College students say the darndest things

By Vicki Smith
Associated Press

Anders Henriksson compiled college students' mangled vocabulary and historical howlers in "Non Campus Mentis: World History According to College Students." Associated Press

From thousands of papers and exams, he has plucked these gems:

• During the Dark Ages, it was mostly dark.
• Hitler's instrumentality of terror was the Gespacho.
• Christianity was just another mystery cult until Jesus was born.
• The mother of Jesus was Mary, who was different from other women because of her immaculate contraption.

Mangled vocabulary, inventive spelling and historical blunders, it seems, are the stuff of best sellers. Chuckles — some smug, some sympathetic — have carried "Non Campus Mentis: World History According to College Students" onto The New York Times miscellaneous best-seller list.

"The cause that underlies most of the silly things these kids say is desperation and pressure. I think the reason we laugh is that we relate to it," says Henriksson, chairman of Shepherd College's History Department.

"We have all been in a situation where we haven't prepared when we were supposed to."

His book knits together errors, assumptions and creative fact-making that are shocking and hysterical. Together, the hundreds of entries create a revised history of the world in 26 chapters, from the "Stoned Age" to the "Age of Now."

Names are withheld to protect the ignorant.

Although Henriksson has taught in West Virginia since 1985, his book features students from across North America, with about half the submissions coming from Canada. Each one, he says, is genuine.

"I don't think anyone could make this up," Henriksson says. "You'd have to be Mel Brooks or Woody Allen, and I'm not that clever."

If anything, the history professor is quite serious. His last book was a scholarly work, "The Tsar's Loyal Germans: The Riga German Community, 1855-1905."

His collection began when he was a teaching assistant at the University of Toronto in the late 1970s, grading 500 student papers on Machiavelli. He read one to his wife: "Machiavelli wrote 'The Prince' to get a job with Nixon."

She told him to save it.

The first collection of errors appeared as "College Kids Say the Darndest Things," an essay for The Wilson Quarterly in 1983. Colleagues read it and began sending Henriksson their favorite foul-ups.

He has woven them into textbook form, with lined, notebook-style pages and photo illustrations. There are even maps of the ancient, medieval and modern worlds, with the "Kingdom of the Tarts" and the "Automaton Empire" clearly defined.

"The spelling may be avant-garde and the logic experimental, but no one can fault these young scholars for lack of creativity," Henriksson says.

Some have suggested the compilation is a warning about the state of education, but Henriksson doesn't see it that way.

Sure, he says, students may rely too heavily on spell-check programs. But he doesn't think they're getting dumber. Nor has he noticed any patterns based on age, gender, class or region.

"I think exams and papers written in the 1920s would be just about the same," he says. "Of course, there's an element of students getting into college without managing to absorb some basic things, but it's mainly the human response to, 'Uh oh! I'm not prepared."'

It's a perennial problem: Students who skip class or fail to study are forced to fill the vacuum with something.

"A world history or Western civilization course can be a daunting swirl of unfamiliar ideas, names, places and events for those who start from near ground zero. It's so easy to get them all jumbled," Henriksson writes in a sympathetic postscript.

"Add to this a dose of distracted note-taking, last-minute cramming and limited vocabulary. The result is the kind of bizarre free associations that have Roman senators exchanging togas for tubas, Caesar perishing on the Yikes of March and monotheism originating with a God named Yahoo."

Most students are surprised when their papers are returned "hemorrhaging in red ink," Henriksson says. And a few have been stunned to find their work in print.

"Most of them get a good laugh out of it," he says. "I have not had a student complain.

"On one level, though, who wants to admit, 'I thought there was a Mexican bandleader named Pancho Vidalia.'"