“Log on. Linked in. Click on. Click over.
POP UP!”
The course is wildly popular among
the creative types on campus — Gingher
actually has to interview students before
they are admitted to the class. And its popularity is due not only to Gingher’s
charisma but also to the genius of Daphne
Athas ’ 43, a longtime lecturer in the creative writing department and probably the
most interesting person in Chapel Hill.
Athas, a formidable intellect and proud
grammarian, created the class, which she
called “Glossolalia,” in the 1970s. She
stopped teaching full time in 1984, and
the course stopped, too, until Gingher
teamed with Athas to resurrect “
Glossolalia” in 2001.
Since then there have been eight end-of-the-semester “Gram-o-Rama” shows,
and my classmates and I like to think of
our show — “America the Bootyful” —
as the one to top. And why shouldn’t we?
We used “nonsense language” to show
how the youth of America sound to old
people; we sang A Whole New World
entirely in passive voice; we made a pun
about fallopian tubes; we celebrated womanhood using 13 different types of sentences. People laughed, people cried —
about 200 of them, in fact, as the performance venue at Wilson Library was completely packed. Who would have thought?
Standing-room only for a show about …
grammar.
I am sure next fall’s “Gram-o-Rama”
class will be just as brilliant and fun as
ours. Next fall, nearly all of the students
from my class will be “in the real world”
or “outside the bubble” or whatever we
call that big swath of life waiting for us
after May 10. We’ll sit in an office all day
or study for law school exams or try to
make it in Hollywood. And that’s probably
how it should be.
But it will be nice, I think, to remember when, at UNC, we took a class where
we learned about diphthongs and transitive verse, and, yes, how to correctly play a
kazoo.
— Katherine Evans
FRIENDS MAKE A DIFFERENCE
Friends Do
Make a Difference
– a Tremendous
Difference
Frank Borden Hanes
In spring 2008, the John Wesley and Anna Hodgin Hanes Foundation
pledged funding for the University Library’s purchase of its six-millionth
volume– just as the Hanes family and its foundation has done so generously for each previous millionth-volume milestone, beginning in 1960.
The six-millionth “volume” chosen is an important collection of the works
of the poet John Keats. Students and faculty members alike supported this
choice. A doctoral student in the English department wrote:
. . . I remember how in my first year [in college] I heard an older English
major reciting “Ode on a Grecian Urn” to a group of fellow students just for
the pleasure of it. At that moment I said to myself, “That is the kind of person
I want to be.”
And an emeritus professor of history said:
The Hanes benefactions…have marked the transition of UNC’s always good
library into the great repository of learning that it is today.
Thousands of gifts, both large and small, have helped our University Library.
From the undergraduate library worker to the Hanes Foundation itself,
all donors share one belief: that the Library is the foundation for inspired
teaching, learning, and scholarship at Carolina.
Will you join in celebrating the six-millionth volume by making your
gift to the University Library? It’s a great way to show your love for the
Library – and for Carolina.
Mail your gift to:
FRIENDS OF THE LIBRARY
Post Office Box 309
The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
Chapel Hill, NC 27514-0309
Or make a gift online at www.giving.unc.edu/gift
For information on Friends events and Library news, visit our website at www.lib.unc.edu/fol
