer gave grain to the ducklings."

Oh, I see. He has an alibi. He was giving grain to the ducklings when the crime occured. Yeah, nice. And then, what happened?

"The farmer gave the ducklings all the corn he could get."

But why? Is he trying to pretend that nothing happened? "The ducks won't eat that amount of corn. BECAUSE THEY ARE DEAD. Assume it. They are gone and you killed them. You are a killer. Now get rid of those duck corpses and leave the crime scene."

"The farmer got out from the barn."

"The farmer will go to the town."

And these were the last examples. After that class, nobody felt the same. We will always remember the poor duckling that was killed by the evil farmer. Requiescat In Pace.

Now, I could talk about other things that happened to me in this first term, but I am quite tired and tomorrow I have to eat out with other people who do celebrate Christmas. Poor folks.

See you! Have a happy consumerist craze disguised as religious holiday!