polyglot conspiracy

I have not been posting lately because

a) I took too many classes for actual credit this semester. One involves scatterplot matrices and interaction plots that I am only borderline comfortable with looking at; one involves quizzes (I know, I know…yes apparently grad students do still have quizzes, sometimes) about specific details of the cochlea, auditory filters, frequency masking, etc.; one requires that I continue working on my qualifying paper research, meaning: producing tangible academic products from said research.

b) I’ve got a lot of papers to grade for the class I’m grading for, which is right up my alley, “Language in the Mass Media.” The class is awesome; Robin Queen is awesome; grading is awesome but tiring.

c) Due to [b] I am also required to take a fourth class, which is supposed to teach me the best way to teach students to write, but really teaches me how awful it sometimes is when a bunch of grad students who have to grade undergrad writing get together and bitch about it.

d) I am on the organizing end of this. Thank god for Kevin. (The other day I learned from a friend that in the department of History here at UMich, grad students are not required to do departmental service. Meaning, they don’t sit on committees, they don’t have to organize department-wide events, they don’t have to plan recruitment activities for the department’s admissions cycle, they don’t have to go to meetings or generally worry about things getting done. Now, in general, don’t get me wrong, I *love* the structure of our department, and I think it’s absolutely critical that grad students are allowed and encouraged to get involved in professional-type activities at the departmental level. But sometimes, like, um, right now, not having to do anything seems really, REALLY appealing.)

e) I am one of many people doing my share to try to win our union a better contract, one that sets our pay at an amount that is actually sufficient for living in Ann Arbor, recognizes the needs of parents who are in graduate school, and doesn’t pay grad employees who work fewer hours less per hour than people who work more hours. Oh and also one that secures affordable healthcare for all grad students, including increased access to mental health care (which all grad students need) and physical therapy (which most grad students will, at some point, need, what with all the typing and all). So far the university hasn’t responded positively (or really responded at all) to any of our asks, which you can read about here. This sucks up a lot of my time, but it’s one of the most important things I can be spending my time doing right now, so I’m pretty ok with the tradeoff.

f) I am trying to maintain a social life that keeps me happy.

g) Michigan winters don’t motivate me to do very much.

So that’s all. I guess I wrote this because I’ve been really bothered this semester by how little I’ve posted, because writing here is actually something that I feel contributes a lot to my identity (believe it or not). I don’t like telling people I have a blog and then knowing that if they go to look at it it will look like I’m neglecting it. This semester just hit me like a freight train - I’ve felt mostly overwhelmed and sometimes in control, and my brain just isn’t feeling as clever lately. But I’m still reading all y’all in the LBS (new hip faux-initialism for linguablogosphere??).

One thing I do have to say pertains to “a recent piece by Nicholas D. Kristof as just one instantiation of the unbelievably essentialist media coverage/commentary of the Democratic campaign so far: Way to reify. Awesome. Just what we need.

[I was going to title this post "Excuses and complaints," but it sounded weird. Is it always better to start with a word that starts with a stop/consonant rather than a vowel? Or is it the syllable structure?]

This is the traditional first-of-year filler post to let you know that I’m still here despite seeming not to be here. I’ve got miles to go before I’ll be mentally ready to start the next semester, but the semester already started two days ago, so I’m already behind. Short semester breaks are the evil thematic flipside of the otherwise glorious Michigan Time.

The only marginally notable thing that has recently happened is that the McDonald’s in Marshall, Missouri proclaimed, once again this year (3rd year in a row), that “MCRIB IS BACK.” So awesome. Otherwise, I have just been etoxing and eating and spending QT with family, old friends, locals, and my cat.

Soooo, I hope your holidays were fun-filled and relaxing, and let us toast to the imminent blogability of 2008. Cheers!

Dear World,

Please excuse my prolonged absence the past month. I went on vacation and made a point of low-level etoxing, and now that I am back home my desire to blog has been absent. I expect this to change in the next few weeks as I get “back into the swing of things,” as they say, and as I continue recovering from some nasty illness I’ve fallen victim to, which has involved coughing for approximately 20 seconds every 2 minutes for the past 3 weeks.

In the meantime, note that I did not attend the LSA Meeting, and thus have nothing in the way of reportage on it, but if you are interested in such reportage, I refer you to The Tensor and Semantic Compositions, who seems to be finally (finally!) back.

Also, remember how I came back from holiday vacation in 2005 with a comment on the McDonald’s in Marshall, MO and its advertising for the McRib sandwich? Which said “Try the McRib / It is back”? Well, apparently the McRib is back AGAIN, and there really IS some kind of Natural McRib Cycle at work.

Happy holidays (a little late), happy 2nd semester (or trimester or quarter, if that’s your thing), and happy postings ahead!

PC

Leila Monaghan of Indiana University has started a community Linguistic Anthropology blog.

Linguistic anthropologists and other scholars of language and culture are invited to join the Blog team and post their work or comments or point towards the work of others. Comments are welcome from all…Organizers and participants in sessions and conferences who would like to post their own and their colleagues work are particularly welcome.

Though I’m not sure how many linganth type of people read PC, it might be of interest to others who don’t know much about linganth, too. (thx Joshua)

So I just made a new blog. It’s basically an images blog, designed for quick and thoughtless posting and amusement. It consists of artifacts from the dark underbelly of graduate students, the work that no one is supposed to see but that is critical to our, um, work: the notes we write ourselves.

I’ve been really amused lately at some of my class notes, or my annotations in the margins of my reading. Sometimes it’s that I make ridiculous write-o’s (or whatever you call writing errors, the handwriting equivalent of “typo”), while others have been the stupid ways I boil down concepts in my notes so I’ll remember them, while others have been silly cartoons about classroom happenings. For a starting sample, try ternary branching and morphological traps.

So, the blog is Marginaling (get it?! get it?!), and I’ll probably post funny-ish items a few times a week. I would LOVE to see other people’s contributions represented there, too. So if you have a funny note you’ve written yourself, or see a funny margin note in a book you have checked out of the library, for instance, send it to me at ( marginaling at gmail dot com ). Include commentary if desired. Stipulations are only that it be in .jpg or .gif (or already hosted somewhere), and that it be marginally (!) related to linguistics. Let the fun begin! And tell all your nerdy friends. Thanks.

Yes, it’s that time of year: the blog has turned the big two years old. Watch out, y’all. I’m ’bout to get feisty.

Thanks to everyone for ever reading and especially commenting. I’m surprised I’m still doing this, but it’s been rewarding in interesting ways, and let’s hope that the remainder of PhD school acts as blogging inspiration rather than the blog/soul crusher that it is more famed to be.

I’m going to go celebrate by reading through my RSS feeds for the day, perusing a phonetics article, and reading some stuff about language ideology. But first, I’m going to read this article about the MySpace profiles of murderers because it’s just the kind of creepy thing I need first thing in the morning.

Holy cannoli! It’s been a long time since I’ve written a real post related to anything at all worthwhile. This was mostly because I was away from the internet for a couple long periods of time - not COMPLETELY away, of course, but not with hourly or even daily access. In terms of being a blogger, it felt strange, since bloggers tend to inflate the expectations of their audiences, indeed to inflate the reach of their blogs in general.* I don’t think I’ve done this, at least I’ve tried not to. But when you’re away from it, after a few days you start to think: will they forget about me? are they wondering where I’ve gone? do they care about me at all? will they still read when I start posting again? is The Tensor writing anything interesting these days? might I ever stand even a millionth of a chance in a popularity contest with Language Log? do I still remember how to use HTML tags??? It’s an avalanche of doubts.

But then, after a week or so, you start to also enjoy the freedom. (by “you” here, I obviously mean “me/I.”) But then you come back home to your broadband and see that there are like 200 blog posts of possible interest that you feel awful about just clicking away. I was reminded by these feelings of a post over at Zephoria about the split between reading and writing blogs, the obligation bloggers feel to an audience that may not be real (or at least as big as they think it is), etc. Conclusion? Blogging is weird. That’s my deep thought for tonight, folks. Maybe two weeks into phonetics I’ll have some grander revelation.

At any rate, I’m in Ann Arbor now, settling down and starting class. I did see this on a bowling alley marquee the other day:

WE ARE STILL CRAZY

What? Since when? It’s a bowling alley that doesn’t have crazy anywhere in its name. I could understand this more if it was called Tom’s Crazy Strike or The Crazy Bowl. Its reputation must far precede my presence in A2.

*Writing this entry was the first time I ever felt Carrie Bradshaw-ish about writing. I think it must seem pretty lame that I feel Carrie Bradshaw-ish when writing contemplatively about blogging, rather than about sex. Yes?

Just busy - traveling, packing, moving…I probably won’t be posting til well into next week again, but I will definitely be posting again. Please stay tuned.

For now, linguafolk, would you mind taking a look at my “languagey” blogroll to the right and suggesting to me any valuable languagey blogs I have neglected or just not known about? In the interest of keeping up-to-date with our little corner of the b’sphere. What do y’all like to read? Thanks.

These are even more zygotic than the last ones…whee this is fun!

Friendster tip
I saw this tip on Friendster’s website once:

Friendster tip: Do some housecleaning! Edit friends [link]

They’re instructing you to delete friends? Does that seem a little weird to anyone else?

Proof of spouse
I saw this on the website for UVA’s gym:

Spouses with different last names must bring a marriage certificate, joint tax return, or other proof of marriage to get spouse passes.

So just because you have the same last name your marriage is assumed to be for real?

Disabbreviation
I liked The Tensor’s post on disabbreviation.

Greengrocers’ Apostrophe
There was apparently a lot of talk about the apostrophe at some point.

Taxicab Expressions Explained!
Remember that fun project I totally ditched? By way of explanation:

I can’t believe someone actually beat me to this. Well, actually I can, because it’d be really sad if I was the first person to go public with this thing. Here’s an article from two years ago about the man behind the slogans.

Beer Googles
This embarrasses me, but I’m posting it anyway.

I’ve sort of lamented the lack of “beer goggles.” No matter how much I drink, I pretty much always seem to have some semblance of reason and visual acuity. When intoxicated, I still find people I consider unattractive unattractive, and people I find completely dull are still really dull. While I may be more dull myself when in such states, it doesn’t take a toll on my propensity to love things more than I would otherwise.

Except for when it comes to Google. Coming back from a long night out, I get the inevitable urge to google people. It could be anyone, though usually it’s people from my past. I think this probably happens for a number of reasons: 1. Beer makes nostalgia flow like honey, and 2. Google is remarkably easy to manipulate. All I have to remember is the person’s name, and I have a wealth of potentially interesting results at my fingertips.

So while I don’t have beer goggles, I do get the beer googles. Sister to the drunkdial, the drunkmail, and the the drunkIM.

Unfortunately, I thought I was totally clever in thinking of this, but naturally, the phrase has already been coined, if with a slightly different meaning. Wait, it’s been done more than once, though I’m pretty sure this one is a misspelling.

As a side finding of this google seach, a lot of people who like beer, also like google. As in, “What are your interests?” “Beer, Google, blogging…” Also, a lot of people misspell “goggle,” lucky for Google.

Something killed the TV star
This post was going to be a rumination on how I noticed that so few of my friends or people in my peer group watch TV, and how I attribute that largely to the internet. It was going to be brilliant. As it sits in my draft queue, however, all that exists of the post is this line:

What was it?

Profound.

Morphological Experiment of the Week(s)
I was going to start this as a regular feature, but then decided it was too shticky. These were words under consideration, though:

hyperlogospecifilia
adult-onset oedopedophilia
ingenious-disingenuous-ingenue-genius [I guess I was going to try to figure out why these are all so confusingly similar]
beer-google [ahem, see above]

And that’s it. The dungeon of Draft is empty.

In case people missed it, last week, Bridget at ilani ilani announced that she had created a site for the internet public to share their linguistics links. Bravo! Go to LingNews to read, share, and rank stories related to our nerdy little interests. If people take to this, what a great resource it will become for the community.