Winter 2020 quotes

These have accumulated for awhile and I might've missed some as there is currently a "scratch notebook" infestation throughout the rooms of my house.

Out-of-context semi-anonymized quotes for your enjoyment!

I: "Evidence is really piling up for us living in a weird simulation. Let's have their teeth fall out, try that!"

M: "What's the official wine pairing for bacon-wrapped chicken?"
L: "Bacon-wrapped wine."

Z: "There's more red flags than potential here."

G: "I'm discovering things about people I never knew."
L: "By looking at their backgrounds?"
G: "By listening to what they say!"

N: "I like that JavaScript is being described as low-level here."

Z: "You accidentally muted yourself."
I: "No, I did it on purpose, but at the wrong time."

M: "I was such a good writer back then. That was before I went to grad school, I can tell."

F: "The problem with legacy code is, they did a lot of stuff in the past, and they keep doing it!"

Z: "Do you have a job, or is this, like, private daycare?"

D: "He died of syphilis because he had all these... incubis... you know?"

Z+D (simultaneously, uncoordinated): "Maybe don't do your taxes today."
M: "I think it'll work out in our favor!"

D: "Julius Caesar was not another Groundhog's Day."

L: "Isn't it being livestreamed on the IRS Facebook page?"
K: "That is a cursed sentence."

I: "I don't trust the government. I don't trust anyone! I don't trust myself! I do trust Paypal."

A: "Tomato grove?"
B: "Tomato thicket."

I, on the topic of grad school: "It was actually quite useful, but not directly."

F: "You know, I'm in a perfect position here to rob the bank."

R: "Can I promise that the results of this won't be used for evil, anywhere, ever? No."

I: "We're all just in a sorry state."

Z: "surveil and digitize" (which I suggested would be a good evil catchphrase)

L: "The problem with buying a fanny pack is..."

Z: "No, I don't want a duck-face filter, I want a duck filter. I want to look like a duck."

D: "When I look at the scores, I think... we shouldn't have explained to her how the points work."

L: "I like to say a long goodbye and get cut off so that my children feel an obligation to talk to me again soon."
D: "Mom, I don't think you should reveal the secrets of how you maintain the social contract!"

This post's theme word is meech (v), "to whine" or "to move in a furtive manner" or "to loiter." Stop meeching about the park, meeching to each other, I see you meeching over there!

Reality dissonance in POV

One of the continually fascinating and renewed interesting things about being... alive? Just about being a person, just about being, is of course that my first-person experience is incredibly different from everyone else's impression of me.

Obviously yes: how could it be anything else? I have access to lots of extra internal state information, plus the impression of free will to affect my actions. And on the other hand, everyone else can see information hidden from me, for example bugs crawling on the back of my head, or involuntary nervous tics.

Obviously no: whoever I am, that's who I am. Who I feel I am is who I appear to be, it's just that there's a change of perspective. How could they be different? There's only one objective reality, and we're in it. I'm myself and you see me; when I take an action, you see it. This is consensus reality, and no one has yet been able to escape it (as far as we know).

Every once in awhile the contrast of perspectives is thrown into sharp relief, and I just had one of these moments of reality-dissonance.

Here I am, innocently tootling along and doing a language-learning exercise which is trying to teach me new Japanese vocabulary. It brought up a word I definitely think I do not know --- "stylish" (adj), "oshare(na)" --- and I look it up. As soon as I pronounce it aloud, I start to rap in Japanese in my head. Why? Well, it turns out that 15 years ago I memorized some Japanese pop-rap entirely phonetically, with no regard for word breaks, grammar, or in fact content, and not only does my brain still have that stored somewhere (team: Never Garbage Collect), but it is still indexed by phonetic lookup and also immediately available. And also, now that I am hearing the sounds I memorized in my head, my brain is cross-referencing with a lot of new vocabulary I've learned in the past year and translating the rap.

I look down. My phone screen has not yet timed out, so this entire revelation - realization - translation phenomenon has taken < 30 seconds. And now I just know a verse, in English, of a series of noises I memorized without linguistic structure 15 years ago.

This just happens, sometimes.

I have been told that I give the impression of being "quick", very clever, very smart, always ready with an answer and a call-back reference. Intelligent. The first-person experience of this is that I am strapped in to an involuntary rollercoaster, my brain whipping me through tangentially-relevant memories in a barely-controllable whirlwind. It's just lucky that I set myself up in situations where "here's a  related memory" so often contains the nugget of truth that I need right now.

Also possibly I am dissociating because it feels very unreal to be still performing my extremely socialization-based job but also to be completely isolated from all other humans.

Hello from my isolation to yours!

This post's theme word is mimsy (adj), "prim, feeble, affected." This blog post gives the impression of a mimsy humblebrag: oops.

Stunningly efficacious

I have no particular, publicly-declarable goals to commemorate the incrementing of our calendar year, except that --- as always --- I want to hone myself into the startlingly effective, time-efficient, prosperous, merry, well-balanced person that other people (hopefully) think I already am.

I like circuitous sentences and superfluous verbiage, and I refuse to change either of those personal attributes in 2018. Come back and try again in 2019, haters.

Day 1 is marked by a high turnaround of holiday letters and emails, paying bills, updating all my yearly-in-January donations, and staring in awe at the truly prodigious list of half-written draft posts for this blog.

(Sorry about that.)

You, my diligent readers, whether my parents or my overcurious students or internet strangers looking to post advertisements as comments (don't, I delete them and it wastes everyone's time), will simply have to put up with me as I am, striving yet again, always, in a continual manner. I want to write more, and more cleverly, and because this platform is free and quick (except when stuck in draft limbo), it will likely be the recipient of this output.

Although frankly, a lot of it goes to /dev/null right now anyway, and that might be for the best.

My year-end phrase-stuck-in-my-head is "flamboyantly intelligent", which is a descriptor of the kind of people I'd like to surround myself with. Maybe there's a subreddit? I'm on a (mild) quest, in any case; if you find any such people, please send them my way. I am a diligent and snarky correspondent, and I have been told I am secretly kind and caring, but that was 2017 and I am looking to turn over a new leaf, so...


This post's theme word is palilalia (n), "a speech disorder characterized by involuntary repetition of words, phrases, or sentences." I am trying to remember the word for "having a phrase stuck in your head", but all I can come up with is palilalia, which is not-quite-it-but-close-enough-to-blot-it-from-recoverable-memory, plus: contains "lila" as a substring!

I become bland

Unsure of myself with new colleagues and a new position, and wanting to maintain a certain dignity and thus obtain a level of respect (and respectability), I find that I am curbing most of my sotto voce comments and asides.

I want to appear pleasant and personable. (I am in fact pleasant and personable, although the way in which I express it is different from others... more prickly and dry. My personality is a cactus.)

Perhaps all my stifled remarks will harden deep in my core, and form an iridescent pearl of sarcasm, glistening with wit, and at some future date, a metaphorical conversational trawl will haul it up and expose it to the world.

In the meantime, I am content to be a little bit socially quiet, observant as usual, and with a vibrant inner life of narration and context-driven jokes.


This post's theme word is hebetate, "to make dull or obtuse." My temporary period of retirement from society shall not hebetate me.

Cultural acclimatization

Apartment searching in Paris is demoralizing. I thought I had reached a low when I discovered an "apartment" of 10 square meters for 750 Euros/month, but then I compared it with an "apartment" of 2 square meters (two!), seventh floor (no elevator), slanted roof ceiling, plus a shared toilet on the landing, for 550 Euros/month. This former servant's quarters started looking good, though, after long enough perusing rental listings, agency websites, sabbatical vacancies, and craigslist.

I am coming to understand why all Parisian residents recoil slightly and emit pitying moans when I ask them for advice finding an apartment. I have been encouraged, with an appropriate cringe of social awkwardness, to ask everyone I know: are you moving soon? do you know anyone who has moved? or died?

Yech.

I have spent several days now, in sequence, where every face-to-face interaction was entirely in French. I visited an apartment showing, I walked across maybe 80% of Paris without a map (tl&dr, geography version), I read legal and immigration paperwork, I was asked for directions to somewhere I didn't recognize, I interacted with shopkeepers, I verified my temporary housing situation, I was asked for directions which I was able to give competently.  This last one feels like a milestone in cultural acclimatization. It indicates many things. I am in a demographic sweet spot to ask for directions: woman, white, healthy, not obviously homeless. I am walking purposefully. Until I open my mouth, I can pass as local. Perhaps I have improved my passive scowl. Huzzah!

I am suffering a bad case of l'esprit d'escalier, basically continuously, because my ability to cohere my thoughts into sentences in French suffers a lag.  I know enough words to say the thing I want to say, but my thoughts in English are verbal and sophisticated, while my expressibility in French is simplified and riddled with pauses. If this post seems verbose but oddly curt, blame my attempts to improve my French. Also blame my isolation from English-language conversation. I need to find an expat chatting club.

There is a fascinating mental adjustment necessary. (Il faut que je change... see? sentence structures bleed across my brain barriers between languages. I'm lucky I didn't give directions in Japanese, I aced that chapter and practiced speed directions.)  Every time a child or homeless person speaks French in earshot, my brain does this: wow! that kid/beggar is so erudite! s/he speaks French! ---oh, wait, everyone speaks French here, it's not the marker of some cultural or educational achievment. I obviously understand that there are native French speakers at an intellectual level. But somewhere deep in my brain sits the belief that humans fundamentally speak English, and all other languages are awkward additions, the result of work and study.  So a handful of times a day, I mentally kick myself for my English-centric worldview.

Of course, kids and homeless people probably do speak English, too, and likely German and Italian and a handful of other languages. Because this is Europe and such things are useful, and no one here buys into the kind of cultural/linguistic/national isolationism to which I have become accustomed.

One final thought on cultural acclimatization: I have not yet seen a single Irish pub. Amazing. I thought they were a worldwide phenomenon, a sort of screen saver adopted by any underutilized commercial food site. Apparently here they default to cafes with little black wire tables and smoking waiters.


This post's theme word is ambage (AM-bij, not ahm-bahZH), "ambiguity, circumlocution." I am not fluent enough to commit ambage.

Dictionary

Any number of players can play Dictionary. When it is player i's turn, she picks a word from the OED that no player knows. All players write a definition from the word (player i writes the actual definition). Player i reads all the definitions; the other players vote for which they think is the correct one. Each vote earns player j (≠i) one point; guessing the right word also earns one point.

We played this, and now you can too! (J. won hands-down; he left halfway through the game and still held the lead until the final round. He came in second by one vote.)

Can you pick out the correct definition? (No cheating!)

What does "quisby" mean?
- a crescent-shaped water hole
- pertaining to the way along the dock or harbor: "The fishermen
admired the quisby view after a long day of work."
- a scrimshaw boat
- the act of feeling apprehensive about one's own bodily odor
- an idle person
- traitorous: "The quisby East German judges only gave an 8.2."
- one who asks questions
- an elongated tube of glass used to ensure cucumbers grow straight
- the state of being confused: "He was in a quisby."
- the feeling of being uneasy or sick
- a childish, precocious middle-manager
- a small nocturnal mammal endemic to Madagascar

(Answer: An idle person. Extra puzzle: see how many times you can use "quisby" in one sentence; can you use all the above meanings? The quisby quisby pulled into the quisby, steered by a quisby who felt both quisby and quisby, and accidentally dropped his quisby on an endangered quisby...)

What is a "kurgan"?
- a failed attempt
- a ceremonial turban used in the observance of the Zoroastrian new
year
- a stone-age tool used to scrape hides
- a member of the judiciary in the Ottoman empire
- a spice commonly used as a substitute for pepper
- an unmanned water cache used to facilitate desert journeys
- a traditional oil lamp used in the tents of Mongol chieftans
- pertaining to or originating from the mountainous region surrounding
the Caspian Sea
- title for the leader of the Tartar tribes in the 9th-12th centuries
- a prehistoric sepulchral barrow in Russia and Tartary
- an Eastern-European confection whose principal ingredients are
flour, egg, and quark
- a derogatory Turkish term for a non-Turk
- the secretary of a medieval guild

(Answer: A sepulchral barrow! As opposed to a merely decorative barrow!)

What does "zawn" mean?
- a hood for a wood-fired kiln
- the adolescent form of any lizard in the family Orcumbries
- a mythological beast in early druidic texts pertaining to seasonal
changes
- an even-sided diamond used in heraldry
- a fissure or cave in a coastal cliff
- a colloquial expression of disinterest
- an animal found in the south of Mexico that resembles a badger
- enthusiasm; joie de vivre: "The student was full of zest and zawn."
- a young Bactrian camel
- to fall off a high place

(Answer: A coastal cliff, as in "He cried 'zaaaaaaaaawn!' as he fell into the zawn.")

What does "gholam" mean?
- mounted Arab warriors
- a type of building popular in the Sassanid dynasty with passive air
ventilation
- a zombie
- a sense of awe felt when beholding a mountain range
- a fugitive from a Soviet gulag
- a clearing in a forest with no vegetation growth
- a courier, messenger
- a ceremonial Tamil knife
- an obsidian gollum

(Answer: A courier, but it should be the building with passive air ventilation.)

What does "galactico" mean?
- the many-eyed monster of Greek mythology, beheaded by Chronos and
flung into the firmament
- a demon; cf. manichee
- the substance once presumed to fill the space between stars; ether
- a skilled and celebrated footballer, esp. one bought by a team for a
large fee
- a variety of tomato predominantly grown in the northern regions of
Italy
- an abhorrent structure formed during the development of neurological
tissues in mammalian vertebrates
- a form of adhesive made from the sap of a coniferous tree used by
the Metis
- an additive used to enhance the flavor of some milk products
- (1950) a music and fashion subculture that thrived in the
post-rockabilly era in the United States
- a star football player belonging to the Royal Madrid football club

(Answer: A skilled, expensive footballer. N.B. that one player remembered this during the round, hence the two football definitions offered.)

What does "soodle" mean?
- to trick or deceive
- a diminutive horse
- a traditional Norwegian breakfast
- a large burning mound used in the production of potash
- to walk in a slow or leisurely manner; to stroll, saunter
- a food product derived from animal fats, often used in flavoring
broths
- to deceive, in the context of maritime trade or barter
- obsequious, especially in business dealings
- a traditional Norwegian buckwheat porridge
- a jaunty walk

(Answer: A slow walk. I like that a jaunty walk was also offered, hence "would you like to soodle or soodle this afternoon, dear?")

What is an "ozena"?
- the organelle in protozoans responsible for sensing the direction of
light
- an infection that causes irritation of the skin
- a Turkish pastry, made with pistachios and rose water
- a nose ulcer which results in a fetid discharge
- a sharpened disc used as a weapon by indigenous Amazonian warriors
- a medicinal balm used for treating burns and skin irritations
- a viral skin condition characterized by fissuring and cracking of
the skin
- a luxury fabric woven from silk and gold
- the conduits in mushroom gills down which spores travel
- a drinking cup; quaiche (from the Greek xenos, for foreigner);
hospitality
- a coastal rock formation

(Answer: Rather unbelievably, it is a fetid nose ulcer! We've got a word for that in English! I challenge you to use this appropriately someday.)

What does "maninose" mean?
- a soft-shelled clam
- deriving from, or related to, the use of statuary in garden designs
- patient, willing to wait for opportunities
- a traditional Peruvian codpiece
- common byproduct of anaerobic metabolism, along with Xylitol,
Ribose, and Lactic Acid
- the original term for mayonnaise sauce
- a flammable oil made from fish products
- a trunk of a coppiced tree immediately after harvesting
- surly; cantankerous

(Answer: A soft-shelled clam. Nature makes it easy for once. I prefer to think of it as a Peruvian codpiece; if enough of us use the word this way, it should catch on!)

What does "mandram" mean?
- a sudden gust of wind on a clear day
- an early loom requiring external weights such as stones or lead
- a metal sheet used for ramming placed on the front of a trireme
- a cylindrical tool, typically maded of brass, used to stress leather
for curing
- a vote in Spanish parliament which passes with 2/3rds majority
- the neophyte dormitory in a Buddhist monastery
- a two-dimensional figure, typically drawn in colored sand, used in
16th century Tibetan meditation rituals
- a drink made from wine and chopped vegetables
- a root vegetable with pale tubers and elongated, pointed leaves
- dusty, dingy or poorly maintained, especially when referring to a
carriage
- a vessel for preparing large quantities of stew or soup

(Answer: a vegetable wine drink. It does seem like a vegetably word.)

And finally, what does "ballum rancum" mean?
- elaborate machinations in the pursuit of political power
- the foul odor associated with a rotting corpse
- treacle
- a textured skin rash resulting from excessive moisture trapped by
clothing
- a mucosal secretion of skin pustules, esp. from plague
- a collection of Irish street children
- the outermost cartilage structure in the human elbow
- an erotic dance (typically naked) by a number of prostitutes for a
group of clients
- the quarters in which gladiators would wait before entering the
Coliseum

(Answer: Yes, you thought it was a joke for joke votes, but it is a special vocabulary term for an erotic dance of n naked prostitutes to m clients.)

Wherein 'gauche' and 'wink' are cognates

Gauche, from gauche (French), from gauchir (Middle French), from gaucher (Old French), from welkan (Frankish), from *wankjan (Proto-Germanic). Proto-Indo-European root *weng. A variant of *wankjan, of course, is *wenkanan (also Proto-Germanic), whence wink.

Compare wanken (Old High German) with vakka (Old Norse).

Thanks, J.!


This post's theme word is antanaclasis, "the repetition of a word in different senses." Having experienced this derivation, now I am interested in tracing the changing meaning of the word!

Food that looks like itself

Here you see buns which look like pigs.
Much to my disappontment, these are not pork buns -- they are some sweet paste-filled dessert bun. It would be much more pleasing if the hidden inner contents were described by the outward appearance of the food.


This post's theme word is autological, "a word that describes itself." Of course there is also heterological, "a word that does not describe itself." The word 'autological' can be either autological or heterological; the word 'heterological' is neither.

Malcolm Gladwell

I earlier expressed my displeasure at Malcolm Gladwell's writing. I'm not the only one! Someone with a bit more free time built this Malcolm Gladwell book generator (hat tip: A.). Its criticisms seemed spot-on, and its offered cover designs are accurate, too. My favorite title was "Power: How Power Powerfully Powers Power."

This post's theme word is irrefragable, "that which cannot be disputed or argued." Gladwell's theories are so preposterous as to be irrefragable by rational means.

Bad writing (about fitness)

I've been reading a lot of good writing recently, and thinking about what makes it good. I'd like to figure out some lessons and then learn them, to become a better writer myself.

Here, instead, is an anti-lesson, accompanied with a motivating example. (Please forgive my own bad writing; it is late, I am tired, and I have the lingering taste of bad writing in my left brain.)

Good writing shows, it doesn't tell. Numbered lists, foolish quotation marks, and other rhetorical crutches suffuse bad writing, padding it out, easing your mind over the harsh unpleasantness of badly assembled words expressing barely-coherent thoughts.

I just read the article "Everything you know about fitness is a lie" by Daniel Duane. (It's available here, but you shouldn't read it.) The title lured me, and after the first page I, compulsive reader, could not stop. I had to see how far the vapid, vaguely first-person quest could stretch. (Was this guy paid by the word?)

The title was acurate, insofar as Mr. Duane reports that everything I "know" is a lie. Let's start there: there is an assumption of a standard reader with some standard knowledge. I am not a standard reader of Men's Journal. (I think.) Men, even those who read a journal so slimy that merely reading its text on a webpage makes me want to dispose of it in the back corner of a doctor's waiting room and wash my hands thoroughly, do not deserve to be subjected to this level of verbal excrescence.

The standard Men's Journal reader is apparently too slow to understand his own standard knowledge. Throughout the article, Mr. Duane offers reminder of workout-related "facts" that we "know" or "believe." Then he informs us they are false. The tone of the article includes those sarcastic quotes all over the place. Consider the very first paragraph:

I hate the gym. At least, I hate “the gym” as imagined by...

Those quotes serve only to express disdain, and to them I say: I hated this article. At least, I hated this "article" as written by Mr. Duane.

The point of the article, of course, is to debunk "everything I know," mostly by following the author in the riveting tale of his personal journey and life-changing discovery of an amazing, back-to-basics, revolutionary, ancient and time-honored, [buzzword], [buzzword], reviled-by-medical-science-but-actually-SO-good-for-you new workout. Spoiler alert: he likes it.

Even as he denigrates workout systems W, X, and Y for making us obedient, profitable, unfit sheep, Mr. Duane is recruiting us to his new workout system Z. He doesn't address why Z is better than W, X and Y. He just evaluates W, X, and Y in terms of Z. Of course Z is better at achieving Z's objectives, but I bet it sucks at X's objectives.

This is self-unaware writing of the worst sort. Mr. Duane uses the same buzzwords, the same level of excitement and engagement that he mocked in the context of W, X, and Y, to express his total commitment to Z. I suppose it makes sense: if we readers were stupid enough to believe in the workouts he belittles, based on nothing but the recommendations of exercise experts, then we surely will be stupid enough to believe in the workout he expounds based on the recommendations of exercise experts. Again.

It's cheap, it's shallow, and it's a lame marketing tool. I suppose that maybe it earned this guy some money and prestige as a fitness writer. It also gave him an opportunity to publicly brag about the girth of his thigh muscles.

Boo.

I'll keep arranging my thoughts and words on good writing. What are your thoughts? And words? Have you found any good ones lately? What have you been reading? Can you find an article worse than this one? I'm sure it exists; ask, and the vast internet shall supply.


This post's theme word is hagiography, "an uncritical biography, treating its subject with undue reverence," or "a biography of a saint." Mr. Duane's article is a heinous hagiography of Kevin Brown and Rob Shaul.
This post written like H. P. Lovecraft.

Congratulations

As a member of the educated elite, I take pedantic, sadistic pleasure in others' spelling and grammar mistakes. The Cake Wrecks blog tracks such unfortunate mistakes on confections:
I wonder what Mickael (Michael?) conformed to, in order to deserve a celebration with a cross-laden cake?


This post's theme word: lucubrate, "to work (such as study, write, discourse) laboriously or learnedly. "

Richness of text, paucity of expression

Recently I have had several people* tell me that I come across as cold and angry via text-only communications like email and instant message. The ensuing meta-conversations revealed that this is because (and I summarize) I use full sentences with capitalization and grammar, and no emoticons. As the linked Wikipedia article says,

An emoticon (pronounced e-moh-ti-kon) is a textual portrayal of a writer's mood or facial expression. They are often used to alert a responder to the tenor or temper of a statement, and can change and improve interpretation of plain text.

While it is true that including a smiley-face can change the interpretation of plain text, I'm not sure that it improves the interpretation. (Maybe I should change that Wikipedia entry.) There are, as far as I can tell, two things going on here.

The first is that there is [apparently] a standard format of social internet communications: no capital letters, little punctuation, lots of :-) :-D :-P. Although I am of the correct generation, I didn't pick this up in my internet persona. Because I lack it, but my peers have it, there is an expectation that I communicate this way ("oh hai!!!! :P"). My failure to do so comes across as a purposeful linguistic smackdown. I've also been informed that full sentences with capital letters and punctuation are used in "oh hai!!! :P" conversations to indicate a tone which is stern/upset.

The second is that I have clear textual indications of mood and tone. Word choice, punctuation, italicization, boldface... there are many ways to indicate tone without drawing a simulacrum of a face. Even straightforward description of emotions is possible! (I'm feeling fine, thanks.) These ways have been around for longer than the internet. Have you ever read a piece of writing from before the era of email? A novel, perhaps? A play? Somehow those mere words, naked of smiley-faces and frowny-faces, manage to convey emotions and tone.

I may be a young and uppity twenty-something, but I am old and crotchety in the way I use and relate to text. Our language is rich with words and expressions -- and, lo! and behold! these things termed "expressions" express things, including tone and emotion. English has a long and lovely history as a written language. While I do not bemoan its current warping in internet-speak (languages change over time and no one can stop this), there are enough modes of written English for me to select from that I feel no compulsion to abbreviate myself.

For your reference, o my readers of the new style of text, I write this in a moderate, neutral, somewhat bemused tone. (Though when I was first confronted with "you are so cold!" I felt like the robapocalypse could not come soon enough and turn me into a Borg. At least the Borg never have these problems. Plus, they've figured out interstellar travel and have a killer catchphrase.)

*I wonder why no one told me this before. Maybe my family members and college and high school peers don't know how to broach the subject, or maybe they understand my mode of communication. I miss my punster friends. They are a lingual delight.


I love words. This post's theme word: anodyne, "deliberately uncontentious and inoffensive."

This post's BONUS theme cartoon:

Woohoo!

It's Saturday, it's snowing, and I am happy.

Yesterday was 4 hours of office hours, and board games, and finding the Madison, and three sets of quite enthusiastic guitar-playing. Today is laundry and swim practice and finishing the write-up of the formal theory we're calling VMod2L. And then some more socializing.


This post's theme word: bawd, "prostitute." No one playing Scrabble yesterday knew it, but by the time it was my turn, that place on the board had been taken. When I go home I intend to play Dictionary, and revel in the expansive collective family vocabulary.

Sore and tired

I erged (ergged?) yesterday and did my abs workout. This is a bad combination. Today all the muscles on the dorsal side of my body are achingly sore. On the bright side, I went to bed so early that I awoke before my super-early alarm. This is good, because I was so tired that I forgot to set the alarm.

It rained yesterday and all the snow melted and washed away. It was a pretty dismal day. (Exception: I got to talk to D., which was excellent.) I miss my family, my Harvard friends, and being able to use words like "pallor" in casual conversation without having to spell and define them. I don't mind having to do this for non-native English speakers, but for crying out loud -- doesn't anyone read books anymore? I would go hang out with grad students in the humanities, but they wouldn't understand my nerdy jokes. Sigh. It's so hard to be an academic elitist sometimes.

Perhaps next I'll memorize the alliterative v monologue from "V for Vendetta."

Good news: in a few weeks, I'll be at home. Cookie swap, Geometry Wars, pies, Patapon 2! Not soon enough!

Bad news: in a few weeks - ε, I want to submit a complete draft of my Master's work. Too soon!


This post's theme word: cacology, "poor choice of words" or "incorrect pronunciation."