A while ago a friend wore this t-shirt and proudly spread his arms for me to examine it, thinking I’d love it since I’m an English teacher and all: 
Ok. Haha. I get it. “Prose before hos,” like “bros before hos” (or, my own personal play on those words, “chicks before dicks”). But alas, I must be a sourpuss on this one.
You probably recognize the guy in the drawing as William Shakespeare. I have unfortunate news for you (or, rather, for the makers of this T-shirt): he was NOT a noted prose writer. He wrote drama and poetry. I am not one of the world’s foremost bard scholars or anything, but the only prose I can think of is a few speeches made by certain characters in certain plays, usually to denote that something was amiss (for example, in King Lear the character of the same name begins speaking in prose more and more as he descends further into madness). And, well, there are probably some preserved letters that he wrote to his wife Anne Hathaway, who lived in another city. But that’s it.
Ok. This is my life. I can’t just laugh at a damn funny t-shirt that is attempting to appeal to educated people. As a reflex, I pick it apart. I can’t hide from the fact that I have a New Yorker reading, brie- eating, Vivaldi-listening, NPR-pledging, art-appreciating culture snob streak in me. I can’t help it, dammit. The shirt is wrong!
It’s a case of what I affectionately call the English Major Curse: most of us can’t go anywhere or see anything without deconstructing it, analyzing it, and evaluating it from thirty-seven different perspectives considering all sorts of “isms”. I have tried to quit the habit, I swear — but it is so ingrained in me. It happens everywhere, all the time. T-shirts, menus, ads, stationary, address labels, street signs, food packaging, assembly instructions… it stops nowhere.
It’s partially a reflex from being obligated to do it for so long in college, and partially an obsessive-compulsive paranoia that we are somehow guardians of all that is worth preserving for future generations. We know about these silly little things that are no longer important to many people, but are the product of so much work and thought and could be very useful to people if they would only take notice of them. It makes my life both rich and interesting, but on the other hand it drives me nuts for fear of sounding uppity. Arrgh!
Filed under: bitching, education, fun, grammar snob, humor, logophile, random, reading
