Comments on: Annals of Academic Putdowns

By: Aaron Berg

Aaron Berg — Sat, 23 Apr 2005 21:51:59 +0000

Decades ago, a furious fellow history student showed me an essay he’d just received back from his professor. On it the professor had written: “This is the worst essay I have ever marked!”. That was not all, however. The comment was followed by another apparently added later: “I apologise. I have just read one worse!”.

By: bad Jim

bad Jim — Sat, 23 Apr 2005 06:39:08 +0000

How was your weekend in the country?

Well, if the soup had been as warm as the wine, and the wine had been as old as the chicken, and if the chicken had been as tender as the maid, and if the maid had been as willing as the duchess, it would have been perfect.

By: John

John — Fri, 22 Apr 2005 17:55:09 +0000

From the “Don’t List” (as in don’t bother to read these) in a book on forecasting:

“I could not understand this paper. Fortunately, this journal is hard to locate.”

By: Karl Barbir

Karl Barbir — Fri, 22 Apr 2005 17:05:26 +0000

One more contribution:

Definition of faculty: a herd of independent minds!

By: Ayjay

Ayjay — Fri, 22 Apr 2005 16:16:57 +0000

All—repeat: ALL —of the best academic putdowns are by A. E. Housman. As when he said of a particular textual critic that he was like a donkey poised equidistant between two bales of hay who believed that if one of the bales were removed he would cease to be a donkey.

Or his denunciation of “an Englishman demonstrating the unity of Homer by sneers at ‘Teutonic professors,’ who are supposed by his audience to have goggle eyes behind large spectacles, and ragged moustaches saturated in lager beer, and consequently to be incapable of forming literary judgments.”

Or this: “I have in my mind a paper by a well-known scholar on a certain Latin writer, half of which was concerned with grammar and half with criticism. The grammatical part was excellent; it showed wide reading and accurate observation, and contributed matter which was both new and valuable. In the textual part the author was like nothing so much as an ill-bred child interrupting the conversation of grown men. If it was possible to mistake the question at issue, he mistook it. If an opponent’s arguments were contained in some book which was not at hand, he did not try to find the book, but he tried to guess the arguments; and he never succeeded. If the book was at hand, and he had read the arguments, he did not understand them; and represented his opponents as saying the opposite of what they had said.”

These all from published academic articles or lectures.

By: bob

bob — Fri, 22 Apr 2005 14:29:28 +0000

Robert: The famous Math Reviews quotation is by Clifford Truesdell, who wrote (in a review of a 1950 paper titled ‘Equations of finite vibratory motions in isotropic elastic media’)
“This paper, whose intent is stated in its title, gives wrong solutions to trivial problems. The basic error, however, is not new: if the reviewer has correctly understood the author’s undefined notations and misprints, the stress-strain relations used are those once proposed by St.-Venant [J. Math. Pures Appl. (2) 8, 257—295, 353—430 (1863); see $§$2], whose incorrect confusion of coordinates in the deformed and undeformed states of the body was pointed out by Brill and Boussinesq [cf. St. Venant, ibid. (2) 16, 275—307 (1871), see $§$7]. The falsity of the author’s results is obvious, since for the speed of propagation of finite waves in isotropic bodies he obtains expressions which are not scalars unless the displacement gradients are infinitesimal.”

By: Steve LaBonne

Steve LaBonne — Fri, 22 Apr 2005 12:30:59 +0000

Also Rossini on Wagner: “Il y a de jolis moments, mais de mauvais quarts d’heures!”

By: Jonathan Dresner

Jonathan Dresner — Fri, 22 Apr 2005 10:33:38 +0000

Mark Twain on Wagner: “His music is better than it sounds.”

By: eb

eb — Fri, 22 Apr 2005 08:11:27 +0000

“”Part of his unahappiness rises from ignorance; the rest, from error.”

By: Nabakov

Nabakov — Fri, 22 Apr 2005 07:05:11 +0000

“Thank for your latest book. I shall waste no time in reading it.”

By: blueshoe

blueshoe — Fri, 22 Apr 2005 04:38:50 +0000

Larkin, I think, of another poet: “He’s so good I daren’t read him.”

By: Jake

Jake — Thu, 21 Apr 2005 22:15:49 +0000

Taking a page from novalis, I remember seeing a blurb by A.A. Attanasio on the back of The Chosen, a fantasy novel by Ricardo Pinto:

“Ricardo Pinto’s The Chosen strikes the reader with great force.”

By: Cryptic Ned

Cryptic Ned — Thu, 21 Apr 2005 21:59:05 +0000

Your majesty is like a stream of bat’s p!ss.

By: novalis

novalis — Thu, 21 Apr 2005 19:50:13 +0000

See the reviews of Atlanta Nights for many more. Examples:
“ATLANTA NIGHTS is sure to please the reader who enjoys this sort of thing.” — Raymond E. Feist

“Maybe once in a lifetime, there comes a book with such extraordinary characters, thrilling plot twists, and uncanny insight, that it comes to embody its time. ATLANTA NIGHTS is a book.” — Adam-Troy Castro

By: Jake

Jake — Thu, 21 Apr 2005 19:45:00 +0000

I heard of a professor writing on a grad student’s paper: You have reinvented the sled.

Asked to clarify, the prof said: It’s much like reinventing the wheel, but less useful.