The Sprig and The Hoarfrost

Dear Wife and I were chatting one day not so long ago, (we like to chat), and I began to speculate on possible titles for my pre-natal Anatomy Book (you'll be the first to know); and then we began proposing titles for her (well along its way) dissertation, and thus descended into the silliness that is the typical "grabber" title you get in Academia.

Titles for Academia, titles from Academia.

So I began making some up.

Some of the better ones:

Fealty and Friendship: Courtly Gossip in the Age of the Enlightenment

Fecund Fires: Apocalypse Imagery and The Burning of Moscow, A Survey of Russian Genre Painting, 1832-1850

Rebuilding the Rain: The Forestry of Perserving Taboo Architecture in Pol Pot's Cambodia

Rude Health: X Chromosone Transmission Among the Puritains of 18th Century New Bedford

From Vomitorium to Vestibule: Transforming the Secular into the Sacred; A Redefinition of Roman Public Building, C.E 238-496

These are all completely bogus, yet they sound so right. You can see the pattern emerge; the colonate sentences, with their initial "Hook" to open you up for the assault of pompous, prissy exactitude.

How about a couple more?

The Sprig and the Hoarfrost: Agricultural Imagery in 20th Century Insurance Brochures

Completeing the Circuit/Making the Switch: Electrical Design in The Weimar Republic

Rind, Casing, Meat and Gristle: The Inception of the American Weiner Industry

Tender Tenaments: The Rise of the Babysitter Squatter in the Slums of N.Y., 1865-1965

I can't decide on my favorite for this one:
Tantrum At A Tea Party:
either T.S. Eliot and Aldous Huxley at Emma Thornbush-Thruxhall's, The Confrontation That Defined a Generation
or
Ritual Disruptions of the Victorian Garden Party in the Time of Byron

I'm crazy you say? Well, I resuscitated these invented titles and wrote this entry because, while doing a search on Google, I stumbled on the thesis title below (without even looking for such nonsense!), and was accordingly agog, realizing writing is a hell that you build for yourself, one dependent clause at a time.

The thesis was titled:

"My Favorite Mask is Myself:" Presentation, Illusion and the Performativity of Identity In Wellesian Performance

That's a real one! "Performativity of Identity In Wellesian Performance"!! Someone got an advanced degree for that.

Jey-sus, I can't even make that up.