there's a sort of interesting piece in the washpost this morning about how there ain't enough boys in college or something. sometimes, though, you just wish that stuff was written by writers. i leave you to ponder this crystalline formulation:
Now, however, the boys who don't fit the classrooms are glaringly clear.
first of all, avoid completely autonomic adjective phrases like "glaringly clear." second, um, whatever "glaringly clear" might mean, it would be somewhat surprising to find a boy who displayed the quality picked out by the phrase. perhaps a glaringly clear boy is translucent, but reflective, like silvered glass. further amazement is induced when it turns out that glaringly clear boys don't fit the classroom, like, i don't know, a roll of wallpaper. one thing that's a continual revelation: people who write about education are uneducable. probably the post's editor just gave up somewhere in the course of the piece. on the other hand, perhaps the whole tone of incoherent cliche is as much as a man, educated in america, is capable of achieving; the piece then becomes profound, an enactment of its own critique. possibly, however, rather than a first-grader with ADD, we're in the hands of a psychology professor, absolutely the worst-case scenario.
