Juxtaposing the penultimate liminal palimpsest

"Who wants to get liminal?"

Two students jump up and say "I'll do it!" Then they walk across the room and stand in the doorway as I start singing that great old Olivia Newton John hit, "Let's Get Liminal."

I don't know what's more frightening about this scenario: the fact that I am singing in class or the fact that several of my students know that the easiest way to demonstrate liminality is to stand on the threshold. Apparently they've seen me get liminal before. It happens. "Liminal" is a word I work into many of my classes, along with "palimpsest" and "juxtapose."

"Palimpsest" takes me back to my first semester in grad school, when I studied Beowulf in a dim, musty seminar room that always made me wonder whether Grendel's mother might be hiding behind the curtains. I can still hear the great Kevin Kiernan explaining in his gravelly voice how scribes used to scrape ink off in order to re-use vellum but some of the original text would remain, creating layers of meaning with varying degrees of legibility. I don't teach Beowulf or anything involving vellum, but I find metaphorical palimpsests all over the place--and so, sometimes, do my students.

They also learn how to juxtapose, a tricky skill I demonstrate with a silly bit of theater: "Silence, please, while I juxtapose these two books" (or pens or papers or dry-erase markers). I move the two items slowly, carefully, closer together, a look of intense concentration on my face, and as soon as they are adjacent I say, "Look! Just like magic! They're juxtaposed!"

"Wait, that's all it means?"

I don't mind being a bit silly if it helps students realize that a word they employ as if it had profound and magical meaning really just indicates that two items are side by side. And then when we're all done juxtaposing and getting liminal and finding palimpsests all over the place, we can take up the penultimate challenge, which is informing students that all penultimate means is second to last.

"Wait, you mean it doesn't mean, like, really really ultimate?"

Sadly, no. But don't ask me to sing about it. I don't know any penultimate songs.