Back To The Ureftu

It's that time of year here at the Captain's Table when I find myself receiving floods of email from young minds seeking my counsel on what path to take with their educational futures. Really - if you could see the stacks of inquisitive emails, postcards and ham-fisted 2nd year philosophy theses that are stacked across my desk you'd be amazed! Most of these are easy to dispense with as I immediately trash the ones that start with "Deer Captun", are rife with split infinitives, over usage of the word "like" or that employ a hand-writing so spidery and discursive that they can only have been penned by a florid psychotic or drug addict - and we all know that THEY belong in community college.

That usually winnows the pile down to a half-dozen or so and, this year at least, one perfect and sparely-written gem rose to the surface and I felt compelled to respond:

----------------------------------------------

In a message dated 4/8/05 12:16:38 AM, _______@hotmail.com writes:

Easy question: Yale or Princeton?

In a message dated 4/8/05 9:37:38 AM you replied to _______@hotmail.com:

Dear V,

Easy for some, maybe - but remember V that I am a high-school dropout and autodidact. So higher education - particularly the Ivy-garlanded kind - is a mystery to me. Are you thinking of Grad school?

I guess if I had to choose I'd say Yale - but that's only based on its value on a scrabble board - which is the same as Princeton's but uses much fewer letters (thank god for "y"). That sort of terse efficiency suggests a rigorous program with no post-modern nonsense - probably very Paper Chase with professors making speeches along the lines of a Houseman-esque: "You come in he-ah with a skull full of MUSH! But you will leave thinking like a (insert future networked job here)."

If you do choose Yale read "The Secret History" again - in whose shamelessly page-turning, guilty-pleasure narrative you'll find a cautionary tale about what can happen when all that terseness goes off the rails.

Princeton on the other hand is a more lissome creature; discursive and prone to flouncing into the room like a circus horse and making impassioned pronouncements on the nature of Love or Art. This fact evidenced again by the Scrabble rule of university which notes that Princeton - creative, albeit misguided, creature that she is - yields such words as cointer, entopic, intoner, nepotic, noticer, pointer, pontine, porcine, protein, ternion, tropine and entropic. But never a full use of all the tiles on her rack.

Thus, she is broken, probably myopic and, in the end, only partly realized... entropic indeed.

So that's my two cents worth - Yale for the rigour (that's canadian rigour, with a "U", by the way - 4 extra points), or Princeton for the more earthy, artistic experience - though one wonders if you didn't get enough of that 'crumpets-and-poetry-in-a-punt' stuff when you went to Vassar.

Let me know what you decide. Til then I'll be counting the tiles.

The Captain

----------------------------------------------

Editorially I would only add that Yale's motto of "Lux et Veritas" (Light and Truth) doesn't do nearly so well on the Scrabble board as Princeton's pithy "Dei Sub Numine Viget" (Under God's Power She Flourishes). Although, I believe, Latin is still not in common usage in official Scrabble competition, the cautious student may want to consider this fact when declaring a Major.

Comments

[FLUTE]

Great post !!!

And what a vocabulary you have for a self-proclaimed "high-school drop-out." It just goes to show ya' (or as my father would say, it "shows to go ya" --- however that is neither here nor there) how innate curiosity, natural talent, environmental factors (family, friends)and the desire to COMMUNICATE with razor-like precision will always trump the longitude and latitude of your place of "higher education."

Being a word person, I love it. Porcine. Cool word, I have to find a place to use it today.

One quibble however, handwriting is not always a reliable indicator of future success or the type of mental illness one suffers or the amount of illicit drugs one has consumed. (Hmmm, well, let me re-think that one ... after carefully looking at my own scrawl in light of my mental state and the substances I have consumed over the years ...).

Anyway, scrabble on my friend ...

Flutist