Influence

The other day in class we were discussing a passage in which a contemporary scholar's last name happened to be used as an adjective. We talk a surprising amount about social justice in my class, a topic that is in the background of much of the theoretical reading that we're doing, but becomes foregrounded by my bleeding-heart do-goody students (since I'm of the same ilk, this is just fine by me). Anyway, I was reading the sentence with the last name as adjective aloud, and I paused to say something wistful about how you'd know you'd had an impact on the world not only if you engaged in work on behalf of social justice and tried to make it a better place, but also if your name could be used as an adjective. "My last name is really not well-suited to adjectivalization," I said a bit sadly, "but how nice it would be to have your name out there modifying stuff, and feel like there was some kind of positive characterization associated with you and your work?"

Later that evening, one of my students e-mailed me her abstracts and critical questions for the week's readings -- they usually turn them in at the end of class, but she had read one of next week's articles by mistake and needed some extra time do read the assigned article. I expected her to possibly incorporate insights from the class discussion into her summary of the hyper-theoretical article, but what I did not expect when reading over everyone's abstracts this morning was this, quite sly, sentence: "His discussion of the biblical creation story (94) is, in a word, [Mylastname]ian -- employing the elegant use of ironic storytelling to make a larger analytic point."

Oh, I am laughing again as I type this up. Sure, there is a tiny element of grad student sucky-uppiness in this, but really, it's much more a phatic expression of enjoyment of the class and my teaching, and as such makes me really happy (and how much sucking up do students do to people who are completely adjunct to their department?). Plus, how often in this world do we express absurd wishes and have them granted almost immediately? I'll take what I can get.