Mr. Knowitall goes down in a flaming ball of crap
Saturday, March 9, 2002 - 12:56

Yesterday we had our seminar paper presentations. I, as you may recall, have been nervous about this for months. Earlier this week, though, I just kind of stopped worrying about it, because if my paper was going to suck there wasn't much I could do to stop it from sucking.

I presented first, and I was a little nervous at the beginning, but then I wasn't. I did okay. My presentation was entertaining, if nothing else.

A couple other people then presented. They were okay.

Then Mr. Knowitall presented. He sucked ass. He took a very long time. It didn't seem like he'd done all the work he was supposed to do. He didn't understand his topic, because the "big picture" always eludes Mr. Knowitall. He can only see details. The most shocking part was that Mr. Knowitall made up his data.

We are functional freptologists in our department. The most important manifestation of this is that we do not make up our data, especially if we aren't native speakers of the language we're talking about. (Big hint on what 'freptology' is right there.)

Mr. Knowitall was talking about many different languages from around the US, many of which are no longer spoken. He'd looked at dictionaries, and from the information he'd gleaned therein made up some sentences to support his "hypothesis", even though he didn't really have a hypothesis.

It was horrible. The professor was cringing during his talk. He was using some of her descriptions of languages, but he was making conclusions about those languages that she hadn't intended.

So it sucked ass. I was so happy about that. I hope he drops out. I hope he gets a B in the class.

AND during other people's talks he was fucking staring at me! He's disgusting. Did I ever tell you that he tried to put the moves on one of the Japanese students in the department? It freaked her out and now she won't even be in the same room with him. He has a thing for the Japanese girls. He's now trying to get it on with one of the other Japanese girls. He thinks he's a fucking expert on Japanese too, but the native Japanese speakers say that his Japanese is horrible. A lot of times he tries to tell native Japanese speakers that Japanese has certain features and does certain things that the native speakers don't know about, because he's a fucking expert on all the languages of the world.

He knows shit about African languages, Australian languages, Japanese, Chinese, Hungarian, Turkish, French, Austronesian languages, and American languages. But really he doesn't know jack shit.

After the talks, I gave my friends rides home and we talked about Mr. Knowitall and his sucky presentation. He made class miserable last quarter by monopolizing the professor and bringing up completely irrelevant points. This quarter in a different class, we took over. We sat in his special chair right by the professor, and we didn't let him take over the discussions. So based on those victories, combined with his joke of a presentation yesterday, I'm starting to enjoy school a little more. At least I know I'm not the worst student there.