English Majors

Remember meeting people in college? You’d always ask/get asked the Big Three: 1. Where are you from? 2. What dorm are you in? 3. What’s your major? Nothing said more about you – for better or worse – than the answer to #3. I spent four years proudly (or, sometimes, not so proudly) defining myself as an English major.

Since graduation, I’ve had a much harder time defending my grammatical nit-picking or establishing myself as the authority on literary topics, mainly because “English PhD candidate” lacks the same ring. For this reason, I am especially decided to bring you this article, dedicated to all past, present, and future English majors (and heck, the English minors too!) out there. So without further ado, here are 10 things that only English majors will understand.

1. A book a week is small potatoes.

2. Logging into JSTOR or ProjectMuse makes you feel a little like Nicolas Cage in National Treasure.

3. Feeling like you want to smack the next person who asks if you’re going to be a teacher, even if you are going to be a teacher.

4. Having a cooler pencil than anyone else in class is really important.

5. Feeling the need to valiantly defend your choice of major when a discussion of post-graduation starting salary arises.

6. Seeing a grammar mistake or a butchered spelling is physically, mentally, emotionally, and spiritually painful. Bonus agony awarded for incorrect usage of their, there, they’re, your, or you’re.

7. Reading so much Shakespeare (or Austen, or Dickens) that you start incorporating their vocabulary into your lexicon.

8. Being asked to borrow a pencil is like being asked to borrow a child – and you’d better get it back without teeth marks!

9. Tossing out a semicolon to remind the person grading your paper that you’re awesome.

10. Having the OWL at Purdue bookmarked in every browser on your computer, even though you can cite MLA-style in your sleep.

Got any more things that only an English major would understand? Post them in the comments!

1 reply
  1. Elle Marie
    Elle Marie says:

    As a former English major myself (I moved to history as a graduate student), I absolutely love this! Number two made me realize just how much I miss having instant JSTOR access, and number six really hit home as I work in a corporate environment. I’d add a sub-item to it–realizing your own grammatical or spelling errors in sent email correspondence. The longer I’m in the corporate world, the more often it seems to happen, and I cringe every time it happens!

    Reply

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