"We were young and trying to advance our careers, so we just started making things up: Homer, Aristotle, Socrates, Hippocrates, the lever and fulcrum, rhetoric, ethics, all the different kinds of columns - everything. Way more stuff than any one civilization could have come up with, obviously," he added.
Obviously.
"One thing led to another and before you knew it, we were coming up with everything from the golden ratio to the Iliad. That was a bitch to write, by the way..."
***************
And this just in: kids can understand irony.
No kidding, Sherlock, I could have told you this. Case in point:
My house, dinner. Dominic is eating brussell sprouts and exclaiming over liking them. Richard says "Funny you should like them. I don't. Maybe I'll call you BS - as in brussell sprout."
I object, on the grounds that the first thing people think of when they hear the initials BS won't be brussell sprouts. I frown at Richard. Richard smirks, pleased with the hilarity of this double entendre. Dominic looks shocked. Then annoyed. FDPG and Max howl with laughter. Dominic glowers at this new and unwelcome intrusion on his sense of personal dignity.
"Would you like me to call you F?" he asks archly.
We gape as one at Dominic, then burst out laughing. He's grasped the essentials of the ironic insult and turned them back on Richard with a certain amount of oddly mature sarcasm. Then again, he's always been like that: a very adult wit for such a very small body.
2 comments:
I love this line: "We picked Greece because we figured nobody would ever go there to check it out," Nguyen-Whiteman said. "Have you ever seen the place? It's a dump. It's like an abandoned gravel pit infested with cats."
Sounds great to me.
And this one: She added, "Inevitably, though, people started looking around for some of this 'ancient' stuff, and next thing I know I'm stuck in Athens all summer building a g*dd*mn Parthenon just to cover our tracks."
I nearly choked on my Rice Krispies.
My son (age 6) is a budding jokester and sarcasm is his speciality (Hmm, I wonder where he gets is from?) I imagine irony is just around the corner.
Wasn't that the funniest article? I LOVED that Parthenon line, too. What a laugh.
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