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TO REGURGITATE FACTS OR INFORMATION/WIKIPEDIA REGURGITA Today I have a couple of great phrases you can use to talk about your learning experiences and committing something to your memory. The first one is “to regurgitate facts or information”. If you regurgitate facts, you just repeat what you’ve heard without really understanding it. Think about rote learning that some of us did at school in hopes of getting a high grade. I remember I needed to turn around my grades in Physics. But science has never been my strong suit and I didn’t understand a word in my textbook. No matter how hard I tried to push through, it didn’t make any sense. But I was hellbent on getting a B. It was my senior year in high school, I was about to graduate, so I’m sure you can relate. Anyways, I learned the whole paragraph by heart. Just like a poem. It was 4 pages long and I managed to recall it verbatim. So when I basically regurgitated the whole paragraph in front of my high school teacher and was ready to give myself a pat on the back, my teacher couldn’t care less and saw right through me. She gave me a B minus, but I could see she was doing me a huge favor. We can use this phrase in different contexts which have nothing to do with learning per se. Think of trends that keep coming back or a new diet or protocol that has actually been around for decades. People forgot about them, but they are being marketed as some cutting-edge treatment. There is an example of this phrase in the interview you’re about to hear - a writer who talks that in his attempt to be creative and clever he was also guilty of regurgitating something that was not original at all: “For me, art that’s alive and urgent is art that’s about what it is to be a human being. There are certain paradoxes, and there are certain hazards involved, I think, in writing about this world because there’s the danger of being sucked into it. And simply trying, for instance, to do something that seems very hip and clever and thinking the job has done that. I’ve certainly done stuff like that and realized only later with horror that what I did was in fact just kind of regurgitated the same stuff that I’d been hearing since I was 4 or 5. “ Rethinking David Foster Wallace. The Best of Our Knowledge. Let’s just step aside and talk about the word “regurgitate”. Regurgitate means to vomit or throw up. And if you really think about it in relation to recalling and memorizing information without properly processing and understanding content, it does remind me of the food that your body refused to digest even though you shoved it down your throat. And here goes the second phrase – Wikipedia regurgita. Watch the clip for the context. -Let’s talk about grades. -I know it’s been a rough couple of months, but I’ve been trying to turn them around. -I saw that, but the problem is we’re halfway through a semester and half a fail is till pretty bleak. This is the part where you say to me, “What can I do to change that?”. I’m glad you asked. How do you feel about the extra credit? -Yeah. Totally. Whatever. -Good. Write me a paper then. -Okay. About what? -History. -Pick a topic. Keep it local. No Wikipedia regurgita. These old town have a lot of rich history, so just get your hands dirty, make it sing, and you’re back on track. Deal? -Yeah. Deal. The Vampire Diaries As you might’ve guessed Wikipedia regurgita is when you just copy and paste information from Wikipedia and pass it off as legitimate research.
