An Immodest Proposal
by Mudak
Chapter 2
Vanessa posted the syllabus for her Linguistics class on the cork board above her desk in her dorm room. She let out a sigh as she thought of the handsome teacher who, she wouldn’t admit to anyone quite yet, impressed her tremendously. Here was a rulebreaker, a trendsetter, an iconoclast. And whatever else she might say, she really had thought he was just another student, so at the very least, he looked young enough to be a student.
She made a note of his office hours. He was in his office on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays, which meant that if she could make the time, she might be able to see him in his office the following day. Should she go see him this early in the semester, or should she wait?
She replayed his first class over and over in her head. If she was going to stop into his office, she would need some kind of excuse, some pretense for going, and wanting to get a closer look at his well-chiseled face and physique really wasn’t a good enough reason.
He talked about the tongue being naturally lazy. What did he mean by that? She got that the spoken word changes more quickly than the written word. After all, there’s no shortage of words that aren’t pronounced anything like the way they’re spelled. In some cases, different people will pronounce the same word differently. But actually being lazy? That didn’t make sense to her. She decided that she’d use this point as her excuse to go down to his office.
She decided to do some research into that but the only information she could find of any real consequence was a condition referred to as “Lazy Tongue Syndrome,” which apparently is a problem where people (usually children just learning to speak) can talk but are not fully understood.
She sighed and decided that yes, this was a fairly good excuse to go see Professor Wells. Hopefully, it wouldn’t be too transparent.