Sound Bites In Cape Town

In spite of the beautiful sight of clouds embracing the flat top of Table Mountain (called tablecloth) that completes my morning walk to class, I face an inevitable horror. It is the horror of sitting poker-faced for 3 hours as my professor par excellence, world-renowned anthropologist and endearing mentor, John Comaroff delivers his grand lectures with all this anthropological jargon and sophisticated words.

Sometimes much too grand and sophisticated for my incapacitated brain (due to the euphoria of being in glorious, glorious South Africa).

For a taste of what I struggle to comprehend everyday...

In the exegetical discourse of African modernity, we problematize the grammar of post-capitalist Africanity through the normativity of limitations and the internal dynamism of a deconstructionist debate in a totality paradigm with a Hegelian perspective to modernity and positivist knowledge.

(Alina Epstein, on her imitation of John Comaroff, circa January 2010)

The fact is, of course, the verbose sentence means nothing. Completely nothing. (Hehe, not to mention we discovered that some words in our readings were conveniently made up)

But the truism is this: the higher the ratio of syllables to a person's sentence, the smarter he sounds. Damnation!

So let us create words like damnation and pray tell we sound much smarter than we really are, because in life, sounding smart gets you around:(|)

On a much lighter note, you can sound stupid and make many persons happy.

"Beautiful.. Show me your panties"

(Overheard in Cape Town, circa January - February 2010)

Clearly the best pick up line. Ever.