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On the phone, he told me that he was an associate professor of art history.
When I actually met him, he looked like Uncle Duke from Doonesbury, and when I asked him where he taught art history, he said, "I just meant that I have knowledge equivalent to an associate professor of art history." My suspicions rose.
When he told me that the Army had paid him to get an M.A. in art history from Oxford University, I knew that he was full of it. My face must have revealed my opinion, because he just shut up in mid sentence, slapped $5 down on the table, and hurried out of the coffee shop.
A couple of years later, I placed a personals ad, and one of the respondents was a man who claimed that he restored Baroque and Rococco houses in Portland. Yes, it was the same guy.
When I was teaching at one of the colleges in Oregon, the admissions office sent me a prospective student who was interested in studying Japanese. He started telling me that he was from a wealthy New York family, that he "could have went" to any school in the country, and that he had started studying beginning Japanese at "the University of Okinawa" and continued at Yale.
Little did he know that I had spent several years at Yale as a graduate student, or that people who are from wealthy New York families consider it bad form to brag about it, or that anyone who uttered the phrase "could have went" on the Yale campus would have been laughed at for four solid years, or that there is no University of Okinawa (it's called the University of the Ryukyus, and you can't just take classes at a Japanese university as you can here, nor would such such a university teach beginning Japanese).
I decided to play along with him. "What college were in you in?" I asked, referring to Yale's residential colleges. Since students are assigned to a residential college in their admission letter, this was something every Yalie or prospective Yalie knows.
"Yale isn't a college; it's a university," he said. (Well, yes, but the undergraduate division is called "Yale College.")
So I continued, "I meant, what dorm were you in?"
"Piedmont," he said.
"Piedmont," I repeated. "That must be one of the newer ones. Where did they finally build it?" (There is no "Piedmont" building.)
He started to get flustered and made some excuse to leave.
If I had been really wicked, I would have asked him to complete the sentence, "Durfee...."*
*There is an old tradition dating back decades, of freshman on the Old Campus quadrangle leaning out of their windows and yelling at Durfee Hall, the dorm on one of the corners, "Durfee sucks!"
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