"To be..." Stop! What does it mean to be? We know what it means to be something. To be sad, to be happy, to be tall, to be short, but what does just "to be" mean? How can you just be? The dictionary defines "be" to mean...
"Hello" The usage of the word hello, which contains hell indicates the character actually has sinister intentions which he is hiding through a common greeting. Also, the author is depressed and want to go to hell.@@NaudVanDalen
I am a writer and I disagree, we are incredibly self absorbed and obsess over every single little detail to the point of rewriting scenes several times until the fucking chandelier is described just right. There are so many little things that do actually matter and sometimes the explanations ARE that outrageously stupid.
Game writer here, yes and no, I’m more specifically in world building and what we do is make a lot of things heavily detailed, while leaving some things vague on purpose so players can fill in those details on their own, thus making the world feel more fleshed out than it is, a perfect example would be describing the ins and outs of the capital of a kingdom, it’s government, etc. but saying nothing about the king, sometimes not even his name
@@brakromlord5197 Whenever my mom reads my writing, she expects every detail to be spat out. It's quite annoying as I like the reader to "infer" about certain topics. I ensure that you will get the details that matter and add to the story, but I do like to make the reader infer. (This isn't disrespecting my mother, she's a very sweet person)
I once had an English teacher who analyzed a scene where kids were building sand castles and said “the children here are exploring their God complex by enjoying the pleasure of destruction. That's why kids like to build sand castles, you know?” And as someone who never built sand castles in my life, I don't know what to think of that
Ah yes... The armchair psychologists who took one mandatory class of psychology, read a book on the topic, bumbled their way through the class and now think of themselves as having solved the human condition. Those can be... "Fun".
I built sandcastles just because it was fun and broke them just before leaving because I didn't want to give someone else the satisfaction of doing so.
Ephesians 6:10-18 Finally, my brethren, be strong in the Lord, and in the power of his might. Put on the whole armour of God, that ye may be able to stand against the wiles of the devil. For we wrestle not against flesh and blood, but against principalities, against powers, against the rulers of the darkness of this world, against spiritual wickedness in high places. Wherefore take unto you the whole armour of God, that ye may be able to withstand in the evil day, and having done all, to stand. Stand therefore, having your loins girt about with truth, and having on the breastplate of righteousness; and your feet shod with the preparation of the gospel of peace; above all, taking the shield of faith, wherewith ye shall be able to quench all the fiery darts of the wicked. And take the helmet of salvation, and the sword of the Spirit, which is the word of God: praying always with all prayer and supplication in the Spirit, and watching thereunto with all perseverance and supplication for all saints. The bible is no old book. You have to really let Christ open your eyes; to see the world in shambles. Many people say it's a religion to lock up people in chains, and say it's a rule book.. why? Because people hate hearing the truth, it hurts their flesh, it's hurts their pride, it's exposes on what things have they done..people love this world so much, s*x, money, power, women, supercars.. things of this world. Still trying to find something that can fill that emptiness in your heart. You can't find that in this world.. only in Christ, the bible is no chains, it's a chainbreaker. Breaking your sins into pieces... Repent now, and turn back to the true Lord only.. God bless.😊😊😊
@@Inferdesu then they arent encrypted messages they are just overinterpreted thoughts without meaning when an author writes something they do it with intent and a certain meaning behind it just because you interpret it in a different way doesnt mean you can force that meaning to change, the message is only that what the author intended and if you come to a different conclusion then you failed to understand the meaning the author tried to share
I know someone who literally wrote a poem about how much they liked the color green. Their teacher congratulated them on the subtle undertones of the poem, and how it conveyed a message about nature.
Fun fact: There was a series of questions in the Korean SATs about a poem and in an interview the writer of the poem literally said he got all those questions wrong lol. These kinds of stuff happened so much that now the people who make the questions for the Korean SATs usually only use pieces of literature from writers who are dead.
I love how instead of changing the way they ask questions about literature they just chose to ask awful questions with wrong answers about dead writers’ works like “Well…what are they gonna do, complain about it?”💀
The English teachers would probably tell the poet he's wrong about the reasons he wrote those lines, that there's some hidden meaning that the poet subconsciously injected into his poem without realising it. Like they study English and they think that makes them expert psychologists and detectives.
People when media literacy exists: Authors have a lot of hidden meaning in their text, especially poets. Colors almost always have meaning. Look at character and costume design in movies, for an example.
My English teacher legit analyzed a non fiction book, and even deeply analyzed the wording despite the book being translated from a different language.
Translations have intention and meaning behind them just as worthy of interpretation and analysis as anything else, fiction or non-fiction. Just because it's abnormal doesn't mean it's bad or wrong
@@Just_a_squirrel_64 True, but his analysis was that the wording was simple reflecting the loss of emotion from the author and I can’t help but wonder if that was a transition thing or not. But yes you could be right.
@@darrenm.7980 Thanks for giving me some more details about it! Without the text and without the teacher, I doubt I'd ever be able to argue one way or another about this successfully. But still, I think it's an interesting topic of discussion :)
@@darrenm.7980Good literary translations are supposed to be so exact that you should definitely be able to get the same meaning out of analyzing the wording as you would with the original. Obviously, there’s always the doubt as to how good the translation actually was etc. but chances are that if it was a famous book, the translation was of high quality.
Worst example I’ve experienced is not in an English class but in a Theater class. We were working on lines and we had to write a short summary on what we thought the character’s motives and attitudes were during the scene based on only the lines given and some context clues given by stage direction. I had wrote down that my character was very formal due to calling the other character Mrs. and also using more formal ways of speaking (hello vs hi or hey etc.) I gave it to my teacher and then she proceeded to share it with the class because she said I had gotten it wrong because I didn’t understand that the reason the character said Hello and called the other character Mrs. was because they shared a troubling past and he didn’t forgive her for what happened. Like dawg how am I supposed to get all that from Hello Mrs. Rose. Good Morning John, how’s everything ? Good and you? I swear people just be making crap up
Honestly? What you describe, if that really was it...then- yeah. That's an excellent analysis of what you've seen. Clearly they are formal, and have a connection having known each other enough for names. I mean. Mrs.Rose, formal. They know each other. What else COULD be there? >->
its the contrast between her addressing him by his name while he addresses her with a formality that suggests a disparity in their relationship: she bears more affection and familiarity towards him than he does towards her. maybe from a falling out or a misgiving he has towards her. its pretty much impossible to find that they had a troubled past together just from that dialogue though.
@@davenlim8217 this is adding stuff that isn't there, but making the more formal speaker black you could apply race theory, too. you can do a shocking amount with a little, but you can't do everything lol
Didn't happen to me but in school my friends analyzed a story in their English class and spent a bunch of time talking about the significance of some items that were in the story- thing is, the author actually had connections to the school, so they got in contact to ask him about it and he said the items were just random things because he just needed something there for the overall plot, but could have been anything as far as he was concerned.
There's a short story about a guy who invents a time machine and brings William Shakespeare to the present and enrolls him in a class on Shakespeare. He failed.
@@burnedbrainz it was the same way in my old schools. There were 9 periods in one day, ela, math and science classes all took 2 periods (usually consecutive but sometimes they were broken up for lunch periods) and you had 2 periods for electives
I'm convinced english teachers actively making students hate the subject they otherwise might have been interested in. I HATED these type of over analyze subjects in middle school, and would get consistant low marks. Made me hate reading anything except for percy jackson cause rick is the goat. 3 years later in grade 10-11 after accepting what they're teaching is not related to actual writing I did nano out of interest and produced a pretty detailed 55k word fanfic which made me discover my love for writing as a hobby.
percy Jackson is the best! just yesterday I was arguing that it is far superior reading to philosophy books, because a guy mentioned buying Marcus Aurelius' Meditations... philosophy books are probably really boring! - idk, I've barely read a few pages of that content - and this is me, a student of both Latin and Philosphy, speaking...
As an English major studying to become a teacher, I have to say it is surprising the teacher didn't emphasize the importance of why we never get a specific store mentioned. Its ambiguity presents Johnny holding an identity crisis, in that any store could provide salvation to the drug addict. Through this action does Johnny represent the irrepresentability of drug addicts who are commodified by the stores and its dealers for profit.
Johnny went TO the store Johnny Johnny Yes Papa is a popular children song. The song is about lying to a father. So, a Fatherly Lie, or False Father. To, can be said as two. Two is a number. A number is a counterpart to a letter. A letter can be defined as mail. A mailman delivers mail. A mailman is a messenger. Want to know who's also a messenger? HERMES THE MESSENGER GOD! JOHNNY IS THE ADOPTIVE FATHER OF HERMES! JOHNNY ADOPTED HERMES!
No. Bad. Stop! Also I would recommend being an English teacher in elementary school, because anything after that is redundant in my opinion, and they're just trying to find something to do
I’m an English major and I once had a textbook that had an entire chapter dedicated to something just like this, it was analyzing how the “hero’s journey” arc can be expressed in many ways, and one of the examples they used was a boy going to the store💀 I do feel called out tho cuz I love this type of thing🤣
Now I'll pretend I'm the chosen one on a quest given by the queen (mom) to retrieve legendary artifacts (whatever's on the grocerie list) from a foreign land (grocery store) to bring back to my people (family)
Dude my English teacher had us do this for Into The Wild which is a true story and was like “now what do you think the writer was trying to say when Alex died in a rusted broken down bus in the woods? Perhaps it’s a metaphor for how his life had become broken down and wore over the years” and meanwhile I’m like “no he said that because that’s what actually freakin happened, I don’t think Alex was going for some deep philosophical bullcrap when he kicked the bucket in the woods. Dude just made poor choices and died. The writer didn’t plan crap he’s just retelling what literally happened”
I thought this was ridiculous until my teacher said a woman was a drug addict because her teeth were bad. Theres literally nothing else hinting at something like that.
Can we appreciate how the teacher survived 3 shots from a gun with no pain in his voice truly inspiring 💀 Edit:I don't want to be that guy but... Balls.
You see, the name Jhonny has connotations of friendliness and is usually a name associated with children, so the Poet is clearly telling us that Jhonny is a happy go lucky child, on his way to the store. Furthermore, "went" has been used to demonstrate the urgency of his visit, and "to the store" shows that Jhonny doesn't even know what fucking store he's going to because he's hopped up on 25 Adderall from his father's medicine cabinet. Which is also why he's so goddamn happy.
I love when they overanalyze something and immediately tells a life experience they once had that makes me feel like it’s stalling the class period so I don’t have to do any work but to read. It’s like your grandfather telling the story of how he got a watch while your waiting to leave the retirement home.
This reminds of my ELA teacher giving the entire class a whole Ted Talk on how a guy mowing his lawn reflects his goals and ambitions. 💀💀💀 you can’t make this shit up
My English teacher hated me because I was able to summarize the Eragon books in a ~10 page essay each. She was particularly frustrated because I apparently didn't look five parallel universes deep enough on the Witch Angela's statement about all frogs being toads but not all toads being frogs.
@@twopolaar599 The books are long, but the story is pretty simple. You could probably fit a comprehensive look at the entire inheritance cycle in less than 30 pages (and I'm not gonna be any more specific since I haven't read the new book yet).
But *Angela* doesn't even go that deep into the subject, Like, i would have liked a little more reason for her reasoning, but it was so in the moment and then they had other things to talk about and I'm just wondering why she mentioned the tip of that Iceberg.
The fact that in italy one of the most famous poet of WW1 litteraly just wrote 3-5 word for a poetry and it's the most famous one to overanalize really hit me hard
was it actually that or are you misremembering, there is another story that goes "for sale, baby shoes, never worn" and i'm wondering if you got it confused, i'm just curious
I had this happen to something I wrote: Back in high school, we had to write poems about ourselves with the idea of "write about your life right now". The whole point was the write an interesting poem about your point of view and your accomplishments and yada yada yada. My life at the time was really boring and nothing of interest or importance had happened to me. I didn't play a sport, wasn't in any clubs, nothing. So, being crabby and petty, I wrote just that. My poem was 24 lines of flowery language telling the reader to leave and read someone else's poem. A couple of my fav lines I remember was literally just "I am a background character in someone else's story" and "You can't pull a piece of poetry from a math textbook" (i was in many STEM classes at the time). Teacher loved it so much she shared it with the other classes and commented on how "perfect" it was and how it captured the energy of the original poem we'd read (that our assignment was based off of). TLDR: I wrote 24 lines for a poetry assignment telling my english teacher to bug off and read someone else's poem, and she though it was the best one in the class.
As an English teacher this is something that comes up fairly often. I think going for "the one true interpretation" is a mistake though. Granted, there is such a thing as the author's intent but art is subjective and should be allowed to be made far more enriching than that. I enjoy letting students approach these things from their own perspectives. What makes it so much fun and fascinating to read and analyze various works of art is how we subconsciously bring a little bit of ourselves into our interpretations. In some ways, art becomes less about the artist and more about all of us. I've had students share interpretations I'd never once considered and been absolutely blown away. I especially love helping less substantial interpretations along the way by continuing their train of thought into deeper territories. It's really fun when you get a class that's willing to roll with it. Silent groups less so because I feel like I'm just telling them what they should be thinking. Language is about people and culture, this ain't math class.
I am glad this comment exists. I don't like the whole "The curtains are blue because they are just blue". It's easy to follow the joke and say "lol teacher dumb" but I believe people miss the point. Is not about the intention of the author, is about what can we learn by understanding it.
Wow, that's a lot of words. Too bad I'm not readin em **Duke Nukem riff** But also this "no one true answer" is when I realized I could say literally anything and pass English class
the english teacher's development is insane bro went from english teacher to cryptography teacher to math teacher to health teacher to former teacher in a matter of seconds
English teachers (and the students) should be aware that texts only have significant meaning when it is intentional based on clues like repetition, integration with the theme, coherence, etc. If it's just a random description written by an unknown author in an insignificant position within the text, it most likely wouldn't contain any deep stuff.
DUDE WHY IS THIS SO ACCURATE, LMAOAOAOA- some English teachers are just so annoying. I remember one time we were like over-analyzing about I think like a poem about a girl who thinks names are something that give personality???? LOL? This is so accurate, then we really do need to write about essay fr.
my teacher literally jumpscared me by overreacting to the first sentence of a short story i wrote in the first twenty minutes of class and proceeded to overanalyse it in front of everyone and then turn to me like the joker like she was giving me my que to continue reading it aloud. she did not anticipate my distressed butt saying i needed a minute to recover from what she just did. still embarrassed five years later
Being sick is a natural thing, Grant. You should know this. Please, you mustn't go down this path. You need to understand that being sick is incredibly important, it shows that you have no more motivation to keep creating content. The author clearly intended this. welcome to yappsvile
you actually can infer that since Johnny is an informal name, and since the use of this nickname is natural to the narrator, the story likely takes place in a small town, village, or other type of close-knit community where people generally know each other well enough for calling each other by nicknames like this to feel natural
@@justincase9650 that's too far, johnny being his actual name is even less likely than the narrator being one of the few friends of johnny rather than one of the many more people who aren't his friend
I actually like and love when there is a lot more to something than it seems But also, just like some famous psychologist said "A cigar is sometimes ( in a dream) just a cigar"
This actually cool as hell. Id happily write 3 paragraphs on johnnys life if we did cool letter to number decryption and shit like that in english class
My English period is 80 mins long. Our usual agenda is walking in and doing a warmup based off of some new term we’re learning. Then for the next 60 mins my teacher is non-stop talking about that thing until we have 20 mins left to do a very time-consuming assignment. Just the Honors English 9 expirence
my honors english 9 class consisted of 15 minutes of reading/vocab stuff maybe another activity as well idk and then we just spend the rest of the class reading whatever we book we were assigned and then like 10 minutes for our project 💀
Major kudos to my 7th & 8th Grade teacher for not being like this. She just taught us the literay devices & had us take our own notes. She even let us choose the books we wanted to read. We did have to do anaylsises on our text, but that literally took 5 minutes & just explained how a character was feeling.
I could barely study for an organic chemistry class and get an A. I could stay up all night writing a language arts paper for a month and get a C+. If you write an argumentative essay against the teachers opinion on a subject, you won't get a B no matter the quality.😂
In my English IV class, we had to do an 1000 words assignment every single day. It doesn’t help that Shakespeare is so hard to understand even with the modern English translations. Also doesn’t help that Shakespeare stories are a 6/10 AT BEST
@@IgnisBB7Omg, yes. I can't express how much I agree with this. Used to hate poems, because I thought they were all like Shakespeare. Even when I read some good ones, I had preconceptions about them being bad, so I never enjoyed them. Recently took the time to actually read through some Edgar Allan Poe, setting aside any assumptions I had. His stuff is so amazing. Shakespeare literally ruined poems for me. I hate Shakespeare.
@@kalahatzeAlthough a lot of people don't like him, I personally see the reason why he is still regarded as the greatest writer of all time and is pretty much the only Early Modern author people know about. I mean, does anyone even know who Ben Johnson is?
Unfortunate that there are so many bad English teachers which make us hate what would normally be a great subject if taught well. Though i guess that applies to everything.
So true! I've experienced this with a couple English teachers. Thankfully, my present one doesn't do this. Thanks for your videos 👏 Good Job, you just earned yourself a new subscriber
What is so crazy is, as much as this is comedy, I really have had an English prof exhibit extremely similar behavioral characteristics 😂 The exaggerated sarcasm is a cliche way of inciting critical thinking, which is somehow supposed to eventually lead students to want to be more purposeful with their writing 💀
Because liberty is synonym for freedom and the freedom to choose your own insurance for your home and auto is the reason why Johnny was able to go to the store in the first place.
You guys had it good. You had something to laugh at, my teacher made us write huge essays over tiny things and the kid who wrote properly (me) got Bs when the kid who made spelling and grammatical mistakes and used !!! at the end of every sentence got an A+ on the same exam. Nice.
On the one hand: Overanalyzing media to a laughable degree is simply an occupational hazard when your job is to try and teach children to look for subtle messaging in works of writing. On the other hand: They must realize they're going overboard sometimes.
My English teacher would make us highlight every single time a color was mentioned in The Great Gatsby and then we would have to write about what that color is supposed to represent. Luckily for me, I learned to just make up stuff on the spot and passed.
Holyyy shittt this is actually too real. I got 19/20 in an essay a while ago by absolutely bulshitting my way through the entire thing. Btw, do you live in australia? cause I do and they also made us do The Great Gatsby.
