[lit-ideas] Re: Hereabouts
- From: david ritchie <profdritchie@xxxxxxxxx>
- To: Lawrence Helm <lawrencehelm@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Sun, 30 May 2021 12:11:27 -0700
On May 30, 2021, at 10:45 AM, Lawrence Helm <lawrencehelm@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
wrote:
David,
Your engineer is not untypical of what I recall. To "don't read much" they
could add "and don't write much either." Hence the need for English majors
who could write -- how else can engineering information be communicated to a
company's customers? I would ordinarily have written "could" instead "can"
in the previous sentence, referring to the state of Engineering in my day,
but your experience suggests that not much has changed.
I take your point, but I am the son and grandson of engineers, both of whom
read widely and wrote clearly. Inventive riffing was never going to be their
thing, and they preferred non-fiction to fiction, but my father could quote
verse he’d learned by heart and after he died clearing all the books from his
house was a lot of work.
Both daughters are unusually interested in well-read engineers. When it comes
to dating, apparently genes will out.
Let you and I therefore simply hurrumph like old men who see the world going to
hell. That could be fun. Or we could celebrate the fact that Mimo laid an egg
late this morning. You’ve heard of the “Unsinkable Molly Brown”? Mimo takes
after her.
David
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