The Tiger's Heart

For March we're doing phrases that English is missing. But so far they've all been from mass pop culture-- so today let's get a little lit.

George Orwell's "Shooting an Elephant" is justly famous: wonderful, elegant, unforgettable, really incomparable. So it's galling that little Jim Kjelgaard, a hundredth the writer, wrote an almost identical story that I think of a hundred times as often, because it's a hundred times the statement:

Jim Kjelgaard, "The Tiger's Heart" https://teamrtdaquest.weebly.com/uploads/3/7/7/5/37755009/the_tigers_heart_2015.pdf

Probably once a week I think, "Ope— Tiger's Heart." It's like "NIH" (Not Invented Here), and it's like Thorstein Veblen's showy inefficiencies, and it's like old Harvard College always being backward and weird, because if you have the same old schedule and grades and majors and frats as other colleges then why do you need Harvard?

So . . . how did the right paw help? And he didn’t smite the tiger? And the tiger jumped straight up? Huh? As my friend would say, I have quetions. In honor of Veblen no citations today. But you can read Orwell’s here. Robert Wellman Campbell, "The Tiger's Heart," RSS Longa, 20 March 2025, public domain via CC0 1.0.