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Monday, May 03, 2004

# Posted 5:20 AM by Patrick Belton  

AND SEMANTIC (NOT SEMITIC) ACCENT ANECDOTE OF THE DAY: This comes via our good friend Josh Cherniss (this is the disciple which testifieth of these things, and wrote these things: and we know that his testimony is true).

Roughly eight years ago, a Yale professor with a strongly Southern accent was giving the final lecture of his class on Faulkner, and advised his students that in studying for the final exam, they should focus particular attention upon "Sarah Sally Dang." Mystified, the students spent the entirety of reading week searching through the entire Faulknerian corpus and critical literature in vain for any mention of Sally Dang. Finally, with no one having encountered any such thing, they arrived at the exam confident that their professor had played an odd, and undoubtedly humourous, joke on them, the punch line of which he was about to reveal.

At precisely which point they received their blue books, and eight tightly spaced pages of questions about As I Lay Dying.
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