Kill your dogs

Yes, it's about that dog again. In the foreword to my phd dissertation I use that same Danish formula of modesty myself - "...me, said the dog" - mainly because I found it, well, ironically topical and illuminating in a dissertation concerned with the use of the first person singular. The phrase is a good example in a nutshell of the necessity (or annoying habit) to excuse yourself for attracting attention to your own person when you speak.

Anyway, I had (have) grown still more fond of the dog-phrase, because a reader of a draft of my text was totally confused by it. She'd never encountered the phrase before and left a big question mark in the margin. What dog?? And that incident made the somewhat stale phrase even more appealing to me. It was potentially strange and funny, even exclusive.

Which, however, it really isn't. And tonight a reader of the actual dissertation confessed that he found it totally uncool of me to use it. Not that he wasn't familiar with it, he just found it really trite and out of place. And I have to agree. That dog is a darling of the kind that I teach other people to kill. And now tonight my dog was killed - but it's still there, and I guess it won't go away until I get down to rewriting the dissertation and make my attempt to have it turned into a book.

How can that dog be barkin' in the backyard? We ran over him years ago How can that dog be runnin' by the backfence? We ran over him years ago Ghost of a dog Barkin' in the backyard How can that dog be scratchin' at the back door? We ran over him years ago How can that dog be lying under the shady tree Where we buried him years ago? Ghost of a dog Flyin' through the backyard.