I remember embarrassingly little from my classes at Brown. Among the flotsam still drifting around in my skull:
• My Nietzsche professor Martha Nussbaum’s astrological sign is Taurus (one of my classmates raised his hand in the middle of a lecture to ask her, “What’s your sign?”)
• The important literary fact that James Joyce had an irrational fear of thunder
• All the distinctive grammatical properties of the word un-fucking-believable
That last one came from my intro to linguistics class. My TA was a grad student with shoulder-length hair and a sneering disdain for schoolmarmish prescriptive grammar (he would say, without irony, that linguistics is the “funnest” social science, using a word that still puts my computer spell-check into code red). But he loved what he called descriptive grammar—the study of how language actually works.
During one session, we were discussing suffixes and prefixes, and how they change the meanings of words. He told us there’s another way to alter a word: the infix. This is when you insert a sound into the middle of a word, not the beginning or end. Arabic and ancient Greek have infixes, as does Khmer, the language of Cambodia. But English? We have but a single infix: fucking. As in in-fucking-credible. Or un-fucking-believable. Ala-fucking-bama. It serves as the ultimate intensifier.
Why do I remember this fact while 99 percent of my Brown education has faded to oblivion? Why does this stay with me while I’ve forgotten all four of Buddha’s Noble Truths, all seven spectral classes of stars, all sixteen Habsburg monarchs?
Obviously, the human brain loves a good curse word. At least mine does, which is why I can recall offensive anatomical terms in most of the Romance languages and yet can’t recall the name of my freshman dorm.
But to make myself feel better, I’m going to argue there’s a greater significance to un-fucking-believable. I’m going to say that those five minutes discussing the fucking infix were the most quintessentially Brunonian five minutes of my education. They encapsulate everything wonderful and progressive—and simultaneously lampoonable—about this great university. I’ve broken it down to three reasons:
1. Intellectual Inquiry Has No Limits
For this essay, I read a book called The History of Brown University, which traced the evolution of Brown’s curriculum. Thank God I was not a graduate of the class of 1850. The curriculum was eye-glazingly narrow, a mix of basic math, Roman writers, and more Roman writers. Livy, Horace, Tacitus, and on and on.
As a 1990 grad, I read my classics. But I was allowed to write papers about the umlaut over the vowels in heavy metal bands and the sexual politics of the Smurfs (why only one female, and why was gender her defining attribute?). And most proudly, I wrote about the ritual of the bong hit in twentieth-century colleges. Naturally, for that one, I had to do some serious participant observation, as all good anthropologists do.
This type of study is easy to mock. E. D. Hirsch Jr. made a career of railing against it. And newspapers have written hundreds of articles about the absurdity of college courses that dissect Keanu Reeves’s oeuvre. Some of the ridicule is probably deserved. While I was at Brown, there was an actual course called “John Locke, the Rape of the Lock and Matlock.”
Even Ira Magaziner, creator of the New Curriculum, talks about the danger of trivializing college, quoting a critic who says it leads to “the belief that all knowledge is so good, that all parts of it are equally good.”
But the general idea is true: All of life is a petri dish. We should bring a critical eye to everything, including bong hits.
2. It Helped Erode My Provincialism
I got the word provincialism from Magaziner’s famous 1968 report on the New Curriculum (which I had never read before I was asked to write for this book). He argued that battling provincialism—our own slender view of the world—is one of the primary goals of a Brown education. It’s a good point. We need to know that other cultures solve problems differently. There’s more to this world than the prefix and suffix.
And just as important, we need to be reminded that our own rituals and rules would make other cultures scratch their heads (or whatever their gesture for confusion might be). What would they make of the Super Bowl halftime show? Or even odder, the Brown marching band?
Of course, this can be taken too far. It can slide into total moral relativism. It can lead naïve college students (like I once was) to believe that all ethical systems are equally valid—a notion that causes fear and loathing from pastors, Republicans, and parents. It can cause dorm room discussions like How can we judge the Taliban? Aren’t they just operating by their own culture’s rules?
At Brown, I became too smitten with moral relativism. In the years since, I’ve gotten older and either wiser or more closed-minded, take your pick. I’m no longer absolutist when it comes to relativism, but some remnants remain.
3. There Are Patterns Among the Chaos
During his lecture, my linguistics teacher explained that the fucking infix cannot be inserted randomly. You can’t say incredi-fucking-ble. You can’t say Al-fucking-abama.
You have to obey the unconscious infix rules. (My attempt to articulate those rules: the fucking must come immediately after the prefix, but if there’s no prefix, then before the first stressed syllable.)
That’s one of education’s most important jobs: shining a light on the mental rules of which we are barely conscious. The infix rule may not have a huge real-world impact. But what about the unconscious bias that attractive people are morally superior? Or our tendency to interpret neutral data as supporting our preconceptions?
Well, that’s my argument. As with many of the essays I wrote at Brown, I’m not sure I’ve totally proved my point. But I had a fanfucking-tastic time trying.