Anne, You Ignorant Slut
Yesterday I was at work, leading an extremely important meeting wherein we were to discuss difficult issues deciding difficult things, with not nearly enough resources to do what we needed to do -- a meeting we have to have every year; it's quite taxing -- and I was setting the tone for the meeting, explaining that we needed to remember that these decisions were going to be difficult, and that we were all approaching the decision making process with charity, remembering that all the other people in the room cared passionately about the issues, and that we were all people of good will, when one of my beloved colleagues interrupted me with, "Anne, you ignorant slut."
Now, this was hilarious.
Well, it was hilarious to me, and to the other person in the room old enough to have grown up hearing Saturday Night Live references, and -- I thought -- helped the tone in the room, on account of introducing a note of comradely levity -- but we could immediately see that if you were a professor who had NOT grown up with Saturday Night Live, and deeply internalized its "Point/Counterpoint" parody, AND hadn't watched the show on Sunday night about the first five years of the show, you might be pretty upset if the senior professors started calling each other names, especially gender-specific names like "slut," especially if you were female and the person saying it were male, and addressing it to another female. So we had to explain the whole damn thing to our junior colleague.
It was lovely, though, up till then -- a perfect Dan Ackroyd/Jane Curtin moment.
But, doncha know, this is just the sort of thing that can get you in trouble.
(I find, by the way, that, due to the wonders of the Internet, you may hear Dan Ackroyd resorting to name-calling, on account of not being able to think up counter arguments, anytime you want to. Over and over.)
Now, this was hilarious.
Well, it was hilarious to me, and to the other person in the room old enough to have grown up hearing Saturday Night Live references, and -- I thought -- helped the tone in the room, on account of introducing a note of comradely levity -- but we could immediately see that if you were a professor who had NOT grown up with Saturday Night Live, and deeply internalized its "Point/Counterpoint" parody, AND hadn't watched the show on Sunday night about the first five years of the show, you might be pretty upset if the senior professors started calling each other names, especially gender-specific names like "slut," especially if you were female and the person saying it were male, and addressing it to another female. So we had to explain the whole damn thing to our junior colleague.
It was lovely, though, up till then -- a perfect Dan Ackroyd/Jane Curtin moment.
But, doncha know, this is just the sort of thing that can get you in trouble.
(I find, by the way, that, due to the wonders of the Internet, you may hear Dan Ackroyd resorting to name-calling, on account of not being able to think up counter arguments, anytime you want to. Over and over.)
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