Revisionist Student History
by
Howard Richler
September marks back to school season and as kids no longer study history I thought I'd warn teachers about some of the written pronouncements they might have to endure in the months to come. To facilitate the flow of information, I have arranged the following recorded student bloopers in chronological order.
1)No human beings were found during the Ice Age because it was the pre-stork era.
2)In Ancient Egypt people wrote in hydraulics.
3)The Great Wall of China was built to keep out the Mongrels.
4)Cleopatra died when an ass bit her.
5)The Ancient Greeks invented three kinds of columns- corinthian, ironic, and dorc and built the Apocalypse.
6)The Acropolis of Athens contained the Parthian, the Erectum, and the Esophagus, a temple to the war-god.
7)Homer wrote The Iliad and the Oddity.
8)Socrates died from an overdose of wedlock.
9)Oedipus Complex was a famous queen of Egypt.
10)Oedipus killed his father and married his real mother. That’s called incense.
11)The Romans prosecuted the early Christians because they disapproved of
gladiola fights and would not burn insects before the statue of the emperor.
12)Roman women built fires in their brassieres.
13)The Crusades was trips to drive the turkey out of the Holy Land.
14)The Jews were a proud people and throughout history they had trouble
with unsympathetic Genitals.
15)In the Middle Ages many people died from the bluebonnet plague after
growing boobs on their necks.
16)Because people thought Joan of Arc was a witch they burned her to a steak.
17)Michelangelo painted the sixteenth chapel.
18)Columbus discovered America while cursing the Atlantic. His ships were called the Nina, the Pinta Colada, and the Santa Fe.
19)Henry VIII had a hard time walking because he had an abbess on his knee.
20)Sir Francis Drake circumcized the world with a 100-foot clipper.
21)Queen Elizabeth's navy defeated the Spanish armadillo.
22)William Shakespeare wrote tragedies, comedies, and hysterectomies, all in Islamic pentameter.
23)The main theme of Shakespeare's Antony and Cleopatra was death and suffrage.
24)Miquel Cervantes wrote Donkey Hote.
25)The Pilgrims crossed the ocean in hardships.
26)Descartes’ famous maxim was “cogito eros sum.”
27)Johann Bach practiced on an old spinster in his attic.
28)The French Revolution occurred because Louis XIV was revolting.
29)Abraham Lincoln freed the slaves by signing the Emasculation Proclamation.
30)Cyrus McCormack invented the McCormick raper, that did the job of 100 men.
31)Charles Darwin wrote The Organ of the Species.
32)In the middle of the 19th century, all the morons moved to Utah.
33)Louis Pasteur discovered a cure for rabbis.
34)Thomas Edison was the inventor of the phonograf and the indecent lamp.
35)The First World War, caused by the assignation of the Arch-Duck by a surf.
36)John Steinbeck went on to win the Nobel Prize for literacy.
37)In 1957, Eugene O’Neill won a Pullet Surprise.
38)The President of Iran is a man called Mahmoud Iwantjihad.
As geography is not taught the way it once had been, placenames also take a beating by students:
1)The Israelites lived in the Sarah Desert and traveled by Camelot.
2)Moses went up Mount Cyanide for the Ten Commandments but died before he reached Canada.
43)Pompeii was destroyed by an overflow of saliva from Mount Vatican.
4)The Americans dropped the atomic bomb on Kamikaze and three days later on Nicaragua.
5)They are fighting a civil war in Serbia because the Bostonians, Crates, and Hertzgodivas want to get rid of the Serves.
6)The capital of Ethiopia is Adidas Ababa.
Howard Richler's latest book is Strange Bedfellows: The Private Lives of Words.
