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Obstinate, not Abstinate

I was thinking of my brother's lack of posts on his own blog recently and was thinking about how obstinate he is at times, and it reminded me of one of the many education oriented humerous experiences I have had and I thought I would share it with you:

As is often the case with students, their knowledge of some of the more sophisticated word choices for use in writing is at a novice level. This can often lead to very surprising sentences popping up in their essays. In one freshman introductory biology course I taught, I had the students select some sort of animal group to observe. One student chose to view a tank of Convict Cichlids we had on disply that were actively breeding and several pair were also raising young fry. As is common with this biparental species, the male assumes territorial defense of the nest site and will be seen to swim around the perimieter for a large percentage of the time when he has a female he has mated with and young fry present. Well in the case of this young student, he submitted a paper to me with the following line in it:

"The male fish was very abstinate in his behavior in the tank."

When I was grading this in my office, I spontaneously guffawed out loud and this accidently caused my pipe fall out of my mouth and clattered onto the linoleum floor. I wrote the following comment at this point of his paper:

"This male has sired well over 75 fry that are clearly visible. I do not know about your family history, but in my own (I have eight children), applying the term abstinate to this particular male fish would not seem to be appropriate. Please see me."

The young fellow came to see me in my office and unfortunately had not figured out what my comment meant, so I instructed him to open up my dictionary and look up the word abstinate. Then I told him to look up the word obstinate, which was what he meant. Finally after reading the two definitions, he understood my comment and laughed. He was a good student, and a few years later I was hapily able to help him in his applications to graduate school.

PipeTobacco