Good lord, man! Far more than I could have ever hoped. Please feel free to audit more Honors English 12 class anytime.

Nouns = shame.

I have the full field of 64 if you’re interested.

What an improbable tournament!

After a matched pair of early games in which the unbearably unexciting wordplay of both Passive Voice and Adverbs was soundly beaten by the product of Multiplication’s xperience and some lesser factors, the western division bogged down in a war-of-words between the historically staid OED and those neologisticly youthful Nouns, who were still smarting from that passionate controversy in their first game over some rather unbelievable statistics (one digit in particular kept showing up from Benford’s unruly fans, if you know what I mean).

In the east (after Juliet set), the ever active Verbs appeared to be breezing through the tourney (with help from their little guys) until they floundered in the semis to the unexpectedly better-than-average triplets of Mean, Median, and Mode. (Subtraction had already proved they were the lesser team by complaining, “we aren’t used to single elimination,” but do the math: with such a negative performance, that fact didn’t make a difference.) Anyway, MMM really threw Verbs for a curve in affine game.

Yet the Big Easy proved Much Harder. Any correlation between MMM’s earlier games and the finals rapidly approached zero. Against Nouns, a win would be predicated only on perfection, but our heros deviated from Coach Norm’s standard plan to put up some prime numbers. The trio were technically in the game but really just outlying on the court. As the pounding algorithm of the Noun marching band counted down the final arc seconds, our boys had nothing left to given.

Certainly, one could argue Nouns already should have turned Pronoun this late in the narrative, and in an equilateral world, they would have. But no fancy rhetoric can redefine Nouns’ dominance. I’ve got no axiom to grind with them.

Still, I felt vindicated when those subjects took their proper place on the winner’s podium; as that handsome and elegant old man presented them their trophy, Nouns shamed their division by failing to recognize Commissioner Euler’s identity.

Action always trumps triangulation.

Just a shout out to a writing assignment I gave a class once. They hated “words”. They believed “numbers ruled”.