[1 x Sweater]⁴

This half-zip cable knit is the sweater I wore to finish out the 2007-2008 Sweater Season last May. It was back for a double dose of Linguistics 101 discussion sections today. Here we see a reenactment of my 3:30 section. We're in the middle of our syntax unit right now, so we've been busy drawing trees for a (limited) variety of sentences. Some sentences are ambiguous, others are creepy. These two are both.

1. The man saw the boy with the telescope.
2. The magician touched the chid with the wand.

Joanna and I, as usual, are involved in a game of Scrabulous at the moment (I'm winning). Just before playing GAVEL she made this comment:


To which I hypothesized that she might have been stuck with 'esoVagus' instead of 'esophagus'. She replied:

O.C.D.

Jobonga's outdated latest sent me scurrying off to the O.E.D. to see what I could learn about sny. Turns out that the only thing of note is that all of our definitions are more interesting than the lexicographers'.

Fortunately I also noticed the entry directly preceding 'sny'.

What a nice little word. Of particular interest I suspect will be meaning #2. I personally wouldn't mind a little cat-snuzzling right about now. WARNING: while included in SOWPODS, 'snuzzle' is not valid in a TWL game of Scrabble or Scabulous. Even if you do have a blank to make that extra Z.

Interestingly (to me), the O.E.D. doesn't come out and say that 'snuzzle' is a portmanteau of 'snout' and 'nuzzle', which seems fairly possible. Instead, etymologically speaking, they give it as a (possible) variant of 'nuzzle' and suggest comparing it to 'snoozle'. Okay, I will.

Not very useful really since we're just sent off to compare something else, but at least I know I'll be dreaming of "... pigs snoozling in the straw" next time I'm back in snoozledom. I can't wait. And since 'snoozle' is in the TWL, you should be expecting it to appear on my Scrabulous Bingo list in the near future. Beware.

The Language of Sweaters

This is me in the Linguistics TA office. Wearing a green sweater. I had office hours today because LING 101 has its final Saturday morning. On the board you can see part of a syntax tree for a simple sentence. This is quite dull, so I decreased the color in this picture to match.

Coolosity

To begin, I have a bit of commentary on the Essay Topic, "Prove how uncool you are", itself. I find this formulation suspect. Do we get a merit badge or something if we score high enough on the uncoolometer? And more importantly, who's operating the uncoolometer. Hopefully not the lame-oids that created this list that Lucia found:

I got a list on some x-box internet site from teenage boys (it includes many many many references to their genitals), sunglasses, a good cell phone, listening to cool music, a MySpace group that forces you to prove how cool you are, and then a discussion of some book called The Tipping Point on how new ideas become widely accepted.

Because that's not very cool. Anyway, my point is that when 'cool' has come to mean 'uncool' and 'uncool' has become something you prove yourself as being so that you can be cool, we are in a strange place. That being said, I'll play along.


1. As has been hinted at before, I'm a geographile. I can recite the capitals of the 50 states, the 13 Canadian Provinces and Territories (although the new one Nunavut still causes me problems sometimes), and pretty much all the national capitals of the world (with the exception of the Lesser Antilles and Oceania, because really, that's just too many islands to keep track of). I also really enjoy maps. This is uncool because being cool requires that one maintains an aloof superscilious attitide towards all things (except one's appearance) at all times. By learning capitals and studying maps I have demostrated interest in things outside of my immediate. -5 cools


2. I found the use of 'can' as a bare verb in both Lucia's and 11Frogs' posts exciting. It's not cool to get excited. Especially about verbs. -6 cools

3. I do the NY Times crossword everyday, even though after Thursday I can rarely finish. Not only is the NY Times not cool (lack of aloofness), newspapers themselves aren't cool (too learny), nor is continuing to do something you can't succeed at cool. -4 cools

4. I know that the grammaticality of the following sentences means that I have unrestrictive quantifier binding:

Every boy's sister opened his mail.
Alice talked about every director's report and his possible resignation.

and I am curious if they are grammatical for you as well (are they?). I'll just go ahead and say it, Linguistics isn't cool. -2 cools

Total: 17 points less than cool.

De Brasserie Douche Zac

That's Dutch for The Douche Bag Brasserie. This place opened up down the street recently, so last night Martin, Yana, and I paid it a visit. As we walked out later that night my first words were, "that was the highest concentration of pretension I've been around in a long time." Which is surprisingly ironic because today as I began to write this blog I looked up Brasserie V online, only to see that featured prominently at the top of their site is this definition:

bras-se-rie (brās ′ Ə -ře′) an unpretentious restaurant, tavern, or the like, that serves drinks, esp. beer, and simple or hearty food.

The problems started for me when the bar tender, or perhaps he would prefer bierista, asked as we walked in the door if we were going to be having beer or wine. In general, at places that are supposed to have large selections of both, I like to see what my options are. Apparently we should have been thinking about this on the way over though so we could answer promptly as we entered. So, after bringing both a beer and wine list bierista offers to let us sample any of the beers before we choose, but only if we can pronounce them correctly. This is the first point of the night in which I thought: douche bag. It was by no means the last. Specifically we were told how he "just can't stand it when people pronounce Hoegaarden wrong. I upped my judgement from douche bag to Skoczen's favorite douche box. The über-academic graduate student from the German department sitting nearby at the bar quickly joined in, eagerly stating his disgust with poorly pronounced Dutch beer names too. He is precisely the reason why people don't like graduate students. Now, Hoegaarden is actually originally from Flanders which is part of Belgium, but where they speak Flemish, which is part of de Dutch. And that brings up a good point. Not only do neither of these pretentious lecturers on Germanic pronunciation not speak Dutch (or Flemish), but they also had no idea who they were talking to, namely a girl who's lived her whole life in Germany, a guy who was born there and is still fluent, and a linguist who knows his phonetics and phonology.

Once the German connection is made of course the tediously predictable Twenty-Something self-embiggenment begins with the places they've been, the people they've seen, the odysseys they've been on, the foreign lands they've fallen in love with. Demonstrating the advanced nature of grad student's douchery, this is all conducted in German. I take the opportunity to order a Corsendonk, which not only did I like the taste of but I really enjoyed saying too.

Later, as the airs of faux-worldliness began to die down, the barkeep attempted to find a beer Yana would like. She asked for something dark. He came back with 3 amber colored beers, all pronounced as too sweet. This, as with the rest of her judgments, I found to be a reasonable criticism. He poured 3 more, slightly darker this time. Also too sweet. "Wait", he says, "I know just what you want." A legitimately dark beer arrives, and is rejected promptly as too watery. Mr. Belgian Beer is clearly distraught by his underperforming Belgian beers. I enjoy this moment. Finally he opens a bottle of something that is deemed acceptable, although overly liquoricey, and he moves his attention to other customers.

We enjoy our beers, we order a cheese plate. The cheese is good (and includes a new variety to me, idiazábel) but isn't amazing. The nuts that come with the cheese are tasty though. We ask about them, and the description begins as such: "Well they're almonds, obviously; and they're toasted, obviously;
and then we throw in a little butter, that's clarified butter, but just a bit, I mean literally just a few drops... " He goes on, and the pretension goes on with him.

To top off the evening, before leaving we hear a guy sitting behind us make the claim that humans will soon be loosing their finger nails. This, as he explains to the rest of his hip-ish table, is surely to happen soon because nails no longer serve a purpose (obviously) and we will thus promptly be evolving to a nail-less state. Right, because there's absolutely nothing wrong with that statement. Douche Bag.

Hipster Chronicles

I was just reading a post over at to live without regrets that was talking about hipsters and I have to say I think their hipster description is spot on. I once had a conversation with Alex in which I had to explain to him what a hipster was, Alex having claimed that he had never heard the term before. I was slightly incredulous at first, but then I thought about Alex, and how decidedly non-hipster he is, and then I went on to describe a hipster to him. I ended up coming up with something very similar to the aforementioned blog (although mine was fueled by beer at the Terrace, not martinis at Mickey's), but with one important, in my opinion, addition: a fixed-gear bicycle. Said bicycle can be either fully functional and for all intents and purposes a 5th (or 6th) bodily appendage, in the process of being acquired (most likely from some very hip, here-to-unknown to even the pseudo-hip, bike shop in southern Brooklyn), or a "work in progress" consisting of a frame, handle brakes with the brake cables unattached, one wheel, 4 different chains, and no less than 3 crank shafts. Regardless, every hipster has some relationship to a fixed-gear bike. It is part of their ethos.

Also, I once dated a girl who got called a hipster while drinking a PBR Light. This lead to a debate about her hipster status. She eventually got so upset she started to cry. Lame.

Out of Time™

This morning I finally made it through the above issue of Time Magazine, dated Feb. 5th, 2007. This marks the end of my almost 4 month backlog of Times. Over the last several weeks I've been slowly working my way out of the Time sink that I had gotten myself into. Today I'm proud to say that my self-enforced semi-weekly time alottment per magazine has paid off. Of course the new Time just showed up today. And I haven't read that yet. But I'm pretty sure that it doesn't count as backlog until it's at least a week old.

On another note, the word of the day is:

Inveigle: 1. To win over by coaxing, flattery, or artful talk. 2. To obtain by cajolery. Etym. - From Old French aveugler - to blind, from Vulgar Latin aboculum - away from, without + eye

Exam Grading

I'm in the middle of grading exams for Linguistics 101. Below is one of my favorite answers so far:

2b) In morphology, what is the difference between a root and a base? Use the word restarting to exemplify your answer.

A base word is kind of like a Mr. Potato Head. The base would be the potato, then you can mix and match the arms, legs, etc. (the affixes), and you have a new potatohead. If you want you restart and make something different, pull off all the affixes and put different ones on the base

In addition to being a very strange analogy, they're wrong (the potato would be the root, not the base) and they were actually supposed to talk about what the bases and root are in restarting, not use it in a sentence.

Omelettes and Methamphetamines

This morning wasn't looking to be a good day. I over cooked my eggs to start with. I should have stayed with my tried and true, two eggs over medium, but I went with the omelette instead. I'm actually really good at the over medium. Based on my experience ordering them at dining establishments, better than most people working a griddle out there. Omelets I've never done as well with though.

Anyway, the point is I wasn't happy with my breakfast. And then the group emails started coming in about the linguistics exam next week, almost as if we didn't have a TA meeting yesterday to figure that out. Then there was the call alerting me that Wendy might have died, which she knows she's not supposed to do. I had actually been worried about this already, so I had to make quick use of the telephone. Having satisfied myself that she wasn't dead, I went to 101 lecture to do the crossword. That's pretty much what I do every Monday and Wednesday at 12:05, and because it's only mon. and wed. I usually do pretty well on the crosswords. Not today. I think I filled in about 5 clues, 2 of which I would later realize were wrong. This was the low point of February 21st, 2007 (Yesterday's low point occurred sometime around 8:00 PM Central Time as UW completed their loss to Michigan State).

Discouraged, I gave up on the crossword, turned to the front page, and read this. It lifted my spirits. Thank god I'm not smoking meth with the whores down the hallway. Oh, and later I finished the crossword. The watershed moment being:

Clue #20A: Slangy question from a benefactor, maybe
(whos your daddy)

Quickly followed by:
Clue #36A: 1964 party song by Manfred Mann
(do wah diddy diddy)
and
Clue #50A: Stuffy sort
(old fuddy duddy)

Once you get those long 3 the rest just fall into place, although I will admit that the iliac artery did throw me for a loop at first. Darcy, I'll assume you would have known this and award you 1 point.