Quote board

I usually write notable quotes on the whiteboard in my office, which over the course of the semester accumulates a border of these snippets of wit and strangeness. This semester we transferred to a remote-everything model in which people still say strange things. So the metaphorical whiteboard has still been accumulating quotes; I copied down all the actual whiteboard quotes before abandoning my office for plague-avoidance reasons.

D: "This head's got a lot of other s*** in it."
L: "It really doesn't."

L: "Where those ninjas at"

A: "Life is an endless series of we trying to entangle things"

Z: "That sentence is surprisingly technically correct."

Z: "It is oftentimes the case that if people in my class don't learn what I'm teaching, they learn a valuable lesson instead."

D: "Dude, our network can't support five baboons!"

M: "I promise I'm not evil, but I do blame you for the development of my evil thinking skill!"

K, on our first Zoom call: "I just think that it's a lot easier to get things done if we're in-person." DUH

Z: "It's not an instructional cooking show. It's a show of me, cooking."

D: "saber-tooth tigers or gtfo"

I: "Damn you, linguistic prescriptivism. I cannot be free."

Y: ""It's never been written down.  It was just kind of something I was told.": every long-standing Swarthmore College policy"

I: "This is the co-recognizer sleight-of-hand where you make the looping go into the co-recognizing part." (I'm charmed by the idea of co-recognizable sleight-of-hand, where it sometimes fails and that's all you care about, not the successes! It's a magican's trick that is broken!)

L: "Sounds like a corner store in Mordor."

Q: "Quarantine is the perfect time to take up falconry."

O: "I had a lot of thoughts, but then I came up with a proof and the thoughts went away."

Q: "I started eating it as a power move"

S1: "Imagine a room that is a perfect cube..."
S2: "I can't imagine anything! I've been inside too long!"

I: "the dangers of emerging from my small, hegemonic area of dominion"

K: “I picture you as a birdlike person with twigs for bones”

Q: "my main photo editor is Microsoft Word... graphic design is a passion"

S: "I think we're a department of pretty reasonable people. Externally."

Q: "Internally, all bets are off."

I: "You don't have to share my feelings about math, but... nothing you've done is wrong. Yet."
L: "That's what we love to hear."
C: "It's been years since I saw this many numbers."

L: "This is so much worse than proving that something IS big O of something."

O: "I'll just be a Piazza fool."

K: "I accept that your answer is unconventionally correct."
I: "That's the best kind! [maniacal laughter]"

Z: "I had mistakenly thought that in our whole system, the section with the most history would have their... act together. [But instead they have] The most trash fire!"

S: "We should not be planning to kill ourselves to this extent."

Z: "I should've been thinking..."
J: "We should get that on a shirt for you."
Z: "Cruel but justified."
Q "... and that's on the back."

I: "I obviously shouldn't be in charge of the world's supply of moon rocks."

It's been a long and strange semester, conducted half in isolation and yet with much more explicit acknowledgments of the Interactions That Matter. Thanks everyone for sticking with it this long, and for chatting with me even though I am badly-surreptitiously taking notes and writing down your quotes as we go.


This post's theme word is kythe (v tr), "to make known; to manifest; to show; to declare." I kythe that the spring 2020 semester is over!