*SO* let me tell you further fun facts about carbonyl chemistry…
Works. Those Anglo-Saxons knew what they were about.
I don't remember the rest of the lecture, but his opening phrase is burned into my memory three decades later. Because in one fell swoop, he simultaneously said the following:
1. This class starts promptly. I expect you to be in your seats on time and ready to listen.
2. I have a lot of material to cover, so I'm not going to waste time talking about the syllabus. You're in college, I expect you to be able to read.
3. The Greeks had a fantastic project. They were going to catalog all the knowledge in the world.
(He did actually talk a little bit about the syllabus later on that day).
As for fragmented texts, at the time when the Greek philosophers were alive there were a lot more texts available to them than we now have. A lot was lost over the years, including when the library at Alexandria burned (48 BC, I believe). We know they had access to many texts we don't because they quote from them, referencing material that we no longer have access to.
But this is a side issue. The main point of my comment was how the prof managed to communicate two or three things at once by the simple action of walking into the classroom, already lecturing, precisely at the scheduled start of the class.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Library_of_Alexandria?wprov=sf...
It worked to get our attention partly because of the time it took to say all that, and partly because it was so idiosyncratic that it sorta became a running joke.
I remember one session in particular.
This was a summer class, and as such each class session was around 2 hours long. The professor would typically give us (and himself) a 10-minute break in the middle of the class, and generally if you hung around the room, he'd strike up a more casual conversation in the room.
This was also not long after Michael Jackson died. The conversation got onto him and his life and his mixed legacy of scandal, went on for a while, and somehow made its way to one student observing that (and I quote): "he lived the American dream – he started out as a poor black boy and grew up to be a rich white man."
The room sorta hung in uneasy suspense at how the professor would respond.
"...and SO IT IS that we see that the Mongol conquest...", he said, launching noticeably-abruptly (and with a bit of a knowing grin) back into the course material.
He was generally a good-natured dude like that. His voice sounded a little unusual, and I guess some students thought he sounded like Kermit the Frog. He came back into the room after a bathroom break once to find someone had drawn Kermit on the whiteboard behind where he usually stood when speaking. He saw it, stopped, visibly pondered what to do with it, and drew a speech bubble from Kermit saying something like "the Silk Road" (or whatever it was were about to cover; it's been quite a few years and I don't remember the specific topic).
Optimal play from the professor.
> Yet for more than two centuries “hwæt” has been misrepresented as an attention-grabbing latter-day “yo!” designed to capture the interest of its intended Anglo-Saxon audience urging them to sit down and listen up to the exploits of the heroic monster-slayer Beowulf.
Heaney's famous translation begins "So. The Spear-Danes ..." with that "So" being an interjection, a thing that could in principle stand on its own. (You might say "So." and wait for everyone to settle down and start listening.) Even more so with things like "Yo!" or "What ho!" or "Bro!" or "Lo!". (Curious how all the options seem to end in -o.)
This is more like "So, the Spear-Danes ..." where the initial "So" has roughly the same purpose of rhetorical throat-clearing and attention-getting, but now it's part of the sentence, as if it had been "As it turns out, the Spear-Danes ..." or "You might have heard that the Spear-Danes ...".
I think the theory described in OP makes the function of "hwaet" a little different, though; not so much throat-clearing and attracting attention, as marking the sentence as exclamatory. A little like the "¡" that _begins_ an exclamation in Spanish.
Of course a word can have more than one purpose, and it could be e.g. that "hwaet" marks a sentence as exclamatory and was chosen here because it functions as a way of drawing attention.
all about how...
Oh no, now my brain wants to play the whole song in my head before allowing me to move on.