I’m not sure why I just thought of this, but it made me laugh. You probably won’t give a damn, but this blog post is for me, not for you. I remember playing with literary allusion in an English class during my junior year of high school. I reached a little bit, just to feel like I was putting to work some of the reading I was doing outside of class. Well, my teacher noticed and mentioned in passing that he actually researched them to make sure I was using them correctly.
Big mistake. His, not mine.
When I realized that he had to go on this “fact-checking” excursion, I amped up my efforts, looking for the bizarre, remote and difficult to verify. He toiled silently for weeks before finally begging me to stop. I think he figured out what I was doing.
Score one for the student!