Veteran actor’s moniker confuses college grammar lesson
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The Oscar-nominated actor best known for his roles in The Larry Sanders Show, Men in Black, Freddie Got Fingered and Dodgeball can now add baffling a Washington State University’s English 100 class to his list of personal accomplishments.
At the request of Associate Professor Gordon on Monday, the class broke into groups of five and deconstructed grammar mistakes in popular culture. After their eyes grazed the list, which included the Pink Floyd lyrics “We don’t need no education” and Treasure of the Sierra Madre quote “We don’t need no stinking badges,” students identified how the sentences translated literally and how to correct them.
After flying through the double negatives, however, the educator threw the students a curve ball with Rip Torn.
“The name not only boldly uses a verb – kind of like The Police frontman Sting, who I heard gave that name to himself – but also contains an adjective that means the same thing, and in different tenses,” one student said.
Gordon said she decided to use the actor’s name after reading The Department of Redundancy Department’s blog, which speculated about the actor’s epitaph, which could read RIP Rip Torn.
The second-year professor said she chose to use the actor’s name as a test at the exact moment when her students thought they understood something about grammar. And as if that wasn’t enough to humble their feeble comprehension of English, Gordon later added that the actor was formerly married to Geraldine Page. Had she taken his last name, she would come to be known as Geraldine Torn-Page.
Fearing her students’ heads may begin to explode, Gordon said she changed the subject to “subjunctives or something. I don’t really remember; I panicked.”
now i heard this guy was a jew in his early stages of life but now obviously he is not one. what happend you asked? i’ll tell you after going threw a really hard childhood as a jew he realized why should i have religion and why cant i be a God. now in this day he’s still trying to be a God but it cant be easy what think would be best for him is if he would just calm down and relax and that he cant be whatever he wants to be and that he cant do whatever he wants to do. and now with doing all this he can now rest in peace as a senior jew at local churchs.