What word makes you turn your head because you think it's your name?

I take attendance by having students answer a question.

What word makes you turn your head because you think it's your name?

Publishing the answers that students wrote would go against my general policy of "don't publicly identify people by name without their explicit consent." So instead of writing their actual responses, let me give you a gloss:

• [student's name, but an alternate spelling]
• [description of sneezing in another country with different typical accents]
• [commonly-uttered phrase in a computer lab]
• [student's name, verbatim]
• [word that rhymes with student's name]
• [non-grammatical sentence/series of words that, if spoken quickly enough or muffled, might rhyme with student's name]
• [list of nine one-syllable names rhyming with student's name] "and eight thousand others"
• "[student's name] but it's a different [student's name] than me"

I am glad, as always, to have an unusual-but-mostly-pronounceable name. I continue to resolve to name my child "Robert');DROP TABLE Students;--", unless that name becomes too popular among database-saboteur parents.

Today's "I don't think you got it" Award  goes to the student whose attention is grabbed by "Anyone yelling anything and staring at me". You got it, buddy, good job.

This post is dedicated to the diligent and compulsively thorough student readers of the future, who are reading every post here for a reason inscrutable to me. I know you exist. Hello!


This post's theme word is asterismos, "the use of a seemingly unnecessary word or phrase to introduce what you're about to say." Hi-ya! Good morning class, I'm Lila! (<-- be="" delivered="" must="" p="" pronounced="" rhyme="" singsong="" to="">

What is your favorite pattern?

I take attendance by having the students answer a question.

What is your favorite pattern?

Visual patterns:

• checkered
• paisley
• checkered
• geometric
• stripes
• plaid

Math patterns:

• a hexagonal lattice
• fractals but only when graphed on the TI-84
• Fibonacci #s
• fibonaci [sic] sequence 
• Mandelbrot set
• compound interest
• Minkowsky
• Pascal's Triangle
• the one that looks like this [scribbled-out drawing] NVM I messed it up but it's like a fractal with a lot of circles
• set of interesting numbers

Social patterns seemed to be mostly self-referential descriptors:

• women self-selecting out of CS (not)
• sleep, eat, soccer (repeat)
• sleep, eat, sleep, eat, sleep, eat (repeat)

The uncategorizable "randomness" gets a mention, since: is that a pattern? Ditto to "object-oriented" and the student who wrote simply "hate patterns", as if adding a subject to the verb would take too much effort. You hate so much that it suppresses your verbal skills. Apparently.

A tip of my hat to the person clever enough to say "baldness".

I looked up the symbols to transcribe this as faithfully to the handwritten original as possible: "D^♭Δ7E⁷AΔ7FΔ7".

The Award for Narrative Convenience and Irksomeness goes to the person whose favorite pattern is "deus ex machina".

The Recurringly Attempting to Get Into the Professor's Good Graces Plaque goes to the student whose favorite pattern is "one of good attendance".

This post is dedicated to the student who diligently checked this blog --- although often through a VPN, so that I wouldn't know who was reading --- and then came to my office throughout the semester to ask me why I wasn't updating it.


This post's theme word is antimetabole, "a literary and rhetorical device in which a phrase or sentence is repeated, but in reverse order." The linguistic patterns woven into the antimetabole dazzled and amazed.