End of semester exams taken by frazzled students can produce some gems. For your amusement, I give you the following pronouncement made by one of my students:
"...the social system in India is held to be a process of castration." (Brad Clough)
From a student paper on the BhG last year:
"Krishna wastes no time in turning over the sensitive soldier’s arguments and laying Arjuna in an entirely new, and utterly transcendent, moral framework."
(Herman Tull)
From a student paper on the Taj Mahal earlier this semester:
"The Taj Mahal is the kind of palace where I would like to live--without the tomb, that is."
On the upside, I'm pretty sure the paper wasn't plagiarized. (Doug Berger.)
Students constantly confuse the words ‘ascetic’ and ‘aesthetic’. And yet, nothing beats the malaprop posted here long about how “the Buddha was very athletic.”
I can see it now: fat, smiling Buddha in the starting blocks rips off the hundred yard dash in 1.2 seconds because, well, he’s the Buddha. (Tom Forsthoefel)
Spell-check (without proofreading) can be dangerous:
From an essay: "In Vedic India, fertility rites were very impotent." (important).
And the current all-time winner: From an email for rescheduling a student meeting: "I apologize for any incontinence" (inconvenience).
Apparently some students realize how annoying rescheduling meetings at the last minute can be
(Steven Lindquist)Two undergraduate essay examples on Buddhism:
"The Buddhist monastic community is made up of bikkus and bikinis"
"When Bhikkhus enter the monastic life, they shave their heads off." (Richard King)
