Hubris, a Guest Post

Hubris*
By Aidan
Delivered to Mrs. Collicutt’s class, 1980

Hello everyone. I am so glad to see you all here today. For my presentation Mrs. Collicutt asked me to pick a word to talk about so I am here to tell you about hubris. What is hubris? The dictionary defines hubris as the act of bringing shame to someone. To use the word in a sentence, I could say “Dwayne showed hubris when he threw dog poop at me last week during recess,” but that sounds weird. My dad says that hubris is when people show too much arrow gins. Gin is a kind of liquor, so I guess that hubris is for people who drink a lot or show off their collection of gin to everyone. But I wasn’t sure what arrow gins was exactly, so I asked dad for an example but he told me to talk to my aunt Jane. But I’ve never seen any gin at aunt Jane’s place. She doesn’t have any liquor at all, or even a television. And all the furniture in her living room is covered in plastic, and no one is allowed to go in there. Why did she buy a house with a living room if she didn’t want to go in there ever? Maybe she keeps all her gin in there. What is an example of hubris in my own life? This story has aunt Jane in it too. Over Christmas time she took me to the Science Centre to look at the animals and see the guy do the dry ice demonstration and they had a whole exhibit on evil lution. Aunt Jane said they had too much hubris and that mankind should remember where it came from. She also said she didn’t pay twenty dollars to have her intelligence insulted with evil lution. She took me home right after and dad was asleep on the couch and not doing anything but he got mad anyway because aunt Jane was supposed to take me out for supper as well and couldn’t he get just one day to himself and then I asked him why evil lution was hubris and he started shouting at Jane to keep her opinions to herself and then mom came from upstairs and she didn’t have her makeup on and she started shouting at dad to stop picking on her sister and dad told her she looked ugly with no makeup on and then mom threw a vase at dad and Jane left with me and now I’m staying at her house for a few days. Tonight I’m going to sneak into the living room and see if I can find her gin. Well that was my presentation and thank you very much for listening. I hope you don’t think I had any hubris in my talk.

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*this guest post has been brought to you by the Palinode