I did the best with what I had…Nothing!…and became a professor.

9 AUG 2018
Professor Penwose on Potential

Good Evening,

Show of hands, How many have been patronized and plagued with Potential? He has potential. She has potential. Parents weep and teachers leap, saying, “Why do they not use it?”
I have tired of that word long ago and will never use it to express an opinion of you.

Have you ever looked up the definition of potential?
Relax, I’ve done it for you.

I had hoped for a clever definition from my favorite source, The Devil’s Dictionary, however I leafed through the pages like a mad speed reader and found no reference to it…with no “potential” for future interpretations as the author is dead.

Dictionary.com defies it as…
Possible, as opposed to actual; capable of being or becoming; a latent excellence or ability that may or may not be developed.

British dictionary Definition
Possible but not yet actual; latent but unrealized ability or capacity.

I see it as a generally accepted way of insulting someone nicely.
When a person speaks of another and says they have potential, it means the person in question has the ability to be grand at whatever the subject matter is, but they are not.
Woe, what a put down.

Most of my life was put down by potential. My father took me to the track to see just how beneficial my potential was. In all fairness I will say the horse I picked to win probably would have had it finished. However he flopped at the fifth furlong to flirt over the fence with a fair filly.

Father deemed my potential of no use to him and symbolically pretended to beat it out of me with an authentic balloon replica of King Arthur’s fabled sword Excallibash. Not the one he pulled out of a rock but the one he picked up out of a dumpster.

I saw this as a gifted opportunity to rid myself of all potential and went into a fake trance and claimed to feel the potential leaving my body.

Me Mum never forgave him for that and when the school masters said I had potential she said, “No he doesn’t, his bloody father beat it out of him.”
To this day she nags him that had I had potential I could have been a king or a duke or at the very least a jack instead of the joker I ended up as.

Worked out rather grand for me actually. I did the best with what I had…Nothing!…and became a professor.
No potential needed there.

Penwose Out.
Bye George
NoPo8