Thursday, November 27, 2008

One for Femina

Femina's comment in response to my last post has inspired me to relate an incident from my college days.

You can 'thank' her later.

During my time on-campus at uni our college celebrated an anniversary milestone. Each year, we had someone design a college T-shirt, and they made a big thing of it that year (being a special year). A competition was run to find the best design.

I can't say much about it without giving up the anonymity of the college, but one group who were entering the design competition had the idea of going with a classic Ionic pillar with the year and anniversary on the front, then the back had the college mascot (which comes from mythology) and they wanted to have an inscription "Towards a Better Age" in Classical Greek.

That's fine, but there was only one individual in the whole place who had done any Classical Greek. That was me. I did one semester and just passed (due to my gramatical struggle after the powers that be in the Queensland Education system decided that English Grammar was a waste of time for high school students).

I offered to take it in to the lecturers and get them to do it, but of course this was at uni and the competition ended in about 30 mins. So I got out my textbooks and did the best I could do in the time available. I figured that no-one but me would know anyway. I couldn't work out how to render the comparative 'better'. I had trouble finding a word for 'age'.

What the shirts actually said? "Towards a Good Time" Probably more much more representative, but shhh, don't tell anyone.

How glad are you that I decided not to take this secret to my grave?

... Approximately None.

5 comments:

Dee said...

yep, towards a good time is much more appropriate for uni students!

Givinya De Elba said...

Yes, that suited the atmosphere fo the place much better.

Femina said...

Hahaha - that's awesome! And probably entirely appropriate.

Anonymous said...

So nice to know what I was wearing all these years later! I wore that shirt until I had to throw it out because it had rotted through. Dani.

Allegro ma non troppo said...

I bet that's how Chinese/English instructions get printed in television manuals - they're only given 30 minutes to translate it with an English dictionary from 1930.