Thursday, July 28, 2011

Ridiculous Quote

The nursing administrators in my building must have been to some conference or class which instructed them to put some inspiring quote on their regular email, because they all popped up at once about six months ago. I don't know if it is supposed to be a general strategy, or specific to nurses, to illustrate what a literary and philosophical bunch they are. Most quotes are banal, harmless. Today the following was appended to the bottom of the education and training coordinator's email:
You don't stop laughing because you grow old, you grow old because you stop laughing.
Michael Pritchard
Michael Pritchard, then, is an ass. This is precisely the sort of blithe optimism which masquerades as encouragement but is in fact a sharp departure from reality, which causes much mischief. People who laugh easily like to say things like this, implying that they have made themselves into superior beings with the steady application of folk wisdom.

Ah, yes, it's all just a matter of hazzin' the right attitude.

5 comments:

  1. Sam L.11:44 PM

    Yeah, they're the coooool guys. Just ask, they'll tell you. Smug about it, they are.

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  2. You need to counter this attack with items from despair.com.

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  3. I vaguely remember some discussion on that subject a year or so back. Reconstructing slippery memories suggests that someone had found that people laugh less at jokes as they grow older. The most probable interpretation was that they'd heard them all before.

    I don't think the study addressed the more difficult question of whether situational or spontaneous humor elicits fewer guffaws from the old. (It is easier to read from a joke book in the lab than to set up a funny situation.)

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  4. The foibles of youth are what old people laugh at... and it's often only a gentle smile rather than a guffaw.

    We don't want to make you young folks feel bad.

    wv: plablece - an immature placebo.

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