"Astronomy teaches the correct use of the sun and the planets"
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Leave it to Leacock to make the cosmos sound like a municipal training manual. "Astronomy teaches the correct use of the sun and the planets" is funny because it smuggles a bureaucratic, improvement-minded verb - "use" - into a realm that stubbornly refuses to be instrumentalized. You can chart Jupiter, predict eclipses, calculate the seasons; you cannot "use" Saturn the way you use a hammer. The line works as a deadpan jab at the early-20th-century faith that knowledge exists to be monetized, managed, and put to work.
Leacock, an economist by trade and a satirist by temperament, is puncturing the utilitarian mindset his own discipline often encourages: everything must justify itself in practical outputs. By framing astronomy as a lesson in "correct use", he parodies the era's boosterism around scientific progress, industrial efficiency, and curriculum-as-vocation. It also skewers a certain imperial confidence: the idea that even the heavens can be domesticated by the right expertise.
The subtext is that the "correct" thing astronomy teaches is not usage but humility and scale. The sun and planets become a mirror held up to human pretensions, especially the managerial ones. Leacock's irony is quiet, not showy; it lands because it sounds like something a well-meaning reformer might actually say. That's the trick: the sentence mimics the cadence of serious instruction while exposing how absurd our hunger for control becomes when it reaches for the stars.
Leacock, an economist by trade and a satirist by temperament, is puncturing the utilitarian mindset his own discipline often encourages: everything must justify itself in practical outputs. By framing astronomy as a lesson in "correct use", he parodies the era's boosterism around scientific progress, industrial efficiency, and curriculum-as-vocation. It also skewers a certain imperial confidence: the idea that even the heavens can be domesticated by the right expertise.
The subtext is that the "correct" thing astronomy teaches is not usage but humility and scale. The sun and planets become a mirror held up to human pretensions, especially the managerial ones. Leacock's irony is quiet, not showy; it lands because it sounds like something a well-meaning reformer might actually say. That's the trick: the sentence mimics the cadence of serious instruction while exposing how absurd our hunger for control becomes when it reaches for the stars.
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| Topic | Witty One-Liners |
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