I had one college professor who was a bona fide jerkwad. It took me a while to realize that he was a bona fide jerkwad on account of the fact that I was a bona fide kiss-up. But eventually I got a clue.
Perhaps it was the dirty word he called a group of guys who walked in late. I’m not comfortable repeating that word here. I suppose all those years of writing for a newspaper made me frightened to type words I gleefully say aloud to friends, to my cats, and to uninvited Jehovah’s Witnesses. But I’ll tell you that it starts with a “p,” rhymes with “wussies,” and somehow wasn’t a surprising thing to hear in a class led by Professor Jerkwad. In fact, now that I think about it, he used the same word while telling a story of the spin doctors who dreamed up the idea of feminine deodorant spray. You get the idea. It’s also a word that, it seems to me, would look nice spray-painted in large letters on the side of Professor Jerkwad’s car, but any resemblance between this observation and any real crime committed in the late 1980s is purely coincidental.
Rumor had it that Professor Jerkwad had a history of holding classes in bars and using the school’s senior class as harvesting grounds for a long string of wives who never seemed to stay married to him past age twenty-eight. Rumor also had it that a few years later he was canned from his job amid some rather unpleasant allegations, but we journalists can’t succumb to rumor and conjecture when nonspecific innuendo is so much more titillating.
What I can confirm is that Professor Jerkwad was consistently surly. He was visibly bitter at the world in general and the knowledge level of the typical college student in particular. He seemed to like a couple of students in the class, but the rest of us were just living reminders of why his Ivy League degree was being wasted in an intellectual black hole of keg-party-goers, sunbathers, and business majors.
But it wasn’t until the day I went to his office to get the grade on my final project that I realized what a jerkwad he really was. The project was a thirty-page paper that took me half a jillion years to complete and was cranked out over the course of two whole semesters on a portable electric typewriter. It was the biggest project I had ever undertaken, and I was sure it would kill me. Whiting out the typos alone took more effort than I had exerted my entire freshman year.
So imagine my shock when, several weeks after I turned in my paper, I went to Dr. Jerkwad’s office to get my grade and he said, “Paper? What paper? You never gave me your paper.”
At the time, it was hard to fathom that a professor would do that deliberately or maliciously. There must have been some mistake—his, mine—I didn’t see the point of arguing about it.
“I gave it to you weeks ago. I put it in your hand when you were right here in your office. You told me my grade would be available today.”
He shuffled through some papers on his desk.
“No. You never gave me your paper.”
I was rattled, but not defeated.
“Oh, well, okay. I kept a copy. I’ll make you another.”
Like I said, until that moment I was willing to chalk it up some horrible mistake. But the way his face contorted when I said the word “copy” left no doubt in my mind what had happened to my paper. He had “lost” it on purpose.
“Copy? You have a copy?” Alarm was evident in his voice.
Organization has never been my strong suit. For example, my underwear drawer contains underwear, T-shirts, one flip-flop, and a five-pound bag of flour. So I was never the kind of person organized enough to make and file backup copies of school papers. The only reason I had one of this paper was that the original was so loaded with Wite-Out it looked like a relief map of the Himalayas. The photocopies hid the bumpy white splotches.
So, believe me or don’t, just know that I’m convinced that Professor Jerkwad really was such a jerkwad that he’d actually lie about never receiving a student’s paper—just for a pathetic little sense of power. And that is why it’s painful to admit that one thing Professor Jerkwad did earned my gratitude.
Have you already guessed it has something to do with grammar? Good for you! At least one of us hasn’t completely forgotten what we’re doing here. Next time I get so far off track, please shove some smelling salts under my nose.
When I finally got back my graded paper, on which I earned a B, I took note of one of Jerkwad’s many little handwritten corrections on the page. He had circled the word “it’s.” Next to it, he wrote, “it’s = contraction of ‘it’ and ‘is’; its = possessive.”
And that, ladies and gentlemen, is pretty much the sum total of my four years of education in a state school, yours free just for indulging my vengeful little waltz through the past, which I realize probably seemed like about four years.
I was ashamed at the time to have confused “it’s” with “its”—a college senior, I figured, should have known that already. But I’ve since observed that a great many college graduates still don’t get it. It’s a very common mistake. Sometimes it’s clear that such mistakes are just typos. I still flake sometimes and type “it’s” when I mean “its.” After all, every other possessive under the sun takes an apostrophe, so the autopilot function in my brain sometimes forgets that this is an exception. But sometimes you can tell that a writer truly doesn’t understand the rule, especially when she makes the same mistake consistently throughout a document. So remember, unless it’s short for the two words “it” and “is,” or “it” and “has,” do not use an apostrophe. If the word has anything to do with possession—“the dog buried its bone,” “the college fired its most obnoxious faculty member”—this is the exception to the rule that you use an apostrophe to show possession.
Thank you, Professor Jerkwad.