There is a lovely expression in my adoptive home of Georgia: “bless your heart.” It can be used as a genuine expression of sympathy, but more often, at least in the classroom setting, it is a good response for when someone said something unusually awkward or problematic.
I am a military historian of the ancient world, and this fall semester, I had an unexpected “bless your heart” moment in my upper-level history course on Greek and Roman Warfare. I assigned a book chapter that I had published under my first initial and maiden name (I had academic, rather than vanity, reasons for assigning the chapter). To my surprise, several students in the class, in discussing the piece, assumed that it was published by a man…