Belmont College - Milady in Brown Yearbook (Nashville, TN)

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infirmary for repairs, they slip little notes of sympathy under the door for her to read when she is able, that read about like this: Dear Champ ' : You did splendidly. We are proud of you. It was funny to see how she had to scheme to beat you, and the funniest thing of all was how close a game you played her in spite of her cheating as she did. She cannot write a reply in her present state of delapidation, but she sends the muse to thank them and to be sure to tell them what royal fun it was. But the Athletic Club does not have a monopoly of fun yet awhile. It comes, in a somewhat modified form — I mean with more fighting and less bloodshed — into the class-rooms. The American literature students read Poe ' s tales, the melancholy story of Hepzibah Pyncheon, the lyrics of Sidney Lanier, the hymns of Father Ryan, the wanderings of Evangeline, the Vision of Sir Launfal, Emer- son ' s Essay on Compensation, and declare American literature is fun. Not long since my neighbors were so hilarious they disturbed study hour. When I tapped on the door and reminded them of the fact, they said: Beg your pardon; we did not know we were noisy; we were only laughing at this absurdly funny Chaucer. To show how very funny Shakespeare is to us, I append some remarks very typical of those one can hear at Belmont: It certainly is funny how King Richard kills everybody he likes to kill and nobody arrests him. We are studying Hamlet now, and it is too funny how he goes on about this ghost. One student, devoting herself to the notes, exclaims: It ' s absurd that they think Hamlet is crazy. I knew all the time he was putting on; and another, laboring over Merchant of Venice, said: It certainly is funny to me what Shylock wants with Antonio ' s flesh: I ' d rather give him the money to keep his flesh. Some half-dozen girls in the History Room the other day for reference work, were called in check for their noise, when they replied: We are tearing down Charlemagne ' s empire and it is so much fun. It is the funniest thing in the world how we do in history. We just build up empires and tear them down. We fairly riddled the Papacy about a month ago. The rhetoric students declare rhetoric huge fun, especially writing poetry. I believe the instructor agrees with them that some of the poetry they write is really funny. The geology class declares that the animals of primeval times were extremely funny, with funny teeth, funny eyes, funny habits, and very, very funny names. It is funny to find the solid earth written all over with funny hieroglyphics in stories of times when everything was funny. The Carboniferous Age certainly was funny coal storage, and it is so funny how nice it all turned out for us. Of course physics is funny with its universal laws and fundamental machines. The acrobatic perform- ances the formula; have to go through with to fit the problems are good enough for a side show.

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Fun HAVE imagined that the limit of confusion would be reached by a foreigner learning to speak English among American students. We have all heard of the Dutchman who, having reached this State, expressed his mental maze in the following lines about the words pro- nounced like raise : Raze means to fift von sumfin up, Den raze it down shupine ; Raze is dot fing der sun puts out Ven he got up to shine. Raze vot you do von leetle sheep, Und raze de brize of vool; Und raze dot vasser to mein leeps, Dot vos so nish und cool. and a similar obscurity in reference to fix and its derivatives: Ve got for all dings fixshtures, Und eberyding ve fix ; So Gretchen fix mein deener Und ped und shocks she fix, Put den der fix ish not der same! I ' m in a drefful fix. How would such a person understand fun and its kinsman funny as we use it at Belmont, I wonder? These words belong naturally and primarily to the Athletic Club. Its members have fun when they bruise each other ' s noses, blacken their eyes and dislocate their joints at basket-ball. When they come in from the golf links with disheveled hair, mottled faces, and halting gaits, they surprise us by telling us they have had a world of fun. After the tennis tournament is over and they have rooted for their champion player till they are hoarse, and vocal gymnastics impossible for a week; when the poor champion is quietly stored awa) ' in the

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Physiology is no exception. The bones, muscles, nerves, sinews, the joints and tissues, when we take them apart to study them, are sufficient material for a family of giant brothers. And yet, funny as it may seem, we have to put them all back into one manikin, and he does not seem overcrowded. Besides this, the chapters on hygiene know more about what we should eat and how it should be cooked and digested than Mrs. Rorer. We learn it, and it is all old style and has to be learned over at the next output of the text. But chemistry is simply the most surpassingly funny thing we study. When we get our experiments arranged with test-tube filled, ring-rest, universal clamp, stop-cock, etc., in place and apply the heat; when distillation, sublimation, condensation, combination and separation all begin, we call out — in spite of the fact that we are first year seniors and have graduated in self-control — - Isn ' t it funny! And when the hullabulloo is over and the test-tubes are empty or shattered, the funniest thing is where it all went and what broke the tubes. And so on through the whole curriculum. Even logic, the sage among the sciences, is funny. It proves to us that every cat, even a cat-o ' -nine-tails, has ten tales ; that a fish-pie is a pigeon ; that we cannot possibly get back to chapel because motion is impos- sible; that in all the cycles of the ages, swift-footed Achilles cannot catch the slow-paced tortoise although he is only a rod behind him. No one can deny these are funny conclusions. We sigh for Psychology just for the fun Of knowing the ego and how it (?) goes on; How funny it is! The heart does not love, Nor does the brain think; The nose does no smelling, Eyes can ' t even wink. My inner machinery goes at its call, The funny old ego just does it all. Those of us who take mathematics find plenty of fun there, too. When we study analytics we wonder why even a versatile French genius could not let well enough alone, and why, when there was already one way, a well-explored beaten track to every result that could be desired, he should have hatched out of his fertile brain another method so mixed up of material from every other branch of mathematics that the whole is a web of funny confusion. The fun of analytics is that when you have worked for some time and covered the board with trick} 7 looking characters you may, by comparing your last line with the answer, find them to be somewhat alike. Trigonometry has to do with six very funny functions. These are so constituted that if they are stood on their heads they are not themselves, they are each the other. Each belongs to a variety of masters, but when a different master has one in tow it is not itself, it is some of the others. To describe their relation to each other I would use the words sextuple identity, and that is a funny contradiction itself.