Nerding It Up

Here's an example of the nerdy humor in my Shakespeare class-- and to get an idea of the kind of kids in this class, imagine this: once, during a discussion of Taming of the Shrew, I mentioned Douglas Hofstadter's Godel, Escher, and Bach, and two students were so excited by this reference to their favorite author of meta-philosophical conundrums that they actually high-fived each other; and so we are discussing Act IV of The Winter's Tale and the incorrigible rogue Autolycus is describing some of the ballads he can sing, and they are uniformly bizarre, but our favorite was the sad tale of a singing fish: previously, when the aforementioned fish was a lovely maid, she would not "exchange flesh" with the one who loved her and so as punishment for her prudery she was "turned into a cold fish"-- so I said the title of the ballad should be "To His Coy Fish-tress" but then a student thought of an even better pun: "To his Koi Mistress" . . . and perhaps you had to be there . . . or perhaps you had to be there, and be a real nerd.