o_O? Okay… (Actually I would have sexual encounters of any kind in Jane Austen would be pretty between-the-lines.

I’m clearly not reading the right literature, because I don’t think I’ve got enough sex in mine, haha. Now the amount of sex in rap lyrics right now, on the other hand, is boring me stupid.

Your story about figuring out erotic dialogue in German in the middle of the HBLL made me laugh and brought back some funny and embarrassing mission memories. In my greenie city, at a Homemaking Meeting, I was saying something or other and waving my hands around wildly in a desperate attempt to communicate when–evidently–I made an obscene gesture. All of the women laughed and laughed, but they were too embarrassed to show or tell me what bad thing I’d done with my hands, so I never did figure it out. I just got a lot more nervous about using my hands to communicate after that.

I guess I was just lucky in my literature classes. In a Shakespeare class once, the teacher defused the issue by taking an hour and introducing us to the Bawd of Avon, where she addressed the issue of sex and naughty words in Bill’s work. She got it all over with at once, and the topic didn’t get raised obsessively after that.

Probably the oddest/funniest experience I’ve had occurred in the library at BYU. I was energetically studying part 2 of Faust, but my RM german wasn’t good enough to get the meaning of some of the passages. I had to use my German/English dictionary to follow the dialogue between Faust and Lilith because they were using words I hadn’t learned in the MTC. I remember the moment I finally “got” what was going on. I didn’t know whether to laugh or feel guilty, after all, that was the Harold B. Lee library.

Kaimi, I agree that it’s polite to hold the door open for the barbarians, but the danger in this family is that you’ll let us all out of our cages to roam the Bloggernacle en masse, and we’ll start howling at the moon and scribbling graffiti on all the lovely gates of civilization you’ve so painstakingly erected.

Last semester we were doing Emily Dickinson, and we were reading a relatively ambiguous poem (of which there are many), and I had my students decide what they thought it was about (and then they had to find evidence from the poem to support their claim). A few of the groups decided that the poem was about sex; the rest of the class laughed and looked at me to see what my reaction would be. I let them run with it, and then I had a student who raised her hand and asked if there really could be sex in Emily Dickinson (because of 19th century conventions of womanhood, Dickinson’s reclusive nature, etc). I had them read a poem I hadn’t originally assigned, and they all agreed that there’s sex in Dickinson.

It ended up being a really great lesson about the assumptions we make about literature based on our incomplete knowledge about an author or culture. While with Lysistrata, you’re dealing with assumptions about classical cultures, with Dickinson, you have to deal more with students wanting to interpret everything in her poetry based on what they know about her life.

I see my job here as standing at the gate and holding it open for the barbarians.

It’s only polite, after all. If I were a barbarian, I would certainly want someone holding the gate open for me.

I appreciate your desire to keep the blog family-friendly. I didn’t mean to come across as encouraging otherwise; however, I was struck by what seemed like an incongruity between your innocuous examples and your apparent . . . what’s the word I’m looking for? distress? I’ll just say, the amount of energy you dedicated to the issue. It struck me that if your concern really _was_ all about the (relatively mild) bawdiness in Shakespeare, then you were making a mountain out of a molehill.

However, given your (and Kiskilili’s) elucidations, I’m quite happy to revise that opinion and note that your concern is painted in somewhat broad brush strokes for decorum’s sake.

I have it on good authority that you secretly love least squares regressions (and maximum likelihood even better).

Kaimi,

Thanks for being the first to mention the wonderful Marginal Revolution. Now I can refer to it to my heart’s conent without being blamed for being the first to sully this most holy blog with economics talk.