Books Blog: English Literature & Linguistics

This short essay on the topic of “school lunch” is being passed around the internet as an example of the failure of the public school system. Apparently, it was authored by a sixth grader in “an inner city public school in Philadelphia.”

Sharswood lunch Discrase

Sharswood lunches are so nasty some people be pukein. Some people be talking about school lunch. Some time the school lunch be trucky niggets. The trucky niggets be the worst. And the pizza be half done. The cheese buger be the best. When we was taking the pssa they had rice and chickhen for lunch. That be the nastyes lunch in the world. The corn be with the trucky niggets.

Original source at You, Sir, Are Going to Summer School garnered hundreds of lovely comments. All I can say is that I wish it weren’t plausible for an eleven or twelve year old American educated child to write something this bad.

The results of the 2008 Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest are in, and they are spectacular! The grand prize went to Garrison Spik of Washington, D.C. for this bit of prose:

Theirs was a New York love, a checkered taxi ride burning rubber, and like the city their passion was open 24/7, steam rising from their bodies like slick streets exhaling warm, moist, white breath through manhole covers stamped “Forged by DeLaney Bros., Piscataway, N.J.”

Other beauties include Shannon Wedge of New Hampshire who won in the Adventure category:

Leopold looked up at the arrow piercing the skin of the dirigible with a sort of wondrous dismay — the wheezy shriek was just the sort of sound he always imagined a baby moose being beaten with a pair of accordions might make.

As well as Graham Thomas of St Albans, Hertfordshire, U.K. who ran up the Purple Prose:

The complementary crepuscularities of earth and sky shrank away from one another as the roseate effulgence of a new dawn burst forth, not unlike a reclining pneumatic beauty’s black silk stocking splitting apart at the seam to reveal the glowing radiance of an angrily sun-burned leg.

I randomly came across Book Rental Fail on the Failblog, which struck me as hilarious and sad at the same time:

Name: Selekta
Posts: 913

Was just thinking. My sister does a lot of reading, and spends like $1000 a year just on books alone. Most of them she reads once then never looks at again. Is there any kind of like video rental store … but for books? Would make things a lot cheap, plus once one person has read one the next person can get enjoyment from it etc.

We do have such a thing; it’s called a Library!!