Pledge Week and Insults

We're more than half way through Pledge Week here at Harding. This is the week when a majority of freshmen engage in a number of silly and time-consuming activities in order to become members of a social club (Harding's equivalent of sororities and fraternities). Most of the faculty dread this week because it means a significant number of our students will be missing class and not doing their homework. I moved a test back a week just because it landed on this week.

Before I left Harding to get my Ph.D., I was a sponsor for Knights, a club I was once a member of when I was a Harding student (here's a really old Knights website I used to maintain). Although I'm no longer a sponsor, I'm still glad to see the club going strong.

Today is the Knights joust, an event where the pledges try to smear shaving cream on each other using a long plastic pole. It sounds pretty ridiculous, but it's a lot of fun. I still remember what a blast it was 15 years ago (yes, I'm old) when I trotted out there in my aluminum foil-covered armor.

In the spirit of Pledge Week, when pledges are routinely subjected to insults, here are a few classics:

1. "Some cause happiness wherever they go; others, whenever they go."
   Oscar Wilde


2. "His mother should have thrown him away and kept the stork."
   Mae West


3. "He loves nature in spite of what it did to him."
   Forrest Tucker


4. "They never open their mouths without subtracting from the sum of human knowledge."
   Thomas Brackett Reed


5. "He is a self-made man and worships his creator."
   John Bright


6. "He has no enemies, but is intensely disliked by his friends."
   Oscar Wilde


7. "A modest little person, with much to be modest about."
   Winston Churchill

Update on 10/26/2007:

It's good to see some of my colleague's kids have joined Knights. I'm hoping Ethan will one day do the same although his mother, a former TNT queen, is trying to indoctrinate him into preferring blue over green.

Oh, if you are trying to access my old Knights website from inside the Harding firewall, you're out of luck. The Internet Archive is being blocked since its an "anonymizing utility". Blah.