“The real world.” How our students love the phrase! An ex-linguist of my acquaintance, bitter from years of mistreatment in English departments, has come to rest at last behind a very large oak desk in a generously appointed office at a large university. She is coordinator of business-writing programs, and a sense of authority informs her words now as she talks of “those of us who work in the real world.” Meanwhile the benighted rest of us, left behind on university faculties, complacently accept the givenness of that extrauniversity “real world.” At graduation rituals we sit smiling under our tassels and hear each speaker, from the head of student government to the chancellor, from professor to famous guest, tell our students that they are about to enter the “real world.”