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| For the few of you, my friends, who read this, I present the following news (with apologies for the impersonal nature of said announcement, seeing as I would prefer, under different circumstances, to tell you personally):
I am, as of approximately 3:18pm (ET) today--though I had not intended to wait that long, but, being constrained by various forces entirely outside my control, I did the best with what I had to work with--engaged.
Yee haw!
Great stuff, eh? Her name is Christy, and if you haven't met her, I'm terribly sorry for you. There's so much to tell, but this is such an awful forum for such things. Suffice it to say, we're very happy, and eager to get on with this thing they call married life. I mean, really, who goes on about how great being engaged is? It's the waiting area, Limbo, the Twilight Zone. It's the time for wedding planning and working out the circumstances of life so that you can live together.
Also, I live in Baltimore. I probably forgot to mention that, too. I just got here last Friday. I'm teaching at a Classical Christian School.
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| The men's (and presumably, the women's) bathroom in my workplace has a linguistically fascinating item bolted to its west wall. It is atable that folds out from the wall affording one a flat surface upon which to attend to a baby and its soiled diaper. [Notice: I only callthe item fascinating from a linguistic point of view. Bear with me.]
Unfortunately, the registered trademark, "Small Comforts," leaves its purpose decidedly ambiguous, and the creepy cartoon rabbit with amaniacal eyes fails entirely to furnish any clues as to the purpose of the device. Hence, sensibly, the manufacturer has provided a brief explanatory phrase to indicate for what one should use a Small Comfortstable. This is probably the result of suggestions from the friendlyfolks in the marketing division of Four D Incorporated (Burnsville, MN). In order to be particularly perspicuous, this phrase is given in three languages: French, English,and Spanish (the languages, we assume, of those most frequently bringing messy babies into this particular bathroom stall).
As you can see, we have the following:
Table a changer les couches (French)
Baby changing table (English)
Mesa para cambiar pañales (Spanish)
Notice, if you will, that the English is not only shorter, but more elegant and more efficient. Both the French and Spanish employ prepositional phrases modifying "table" to describe it as a "table for the changing of babies." English, on the other hand, uses a beautiful adjective phrase, baby changing, to modify "table." Rather than relying on cumbersome prepositional phrases, we can turn normal nouns into adjectives magically based on their position in the sentence.
But the ambiguity of the usage is lovely. The word baby, technically a noun, becomes adjectival in this phrase, clearly describing the kind of table. It is ponderously joined to the gerund changing in a complicated grammatical relationship that I lack the terminology to describe.
What excites me the most is that, not only is this fluidity of usage simple and elegant, but easily understood by all English speakers. The French and Spanish must supply piles of prepositions and additional words to communicate the simple phrase that English conveys with its characteristic elegance.
Okay, so this entry is not very elegant itself, but hopefully my fellow lovers of English are thus inspired.
I close with a detail shot of the rabbit's fur:
[Shudder.]
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| Long ago (circa July 31, 2006) I opened an account with Key Bank. When I opened this account, I was promised a free iPod within 60 days if I met the qualifications. I met the qualifications. 60 days passed. I received no iPod.
After a long, absurd series of conversations with customer "service" personnel, I have gained what I was promised--nine months after initially applying. To recount the process would be almost as exhausting as the process itself, but it culminated in a fairly vitriolic complaint letter that resulted in relatively swift action. So, I received this in the mail:
Oh, and I got an iPod, too. It's nice to see that one of our fine corporations in America only needs four times as long as they promised, nearly a dozen phone calls, and a lengthy and detailed letter to live up to their commitments. So, with all the time involved, it's not really free, but hey, at least I didn't have to buy it!
One important thing I learned is KeyBank's secret customer service phone number. If you want to speak directly to an agent without mucking about in all the silly menus you go through calling the number they give you, dial 800-539-5202. Just don't tell them I sent you, or they'll be inclined to run screaming.
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| [The title is a mixture of Dutch (Ik = I) and English for the sake of the gratuitous palindrome.]
I have just returned from a Christmas-present-afforded trip to Washington's lovely slopes for a delightful, if somewhat painful, skiing trip. [If putting two i's next to each other in an English word doesn't make you happy, I don't know what will.] As it turns out, I am, in fact, very bad at skiing. I have skied before, but it was long enough ago (perhaps somewhere in the 8-10 year range) that I had forgotten how poorly (I assume) it went last time, and put myself down as a "Level II" skier (of the five possible levels). This meant little more than that my bindings were far less apt to allow my skis to detach from my boots than they ought to have been, and my ankles and back got twisted around a good deal more than they ought to have in my apparently too-frequent episodes of downward tropism (i.e., "falling"). I present below two examples of my failure to master the art of skiing, lest there had been any suspicions of my being proficient in this matter among my terribly small (and no doubt, contracted, due to my failure to post in a good long time) readership. For the record, neither of these was staged.
#1 -- Notice my awkward, flailing attempts to steady myself before I casually fling myself head first down the mountain.
#2 -- The first, graceful skier is not me. Look for the small, growing dot at the top of the run.
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| After savoring the pleasure of discovering that obnubilate was the word of the day over at AlphaDictionary.com, I thought it would only be fitting to give a "shout out" to the excellent lexical work over there (being inspired, as well, by a positive response I received in a recent vainglorious rodomontade). The proprietor of the aformentioned site, Dr. Robert Beard (a.k.a. Dr. Goodword), puts out daily zingers with all sorts of lovely etymological data on the Word of the Day page. This only recently lost its status as my browser's start page to the dull, yet informative, Wikipedia Current Events page.
But let me give you a few other excellent links from the AlphaDictionary site:
I haven't ventured yet into the site's Alpha Agora message board, but perhaps I shall someday. I've got a few words I wouldn't mind seeing on the Word of the Day page. Oh! What a dream come true it would be to have my recommendation accepted by so noble a personage as Dr. Goodword! Alright. I'm done swooning. Just go click on some links now.
*EDIT: Make that 35% Dixie based on the advanced test.
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